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How can we Keep Our Teachers Updated?
Keefesis continues: "The information is out there, readily available, yet it seems that teachers are rarely notified of new information. Case in point: My high school chemistry teacher still teaches us that there are only 109 elements; while element 118 was discovered almost 6 months ago. Even the planners that the school gave us list up to element 114 (every teacher uses the professor version of the same planner as a gradebook.) What does it take for our high school teachers to stay up-to-date?"
Update: 11/25 02:24 by C :After perusing some of the discussion, a lot of you feel that the system itself, not the funding, is at fault. How can we fix the system? Do we need better teachers? Better administrators? Or is this something that we just can't do without tearing the whole thing down and starting over?
I think we should make all teachers read /. everyday for 20 minutes *g*
-- Note: These Comments are Generated by ME! Not You! ME!
I think that every month or so, at least once a year. The teachers should go to like a group session and get updated. I mean they have the whole summer off, why not say take a week of that and do some upgrading?
Then again, I can't blame it totally on teachers too. I mean the books we use are so old sometimes that its pointless, then we have to buy new books ever couple of years and that really adds up.
-- Note: These Comments are Generated by ME! Not You! ME!
When I was in high school the problem wasn't getting the new information to the teachers, it was getting them to care. Some teachers just have an apathetic attitude towards teaching new things. They would much rather stick to the books they have been using for 20 years, because they know them inside and out.
... about upcoming information and research in the physics feild. It not only taught the student and the class, but it also taught the teacher.
There was an exception though. My 11 Grade Physics teacher made us go out and find magazine articles, webpages,
Keeping up to date with the trends is simple. Anyone with an interest in science has an abundance of up to date information via the web and traditional printed media. IMHO teachers can be very slack - simply due to a lack of interest. That was certainly my experience at school... and yet you can't say the same about Universities...
Its a hard job, I've been involved with the tech advisor at my school and regularly helping teachers. Often they aren't willing to learn because "my way works just fine." Its very irritating. Chocobo219
Everyone I know in the computer field spends much time learning new things on their own. What makes other professions different?
In one of his excellent books (Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, I think), Richard Feynman railed against the selection processes for schoolbooks; on the selection panel he was on (can't remember where), he was the only one to actually read the books that were submitted for approval.
First and foremost, what's needed is to ensure that the teachers are using the right books. Volunteers would seem to be the ideal way of doing this, but there's the significant danger that this would result in -- amongst others -- the creationists filling as many selection panels as possible.
Okay, I don't have a solution. But I do know that the percentage of teachers that goes outside the designated books is very low. So the books have to be the best.
Every government, organization, or knitting club in history has encountered the same problem. You get together, agree on a certain set of rules and practices, and start a society.
But over time, more and more rules are added, and things start getting cumbersome. Instead of a little red school house with one teacher and a dozen students, you have a school with several teachers, a hundred students, and a principal. Then you have a few schools with hundreds of students, dozens of teachers, and a school board. Sooner or later, you have a "school district" with hundreds of teachers, thousands of students, principals, coaches, band directors, custodians, paperwork, security cameras, and even more paperwork.
Modern teachers don't spend most of their time teaching. They spend most of their time socializing delinquents, filling out sexual harassment paperwork, documenting troublemakers, grading tests, and working out the lesson plans for the next two weeks, which have to be approved by their bosses.
Teaching? That's for the copious spare time left over after they take Little Johnny to the office because he wore a "Free Kevin!" t-shirt, and nobody knows what in the hell that's supposed to mean.
A class is a board with a teacher on one end and a student on the other.
Why does this happen (ie. education being short-shifted)? It happens because the citizenry is not free to choose the proportion of tax revenue that is allocated to each area of government expenditure, in this case education.
If one could choose just one tiny change that would have the widest possible effect in improving democratic responsibility and giving power to the people, that would have to be it.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Hmm, this seems to be a problem in more areas than just IT. For example, when I was in college (admittedly more than 10 years ago), I was memorizing my way though advanced Calculus and Statistics, both of which were pretty much meaningless to me.
... I'm not sure if the past was better, but I think it was simpler ...
However, there were other areas of (applied) Math that would have been of great interest to me but weren't tought at the time: I'm thinking of stuff like cellular automata which back then were brand new and very exciting. As a software guy, this stuff was real and mad sense right away, but it was too new to have real classes on it.
I guess as our body of knowledge expands ever faster, we'll all have difficulties keeping up. I should also note that we seem to live in a complex age that defies simple solutions. It seems that this leads us into a life which is rich in knowledge and poor in wisdom
It takes parental involvement and diligence on the students part to keep schools functioning. I find it amusing that the teachers or the text books or the school equipment is often cited as the readers for students doing poorly. This is simply not the case. Whether or not a student does well depends on the student and his family, not on the environment surrounding him. I went to elementary in an inner city "ghetto". Out of my elementary school class of 30, we had students who went on to Columbia and Harvard, and we also had students who dropped out before high school. We had the same teachers, textbooks and equipment as the person sitting next to us. But some of us ended up in Ivy League schools and some of us became drug dealers. The fact is that if a student is diligent and wants to move ahead, he/she will. If a student is lazy and indifferent and doesn't care about their school work then it doesn't matter if they have Nobel prize laureates teaching them with the latest gadgets and gizmos, they will still not learn and will evenutally drop out. It is not a sin to teach that there are only 104 elements, when there really are 118. The point of teaching students chemistry is not simply for the facts involved, but to open their minds and to get students to think critically. Once a student picks up the general concepts and learns to think critically it is a trivial matter for them to pick up a newer textbook or a science magazine and learn on their own. The biggest obstacle in education is not a lack of proper equipment or a lack of decent teachers, it is the students who don't care about their work that disrupt class, cause problems for other students, drain teachers time and energy and are a strain on our educational system.
...spend more money on actually doing the educational things instead of just going for the other things that are non academic. Here is an example; my school put in a new basket ball court last year and it costed something of 500k. Now couldn't they have spent that kind of money to update their sciences and math departments. Also to maybe get a nicer computer education system. That is one of the major things that I have against my school, they do not teach any courses about computers except on how to use M$ Excel and Word. The only thing close to programming is a web mastering class where they teach you how to use an M$ Frontpage to create web pages. Couldn't they just teach the html code itself? It is rediculously simple.
Well, back to the outdating of the sciences in schools. Even if they did have money they would probarbly spend more of it on things like sports equipment or for a really big grant add another building, but still teach the old and outdated material. Another example, my school is adding a 15 million (I think) dollar building right now. I see no problem with the old one, the roof used to leak but they fixed that before I got there.
It's not the money, its they way they spend it.
Malto
Most schools restrict teachers to using "approved" books and materials, and teachers can get in serious trouble if they stray from that material.
It's clear that teachers aren't going to be able to keep up with the latest developments in their field. For that matter, even science researchers often have difficulty keepingon top of just a tiny branch of human knowledge.
But I don't think it's really a problem. The role of teachers is to get their students to learn important skills, and they can do this without knowing what new element was discovered last week. Education in science is nearly always an over-simplification anyway.
So I reckon teachers should admit honestly that they aren't completely up to date. Then they should get on with the important task of getting their students to understand the important aspects of the subject, giving them some real enthusiasm and encouraging them to take the initiative and delve into the state of the art themselves.
For most professionals, there is an impetus to keep up-to-date on current material. Many health-care professionals (nurses, pharmacists, etc) are forced to write exams or take courses to keep certification. For other professionals, there is usually encouragement to take continuing education courses, or learn on your own. (In some fields you need to do so just to remain competitive!)
I must admit it is probably difficult to teach current information when you are using 15-year-old teaching aids. And, in many cases, teachers tend to be overworked (during the school year, anyhow) and perhaps not paid as well as many other professionals, which may be a factor in the reluctance to do additional upgrading work. I think as more schools become wired, it should at least give teachers easy access to more of this information.
Unfortunately, at the moment, only certain teachers will take advantage of this technology. (They are probably the same ones who would have sought information elsewhere, too.) Without some sort of regulation about continuing education or recertification, there is no guarantee that teachers will keep themselves up to date.
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
For subjects like computer programming, networking, etc., why don't school boards get together with high-tech companies, and have some people take a sabbatical and teach for 4-8 months? Chances are better that they'll learn stuff that is actually being used, or even about things that are right over the horizon. The biggest problem I found with my teachers in High Schools was that they'd been teaching the course for too long, and not learning what was actually being developed. That isn't, or at least shouldn't be, a problem with people who program, rather than teach, for a living every day. I'm not recommending this for introductory, "hello, world" type courses, but for the second or third course they take. Even having advisors from industry to help shape the curriculum would be an improvement.
Now I think a better area that education in areas misses out is in the computer science field. My senior year programming class years back was in Basic on an apple IIe. Even there though, it was taught by a smart instructor who understood programming methodologies. I could start with that same class today, and because I had good teachers (not necessarily good teaching materials), I would arguably be one step ahead of a teacher who didn't care and half-assed taught his class Java. Sure I'd be behind initially in the college Java class, but I would really get it IF I was taught programming methodology. So even there, I think its more important to pay those teachers well.
Money does need to get everyone connected to the Internet though. All kids should leave high school with basic knowledge of the Internet and related. After all, the revolution isn't televised -- its packet filtered.
Students in this country aren't learning the basics, which is clearly a more pressing issue. You can't expect a chemistry teacher to care about the fact that there are 118 elements rather than 109 if the students don't understand the difference between an s and a p orbital. I think this is probably the LEAST pressing education issue in this country.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
* daring code hacker by night *
http://www.silent-tristero.com
The problem with this is not Teachers, it's education in general. The ppublic education system in the United states is substandard at best... a sad thing to think about when most people believe that it should be a free thing for every child. Something thet everyone should have - an equal right to make it in the world. I find it discouraging that I walk into classrooms and they still use Apple II's, or that they are teaching with textbooks that are 10 years old ... it's disgusting. What needs to happen is the amazing backwash of information needs to be reprioritized, computers in the schools need to be a standard - use digital media for textbooks, and extend the school year. God, I don't know that many people who need to help in the farms over the Summer. The question of "where does the money come from" is an interesting idea - I like the idea of The Edison Project Better paid teachers, every student gets a computer - hell it's taxpayer funded private school! - Plus it's done with a commercial group that allows for huge spending cuts in overhead and administration.... Sounds like a winner to me. I know that teachers work relatively hard hours and get paid dick, but if we had a year round school couldn't they go out for paid training -- especially in a commercial education system?
Got any better ideas?
About two weeks ago my younger sister came home from school with interesting news about her local high school.
The schools wonder about needing money. Usually what happens is that the science department usually gets most of it but doesn't really do anything useful with it.
A number of the students from a couple of the classes were asked to move some new furniture into the science teacher's lounge.
Altogether this ammounted to about $12,000 worth of furniture (Italian leather) stuff.
In her school most science departments heads are people who are not very good teachers in the sense that they are looking for really good ego trips.
One of herpast biology teachers made comments that indicated that he enjoyed bringing children to tears overrulings that were made.
Unreasonabley high levels of rigor were introduced that I have not found in any of my years of collegiate work.
If teachers wish to be kept up to date maybe they should actually think about what they do and tailor it specific audiences. Most people have the ability to buy a subscription to one of their academic journals (Science magazine leaps to mind) that would amply inform them of revent events.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I remember hearing one of the most drastic proposals on this subject in a Usenet discussion a long while back, that schools ought to revert to teaching only maths, for analytical thinking, and speed reading, so people can teach themselves.
Most people just start screaming about elitism at the notion of this (certain people seem to believe that very concept of freedom is elitist because it hurts the stupid people), but I really think that it is fitting for the information age. School should no longer, in fact, it can no longer, teach students information. The information is readily available elsewhere, and more plentiful and dynamic than in any school to boot.
What students need to learn in school is no longer information: but how to gather, handle, and learn from the information they will be presented with continuely for the rest of their lifes.
Think about your own schooling: how much of what you learned has really been helpful to you later? I know that for me, it was extermely little. In my own subject I realized I could have learned everything I did from grade 1-12 by adding one more term at college rate study. And as for the other subjects, I have either forgot most of it, or realized from own my experience that what I thought I knew about them is probably as infinitesimal.
What I did bring with me from school, and that I am thankful for, is that it introduced me to the subject of my passion, that it taught me to think, and that I learned how to learn effiently. I think I would have been more happy weight had been devoted to these thing than trying to force me to read subjects like history and social studies which I never cared less about.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
With increasing frequency, it seems that we read articles about the problems in education. We read of school violence, increasingly high crime rates, increasingly low graduation rates (especially in inner cities), teachers who don't care about their students, and often who don't care about their subject... it would seem that the problems in education are far more wide-spread than simply the inability of science teachers to stay up-to-date in their fields. What we have identified here is one symptom, not the only one or even a major one, for that matter, of a poor educational system.
Cliff mused whether or not funding would help this problem. In short, I don't believe it would do anything. We hear teachers unions often complaining that education is such a sorry state because they don't have enough funds. Yet, in the 1998-1999 school year, $300 billion dollars were spent on education. In Indianapolis, that worked out to $8,000 per student per year, which is just shy of the most expensive private school in the area. Yet, IPS schools are some of the worst in the country according to the Indianapolis Star. So clearly a lack of funding is not the solution.
The reason it's not the solution is that the problem lies with the teachers and the schools themselves. Teachers and schools just don't care anymore. Especially with the increasingly prevalent idea of tenure, a teacher is guaranteed his job unless he does something truly inexcusable. With such a contract, he has no motivation whatsoever to improve or even remain decent at his work. Schools similarly lack motivation, for schools are a monopoly, and like any monopoly, including that business we all love to hate, it's inefficient. Schools have no need to improve: they are guaranteed that $300 billion. Students who aren't wealthy enough or lucky enough to go to a private school have no choice but to go to their public school, however poor it may be. With such a scenario, it's little wonder that schools have problems, and that teachers aren't motivated to remain up-to-date in their subjects.
There is a quick and effective solution to this problem, and its name is school vouchers. If you're not familiar with the idea, school vouchers are essentially a tiny educational check that students receive to be used at the school of their choice. Instead of the school receiving that $8,000 a year in Indianapolis, the student would receive those funds. If a student's local school was poor, she could take her money and go elsewhere. Poor schools would have to either improve, or to close, while good schools would suddenly find themselves with the resources to expand in previously impossible directions.
If you really want to improve education, don't complain about the lack of funding or the lack of resources available for teachers to employ. Complain about the school system itself. Only by adopting school vouchers can we quickly and effectively give children teachers and schools that care and can teach them well.
- Full time teaching schedule (on average, of three of the four teaching periods she has a class to teach)
- School Library - she is responsible for purchasing, reshelving and repairing books, and anything else that comes up
- A Minimumof one hour's prep/marking per class - that she has to do in the evenings at home
- At least three "cover" lessons per month - covering for sickness or other absence of a collegue
- "School activities". A catchall for extra stuff the school wants done in the evenings and lunch breaks, but isn't willing to hire staff for
- "Pupil management". Meeting parents to discuss any problems, PTA meetings, and so forth.
this is a full time occupation, 8am-8pm weekdays and most of every saturday, and it is a wonder she can still walk and talk by the end of the week. If she could find space for keeping up with new stuff as well, I would be astounded.--
-=DaveHowe=-
I'll tell you a few reasons why your teachers aren't up to date. First and foremost society expects your school to raise you instead of your parents. They might have time to look up the latest and greatest information if they weren't having to beg student to read, not take drugs, avoid sexually transmitted diseases, not shoot each other, etc, etc. The second thing is that most teachers barely make a real salary. Understand that they do make a living wage (comparable to those who are successful with no degree) but they get paid much less than any real job that requires a degree. Start someone off with twice as much work, half as many resources and half as much pay, and they get a bit behind no matter what profession they are involved in. Finally, with regard to education at the elementary and secondary level, the teachers simply need some help. Can you imagine any other profession where the most mundane details have to be handled by the people who are supposed to be using their brains? Teachers not only have to teach, they still have to make sure the window sills in their classrooms aren't dusty. They have to waste time fetching (or begging for) books, grading papers, holding fund raisers, etc. Imagine how up to date your doctor would be if he had to go around worrying about what medical supplies are in stock, or worse yet if he had to hold a bake sale to buy them. Imagine if your lawyer had to actually type up all his(or her) legal documents or look up the case law. Heck your dentist doesn't even clean your teeth, he has an assistant for that. In almost any other profession it is easy to see that they reserve the knowledge work for the knowledge workers, and the drudgery for those less skilled. Your teachers have to do both the knowledge work and the drudgery, they get paid less than the man collecting your trash to do it. (He doesn't even have to tune up the truck) The situation could be fixed, but of course the cost of education at the elementary and secondary level would be comparable per student to the university level.(I wonder why no one ever mentions cost when they continually site our college system as the best on the world and elementary and secondary as the worst) (Figure about $20,000 per student per year)(A hint California spends about $4800 per student per year) Teachers today can't even claim a classroom as their own. (put them on a year-round schedule and let them pack up all their stuff and wander from room to room) I doubt this will even be fixed. The general populace is more interested in Pokemon cards, did Hillary smoke pot, or just about anything else than raising and teaching their children. Nicholas Kelly trumptman@earthlink.net
Take your average teacher... graduated from college with a degree in their field and started teaching. To keep up to date on the things that have happened since they graduated would require extra effort on their part outside of their regularly scheduled duties. What incentive is their for them to increase their knowledge? I think that a lot of teachers (like most people) are lazy and don't want their level of comfort to be disturbed. Most of the teachers that I had were so burned out on teaching that the only thing that kept them going day after day was looking ahead to their retirement date. They go to work, do what is required of them, and go home and forget about it. What we need is a body to oversee the teaching curriculum to ensure that the material being taught is reasonably current ("What?!?! Sounds like more governement!!! Boo!! Hiss!! Boo!!"). Then options would be presented to the teacher to improve their curriculum either through training, or firing. My experience with teachers is that they have it too easy. They need a little "pressure" to keep them motivated.
... considering the pace of development; in the field of biology alone, there's an entirely new text and theory to teach, and that's only being taught in Kansas. I think we should just be happy with what we have elsewhere, and not expect every new theory to be taught :)
Actually, he's probably trying to get his karma bumped a little. I used to post as soon as a story came out with a little non-contraversial comment that was either just a little insightful or just a little humorous, and get at least a point. Now, I've got karma of 82 or so, don't visit or post as much due to a recent promotion and less time on my hands, and I get karma just for Meta-Moderating as well as the chance to moderate every once in a while. What's his face should learn from my example and slow it down a little. More thought out comments will get you at least two points.
The brutal fact of the matter is that we need better teachers, and that doesn't necessarily mean teachers who are up to date on every single technological advance. Teaching is more than just imparting factual information. While facts and figures are an important part, more important is giving students the motivation to learn on their own. A good teacher can do this without an internet connection, without the latest edition science text, even without a Linux computer.
Perhaps the problem with education is that there are not enough teachers who can actually inspire students to learn and realize that students aren't stupid. The attitude of standing in front of a class and imparting choice jewels of wisdom is destructive and idiotic. More computers will not stop a teacher from standing up in front of the class and telling students, "This is a mouse! This is a button! This is an icon! Goody! goody! Now go home and write a paper on it kids, mkay?" Will money solve this problem? Perhaps, but not if its slathered like butter on top of a moldy piece of toast. Better teachers are needed. To get better teachers, salaries must be made comparable to private industry. Just as important, the teachers unions need to be weakened or destroyed and teachers put on the same standard that exists in private industry; produce or be fired. A decision has to be made about whether we are going to sacrifice the education of our children for the job security of bunch of incompetents who can only be fired ("asked to resign") if they refuse to sign a loyalty oath to The Union. The whole system of how teachers are hired and trained needs to be overhauled. This problem is much more complicated than shouting that education budgets need to be increased. Priorities need to change. Picture the worst teacher you ever had in your life. Now picture that teacher in a room full of multimedia workstations, networked Linux boxes, polished marble, etc. Will the students benefit from all that technology? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
I think I would have been more happy weight had been devoted to these thing than trying to force me to read subjects like history and social studies which I never cared less about.
However, even though you never cared less about history and social studies, the point is that you *do*, to be an educated and well-rounded person, need to know a certain base level of knowledge about these things.
The point of education is to ensure a common base level of knowledge for all citizens in order to ensure productive workers and reasonably educated voters.
So even if you never cared less about those things, and even if learning them made you less happy, I think it's good that they still taught you those things.
The principle of aggrandizement is the fundamental law of every government. - Frederick the Great
"It seems that education is always short shifted in our governmental budgets, but we continue to expect them to function with continuallty diminishing resources. Why does this happen? Is this something we can fix in a resonable amount of time?"
I don't know about other states (I'd imagine they're fairly similar), but education is by far the largest item in the Washington state budget. Furthermore, if one objectively looks at education spending, we actually spend far more *per pupil* now than we ever have. A rational observer might start to think the old saying of "throwing good money after bad" is starting to apply to education spending.
Personally, I think it's time to recognize some kids will do well and some won't. I've started to think it's time for a Germanic style vocational system for the kids "who just don't get it."
Personally, I'd rather be talking about how to improve education so that the people I might hire will have the necessary skill set to do the job well, without me having to re-train them for 6 months.
I vote for a new moderation option: "Complaint that the article is boring." But rather than pinning a -1 karma to it, it should warrant immediate execution.
-jacob
Science and math education is the US is in a very sorry state, but most of the problem is that science and education are under-valued within the system. Some examples:
The problem is priority. If school committees really cared about science/math education, things would improve. But all too often they're seen as "extras" (as is art, music, etc.!) while support for things like phys ed, sports, etc. flows on because we're told that school "spirit" and pride is important. I'd rather be proud that my senior class scored exceptionally well on the SATs or MCAS tests than that our local football team went 11-0, but if you look at where the concentration of attention in placed in our high schools (for example, in terms of coverage in local newspapers or on TV), it's sports, sports, sports, with maybe one or two pieces a month buried inside on some education program that's doing well. Where's the outcry from the SCHOOLS on this mistreatment?
There was a program in the 1980's in Mass. called MISTEP which was formed to get science, math, and English majors into the school systems. They offered an accelerated Master's program in Education with lots of tuition waivers, etc. if you promised to teach in the public school system for 5 years after the program. My brother signed up for this (he was a math major) which was good for him because he hadn't settled on a career, and it turns out he LOVES teaching.
He went through the program, started teaching and found himself laid off every year because math teachers are always laid off first. He managed to stay on a couple of times for a second year because he had experience coaching basketball! In fact, he says it's because of his *coaching* experience that he tends to get a sceond interview at schools. (He's now in Virginia where he just spent three years teaching kids under lock-up waiting for an opening in the regular school system.)
The only way this is going to improve is if we can scream and holler (and run for school committee) for higher standards, and rearranged priorities.
The fact of the matter is that at the current teacher salary, schools will not attract the highest-quality, most-motivated, most-intellectually-curious people. To my way of thinking, one has to be a martyr in order to put up with the current frustrations of teaching: no ability to discipline students, belligerent and uncooperative students and parents, stupid clueless school boards and administration, inhumane workload, AND low pay to boot.
If you want a better pool of teachers, ones who will inform themselves and pass that knowledge on to their students --
Pay them well.
The principle of aggrandizement is the fundamental law of every government. - Frederick the Great
"Just because the average humanist scientist believes in evolution doesn't mean it should be taught as fact, but rather as a plausible theory." So let's see now, bacteria that are becoming immune to anti-biotics... that's not evolution? Or are you one of those people that says, "If I can't see a fish spontaneously morph into a human during my lifetime, then I don't believe it!"
"How do we keep our teachers up to date?"
Good question--it's been a public policy debate in the United States for decades. And right off the bat, in the header to this article, you've mentioned one of the oft-repeated assertions in the discussion: schools don't get enough money.
This seems like a no-brainer--if every school had the kind of money that the rich suburban school districts had, we'd all be better off. A long time ago I learned that this isn't true. Let me tell you the story.
Education isn't like manufacturing--the output of a factory is the result of the raw material, energy, and effort of the workers in that plant. There's a common misperception that if you measure the capital, energy, and effort of the workers in a school building, you can measure the amount of education that results. Increase the amount of capital, goes the argument, and you increase the amount of education.
That isn't true. Let's consider your teacher, for instance. He has the day planner that lists 114 elements. He has students who know of 118 elements. But he teaches that only 109 elements exist. Why? Perhaps because he couldn't be bothered to learn more. Perhaps because he's learned that in today's education system you teach the syllabus--deviating from the syllabus only gets you grief from the curriculum committee. If the syllabus says that the sun rises in the West, you teach that the sun rises in the West. Nobody ever got tenure by telling the curriculum committee they were full of prunes.
The simplest proof of this fallacy is the performance of private schools. Take Hemos--he went to the Holland Christian Schools system. You can look at their web site (there's a link off his web page) and view this year's tuition and fees. It's substantially less than per-pupil expenditure at your local school district. Compare the test score results of urban school districts with the performance of Catholic schools in the same area: similar demographics, but the Catholic schools achieve dramatically better results with a fraction of the money.
That doesn't mean that money is bad for education, either. And a lot of public school funds provide for handicapped children (including one of my daughters) who typically can't get into a private school. Special Ed placements can easily cost a school district tens of thousands of dollars per year.
What it does mean is that money is generally irrelevant. A good teacher can make physics fascinating teaching in a shack on the beach. A bad teacher (or simply a teacher whose motivation has been crushed by the hassles of bureaucracy) wouldn't be able to make physics sound interesting with a million-dollar budget. The issue is how to identify and encourage good teachers--and how to prevent good teachers from getting crushed by the hassles of bureaucracy. The issue, as well, is how to present those teachers with students who a) don't pose a physical threat that Jon Katz is likely to write about; and b) are eager to learn. If you were asking your teacher about elements 110-118, instead of asking that question here on SlashDot, it might just remind your teacher why he got interested in chemistry in the first place. And it might just prompt him to put a bit more into his classes, beyond the syllabus that the curriculum committee gave him.
People in the business of living off of school taxes (administrators, union officials, etc.) are quick to insist that money and education are directly related. Bosh--having materials, handouts, and doodads is nice--but not nearly as important as many people think. In the final analysis education is related to interested, prepared teachers; with interested, prepared students. Put them in a classroom in a safe, secure environment, and let them go at it.
Once upon a time when I was young I would dream about the underling process of how things actually worked.
I thought it interesting that there was so much knowledge. I changed my proposed ocupation many, many, times. I at one point wanted to be a beta tester for console video games before I fully grasped the concept.
I did well at traditional mathmetics and thought it was fun. Then I hit the 7th grade. I was assigned to a fellow who had about as much right teaching an algebra class as fly to the moon (he minored in math). The experience was quite bad for me. I did however pass the class. I later took classes in math up through differential calculus. That was an equally sour experience. I went into college and am currently taking a similar course as the one that I had in high school. TO say that the material is difficult is an understatement. Much of this "body of knowledge" is rarely accessable to everyone. Now I don't mean that even people with mental retardation should be able to understand special relativity or dark matter but how much work would it be to simply make a book that had advanced topics packaged into a better framework? We did it with the internet (html,dhtml,java, java script, Active X, cgi, etc) why can't there be a group who takes advanced topics and uses them to be presented into say textbooks?
Most of the current base of knowledge is in the form of academic journals, papers, and dissertations. If this would be routinely integrated into "supplement books" for textbook updates and then could be integrated into standard textbooks.
Quite frankly I think that cellular autonoma is something that would be interesting to look at. However when a subject usually takes about 5 years of solid math traning even to get to the confused stage I think it's time to make it more approachable.Has anyone taken the liberty of creating some sort of learning oriented method of teaching. Take some AI that allows people a student to ask a directed question aloud or maybe on a command line such "Gee I still don't understand why space time curves at the 39th parralel quantum axis when graviton particle concentrations reach 45% why is that?"
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I'm serious. why do people seem just to take it on faith that the govt can educate people better than anyone else. We don't trust the governemnt to delever us good food and groceries, why should we trust them to deliver an education which BTW is sooo much more important. The same market forces that brought the telephone from a curiosity of the super rich to the common man could just as easially play themselves out in an open education market!!!
One thing that no-one seems to have mentioned is the level at which you teach.
Let's take for an example the structure of the atom, which I was first taught at age 14 in GCSE Chemistry. Back then they wanted to keep things simple, so the model we were taught basically said there are 2 electons in the inner shell, then 8 in each shell from then on out, the nucleus contains all the neutrons & protons. This model, although simplified, worked for the calculations we were doing, however even then we would sometimes think up situations where it didn't seem to make sense - the answer from the teacher was "this model is simplified...if you do A Levels (the next set of exams) you will learn a more realistic model which will answer your question".
So along comes A-Levels...and I do Chemistry again, and indeed the first thing they say is "forget what you just learnt, this is the truth". Then they go into the d-shell, p-shell etc, the equations of a sphere, basic quantum theory and so on. Again, this model seems to work in the situations we are testing...again we find some holes. Again, the answer is "This is also a simplification - do Chemistry at University and you'll learn the truth".
Now I didn't do Chemistry at Uni so I can't complete the story, but I bet they present a model, which seems to work, and some bright spark finds a hole. He asks his tutor, who says "this model is a simplification - become a researcher and discover the truth!".
The fact is that although the frontiers of science & tech are moving forwards all the time, only a small subset of students ever need or want to be at that level, usually a simplified model is sufficient for their needs, and this simple model rarely changes. Another example of this would be in Physics, where students are still taught Newtons Laws although we know them to only be approximations. Why? Because Newtons Laws work for most people's uses and Quantum Physics & the g.t.of relativity is too complex for a 14 year old to get their head around!
You could bring a (not very good) analogy into the world of programming - do we teach C++ or asm to kids these days? No we teach them probably BASIC or LOGO or somthing like that. Is this because we want to hide the truth, or because we are lazy/underfunded teachers? I would say no, it's because the simple languages are good at getting a basic understanding going, and they fulfill the requirements of kids at that age. If they are interested they can take it further, and we'll teach them The Truth (tm) at some later date.
BTW: The real tradgedy is when people are unable to get to that higher level, because of economic, social, govermental or whatever other reasons.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Why should we try to fix something that's fundamentally broken? The liberal readers of Slashdot are complaining about the dumbing-down of our school system; yet it is the same liberals who push for "equality" where it is unnecessary.
Case in point: the retarded students--excuse me, special education students--might be offended if we teach material that is too advanced for their comprehension; therefore, the liberals reformed our schools, making the curriculum "equal." This punishes students capable of higher learning by not pushing their minds far enough; it also punishes the less privileged by spoon-feeding them just so they can pass a test.
What does our government do about this problem? It's so concerned with political correctness that it does the only thing it can: allocate more funds. This, in turn, only makes the politicians feel better about themselves. At least the conservatives realize that our school system is flawed beyond repair and cannot be fixed with just money.
By the way, chemistry teaches you to think, not to memorize the elements. If you understand the material, then you should be able to apply your knowledge of the newest element without your teacher's aid. I know -- I'm taking chemistry too.
OK, I get rather pissed off when people generally blame teachers for the sorry state of affairs in US Education. Both my parents are teachers, and a large number of their friends are, so, while I am considerably biased here, I also have a very big insight on what goes on in a teacher's life, and how this affects the schooling of the typical student.
In the long term, if you want to keep teachers updated, you have to pay for it in increased school taxes. What a better teacher? How about this: Every 4 years, a teacher spends a semester where they teach a half-day, and spend the other half day taking unversity classwork AT THE PUBLIC EXPENSE. PAY for 2 or 3-day seminars where the teachers get TOP-NOTCH instructors from relevant fields to come lecture them on advances in their field of instruction. And, even better, have the School Boards LISTEN TO THE TEACHERS when they tell them what works, and what doesn't. Having school boards (and for that matter, state legislatures) dictate exactly what should/should not be taught in the classroom is STUPID. They don't deal with the kids. They don't have professional degrees in the subject. They don't really get it. What other profession has complete outsiders dictate how they work to them, and yet expects them to do a good job? "Oh, excuse me, Mr. Engineer, but we can't have you design/build that bridge without direction from our committee - oh, and did we tell you that our committe consists of a minister, a librarian, a policeman, two shopkeepers, and a streetsweeper? They're be alot of help, and they're really concerned..."
-Erik, who usualy doesn't get this pissed off...
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
(My comments apply to my recent experiences in California.)
Teacher unions and school boards fear vouchers, charter schools, home schooling, and anything not controlled by the local school board because they have less influence there. They have also backed themselves into a corner over the paradox of other countries having better test scores, yet more students per teacher. The unions want more teachers paying more dues, and the school boards want to post christian morality commandments and expel 5 year olds for bringing plastic knives or aspirin to school and teenagers for writing disparaging web sites about their schools and teachers.
These two bureaucracies -- unions and school boards -- are united only in fearing loss of control.
Because of that, US schools have to "serve" everybody, so parents want schools run their way. They want certain books banned, prayers said, creationism taught, etc. If alternatives were available, parents wouldn't have to tussle over the only piece of pie available; they could find their own.
Most parents would quickly find the best educational institutions. The parents who choose schools for other than educational reasons would have second thoughts in a year or two when their kids' test scores plummet.
As for the unfortunate kids of those parents, certainly there would be a few whose parents would never wake up, but it doesn't take much investigation to discover that there are a lot of kids who went the opposite of their parents when they got a chance; the route might be more twisty than some, but they will get to the same end place.
--
Infuriate left and right
Study after study has shown that educational spending is not a valid predictor of the success of our educational success. Two major changes would vastly improve our educational system without increasing spending (and would increase the value of any additional funds we do allocate):
1 - End tenure. If an incompetent teacher can keep their position for 3 years, they are pretty much guaranteed to keep it forever. There is little or no accountability. Unlike you and I who have to produce results to keep our jobs, let alone advance in them, teachers have to do next to nothing to further their careers.
2 - End certification. Teaching certification in the US is largely dependent upon finishing a college education that is heavy on pedagogical method (which usually lacks any empirical basis as to its effectiveness) and very light on actual content. If you have a doctorate in mathematics, you are not "qualified" to teach math in a public school, yet someone who has 18 credit hours of undergraduate education is.
Further, money allocated to education rarely makes it to the classroom. Typically, a large percentage of it is consumed by administrative overhead.
Check out Linux University
If people really care about what their kids are learning, they should be home schooling them.
The question Keefesis asks shows up all over the place in different forms: "how can we get better teachers?" "How can we make students learn more?" "What can we do about the educational crisis in American public schools?"
Here's the answer:
Pay teachers more money! Pay teachers more money! Pay teachers more money!
I am really interested in computer science (from an academic standpoint), and I'm working my way towards a Ph.D. in it. I also love to teach and am quite good at teaching. I really want to be a high school computer science teacher after I get my degree, but it's really hard for me to justify taking the pay cut. The difference is substantial- starting salaries for teachers (depending on region) are in the teens to twenties (might be slighly more for those with a Ph.D.- anyone have better numbers?) Starting salaries at good universities and research groups for Ph.D. computer scientists, depending on the place and the specific field, can start in $40,000 range and go past $100,000 sometimes. What would you do?
It does not take a rocket scientist to see that if the brightest people can get jobs that will allow them to do cutting-edge work in their fields and get paid double or more what they'd be paid to teach, most teachers will be the people who weren't good at it. That intuition is borne out by facts: the majority of teachers come from the bottom 1/4th of their college classes [can't find the source right now, but if it really bothers you post and I'll dig it up].
Pay teachers more money, and maybe you'll attract more competent people to be teachers. This is not a secret. You may tell others.
-jacob
I think the point you made about the fact that DC schools were spending *more* money than comparative public schools in North Suburban Chicago is the strongest argument I've ever seen (even stronger than the considerable evidence regarding private schools, perhaps) in support of the idea that, given some minimal level of infrastructure and salary expenditure, additional funds are completely irrelevant to the quality of eductation provided.
Sadly, until more people realize this, and start holding the educational bureaucrats responsible, little will be accomplished.
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page.
Since I don't know the previous poster, I can't speak for him, but I would assume that his argument is based not observation within his own lifetime, rather the complete lack of any transitional forms in the available paleontological evidence.
Archaeopteryx is occasionally cited as a transitional form, but there are a large body of evolutionist scientists who say that by any reasonable definition, if it existed today, it would be classified as a bird and not as some lizard-bird hybrid.
Of course, there is also the core issue of whether evolution can be reconciled with the second law of thermodynamics. Which of course brings in the debate about whether the earth can be considered a closed system or not, yada yada yada.
You seem to be ridiculing his position, when the simple fact is that there is probably no way we will ever *prove* either a creationist or an evolutionary point of view. At best, several thousand years of observation (including, hopefully, the opportunity to observe planets other than our own), should more clearly show the likelihood of one or the other.
Personally, I'm a creationist as I think it seems the most likely explanation, but I don't think the evidence available is overwhelmingly in favour of either viewpoint. Certainly, a particular kind of creation (or a particular kind of evolution for that matter) cannot be proven by the available evidence.
Check out Linux University
A colleague of mine here asked his daughters Computer Science teacher "What sort of environment are you using?" and got the reply "Very friendly."
While I cannot claim that I know the entire solution, I believe one small part of the problem is that teachers prefer (in my experience they insist) on learning about technology through short inservices/workshops rather than through self-study. I would also make the observation that classroom teachers won't do homework between and won't do preperation before taking inservices or workshops.
Of course these are general observations, but they are based on diverse and extensive experiences that I've had. Specifically I've worked with nearly one hundred teachers over three years and been the primary person responsible for keeping them up-to-date (amoung other things).
I think that if teachers could break free of the classroom learning model for their own personal needs they could keep up-to-date with less time and effort. And better still it might encourage them to develop new models for their teaching practices.
It's "short shrift". Not "shift". Looks like the English teachers could do a better job too.
Recently Slashdot presented an article about the only remaining 1st generation computer. It is located in Australia and was retired in 1964 from active duty. Yet five years after it was retired, we put people on our moon with engineering which was mostly worked out on Napier's Bones, an even older technology in comparison.
The better educated student is the one who understands the Mathematics of Napier's Bones, and not the one who knows how to fix the registry in Windows NT. Long journeys start with small footsteps. Let's modestly hope that our high school students are as well versed in the facts of Science as they stood on the day we first landed on the moon. If there is any danger that they will outgrow that, why then we can begin to worry.
There is so much wrong in this post I don't know where to begin.
First off, transitional forms. EVERYTHING is a "transitional form". Every fossil we have is the transition between that which came before it and what came after. The term 'transitional form' is a creationist invention; it allows them, no matter what sequence of fossils is shown to them to say "where is the transitional between 2 and 3?" If you show them fossil 2.5 they can then say "well, where is the transistional between 2 and 2.5?" A never ending story. No matter how much evidence is displayed, they will demand more.
2: There is no conflict between evolution and the 2LOTD. Those who claim there is have obviously never taken a thermodynamics course. The earth is obviously not a closed system as it constantly obtains energy from the sun, and radiates heat into space. Those who claim that "human's cannot have evolved from amoebas because they are more complex and that violates the second law" whould look at the similarity between that and the statement "snowflakes can not come from water because snowflakes are more complex" to see the stupidity of that arguement.
Third, we have seen evolution happen in out lifetimes. See the talk.origins FAQ for details, I'm not going to list all of them here.
Finally, a basic concept that shows me you are definately not a scientist. You don't "prove" anything in science. You gather a body of evidence. A thing is considered true if there is a substantial body of proof, such that it would be perverse to not believe the theory. Creationists are fond of saying "well, evolution is only a theory." Gravity is only a theory, too, but you probably don't try to convince people to fly.
Sorry about the OT post, but dammit, he hit one of my buttons.
I enjoyed your hidden agenda slam against creationists. They of course would say that you have to be careful of the textbooks that claim that any theory is proven unless it actually is. Just because the average humanist scientist believes in evolution doesn't mean it should be taught as fact, but rather as a plausible theory.
I agree, sort of.. No good science textbook should be teaching evolution as fact any more than it teaches anything as fact. You have the common misconception that scientists believe evolution to be fact. They don't. Scientists do not believe ANYTHING to be fact.
In science, a "theory" is merely a hypothesis which has been backed up by a lot of evidence. In science, EVERYTHING is potentially wrong, since we know our observation techniques are imperfect. Newton's laws of motion (at low speeds), Maxwell's equations, evolution, these are all "theories" in science, yet we use apply them every day.
We could potentially find out that Newton's laws of motion are wrong (and we did.. though only at high speeds), or that our cherished laws of electromagnetism are wrong, and that the computer you're using now is really being run by something we don't understand at all.. It's JUST NOT DAMN LIKELY. Similarly, evolution is a "theory" because we must always be open to the possibility of our observations and logic being faulty, but it has been so well supported that it's just not damn likely that evolution is completely wrong.
In short, if you want science books to teach only "facts", then you'll start seeing some really empty science books with nothing but blank pages.
Science books must therefore teach scientific "theories", which are hypotheses which have been supported greatly by evidence. Among these theories is the theory of evolution.
And of course, I must plug The Talk.Origins Archive, which has lists of this and other common misconceptions about evolution.
What really gets me is not when the course material is a few years old, but when it's flat out wrong. I think every science student has at some point been told or done a lab to show that different regions of the tongue taste different things. It's an absolute lie, and it was proven to be a lie 50 years ago, but it's still in the curriculum today. It does, however, teach students the valuable skill of fudging lab results to get the 'correct' answer.
Bite the hand.
Whenever education is mentioned, there is a knee-jerk response - more money. This approach was tested to destruction in the UK, where failing schools got given more money by Local Education Authorities, and pupils were forced to attend them.
Then the policy was changed. Schools were funded on the basis of number of pupils, and allowed to choose how to spend the money themselves; the pupils were free to attend the school of their (parents') choice, the shcools got to select the pupils if oversubscribed. A lot of bad schools closed and good schools grew. Overall school results improved enormously - the schools competed for pupils.
Sadly, the current UK govt is reversing this policy, and giving power back to the Local Education Authorities instead of the schools, despite the evidence.
here is an article I wrote about how schools (at least here in California) waste all the money they get for technology.
it's not a lack of money, it's a lack of effort and desire. Sure, there are a few good teachers out there, but do you really think most teachers teach because they really want to? No, they teach because it's a secure, relativley high paying (after tenure.. and that takes only a few years) job where they get summers and all holidays off, and only have to "work" (if you consider setting up a audiobook or a video and sleeping during class work) from 8am to 3pm. Ever heard the saying "Those who can, can, those who can't, teach?" It's the truth. Sure, we could spend millions subscribing every teacher to the latest technology magazines, but they'll go unread. We can spend millions taking our teachers to technology training courses, but even if they learn anything, they won't implement any of it.
The educational system has been bureaucratized, legalized, unionized, federalized, politicized, reformed from outside 3 times in my memory, and still manages to do worse every year.
This system was fine for early industrial revolution purposes -- produce a uniform, low-level product.
It is hopeless for an information/technology era where we need people with lots of idiosyncratic backgrounds probing many small areas of knowledge and performing syntheses.
The ultimate small class and small batch size is one -- tutoring is the future.
The net will make this easy -- with video, my kid can have an Calcutta high school math genius tutoring him in math, a Beijing high school history genius tutoring him in the impact of the Cultural Revolution (inMandarin),
Abolish the educational system. Give poor people a chance to get out of the morass which has held minorities back for the last 50 years.
Lew Glendenning
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
Teachers don't keep up to date because most don't care about the subject they teach. Most went to get Education degrees rather than a degree in Chemistry, CS, Biology, etc. and it shows. There are more barriers to teaching at the high school level than there are at the university level. PhD and MS grads can teach at a University, but many school systems require them to take Education classes before they are allowed into the school system. I know a number of PhDs and MS's in chemistry and bio that went back to teach and had a lot more difficulty being allowed to teach a topic they had published peer-reviewed papers in. An Education degree, however, grants the bearer the ability to switch from Gym to Trig (this is a real example - students would continually have to finish sample problems for the guy in the middle of class!). I don't know how much school standards have changed in the last few years or how much local standards vary, so of course YMMV. For all the high school slashdotters, remember, you probably are smarter than your teachers.
Gravity is
only a theory, too, but you probably don't try to convince people to fly.Gravity is
only a theory, too, but you probably don't try to convince people to fly.
Gravity is not a theory. Gravity is real. There are some
theories that explain why there is gravity, but gravity in itself isn't just a theory, it's a force...
The theory that says that gravity is proportional to the square of distance (or something like that, i'm into ephistemology, not physics) is a theory, gravity isn't.
What does it matter if Joe High school student is not aware of 5 or 6 rare elements? Most of these, the rare ones, are soon forgetten anyhow. Education is more about learning how to learn, than it is cramming "inert knowledge", as Whitehead would say.
I believe there is too much emphasis of "accurate" (newer) information, and less on the quality of the material or instruction. I am of the belief that a more traditional education serves the individual far better, even in today's high tech environment, than the more modern/"accurate" education. Furthermore, in the attempt to obtain the latest materials, they effectively dumb it down, ignoring the quality of the material. I think most every modern text book is pretty horrible. I'd rather have an older and outdated one (not to mention less P.C. stuff), than what is normally seen today.
The same can be said for "computers in the classroom". There is such an emphasis in education these days in "technology", that they ignore the important stuff. In one particular inner city system that i'm familiar with, the district spent a couple million dollars wiring each room with ISDN lines and the like, yet a good many of them were unable to use it because their electrical system couldn't even support the computers. In this same system, the kids are not even remotely literate. WTF are these educators thinking? A computer, or any technology for that matter, is not a cure all. Maybe, past a certain stage it can help. But for kids who can't read and write or do basic arithmatic, it is a poor return on dollars. Meanwhile, when you examine most private schools, they frequently have lower spending per student, and they pay their faculty significantly less across the board, yet they send the %95 to top schools.
Our public education system simply isn't rigourous enough; not enough is demanded of the students or teachers. It is premature, and most likely entirely unnecessary to worry about how old these text books are. The question is, does the system make students THINK and LEARN. It must be challenging above all else.
The information is out there, readily available...
...and yet the teachers don't seek it out.
I've had some great teachers, but only a few. The rest were horrible incompetents, either through ignorance, apathy, or honest-to-God plain stupidity.
Step 1) forget education degrees, these have shown themselves to be worthless: in cases where "trained" teachers are unavailable and they substituted untrained individuals knowledgable in the subjects they teach they have consistently taught equally well or better than "trained" teachers.
Step 2) fire bad teachers. It's not hard to tell who are the bad teachers and who are the good ones. The way things are now, when somebody gets a job teaching in a public school, they are set for life barring gross public misconduct (but not gross incompetence, or acting like a petty dictator). I've known elementary school teachers who couldn't pass their own tests.
Step 3) cut classroom time dramatically. You can't learn for six hours each day; people's minds just don't work that way. Kids do better with 2 hours of traditional notebook and blackboard learning and the rest of the day phys-ed/supervised play (yes, you can cover the same material because kids can pay attention and retain what they are taught). Don't even think about homework! This also gives teachers plenty of time to upgrade their skills and give personal attention to kids who could benefit from extra help. This one applies a little more towards younger kids (presumably "supervised play" isn't a good description of free time for teens to play musical instruments, read things that interest them, do art projects, and all the other constructive things that people do in their free time), but nobody benefits from 6 hours or more of traditional classroom time day after day.
Once you open up the pool of potential teachers and fire the incompetents until you have a group of skilled, motivated teachers, and you give them enough free time to keep their skills up to date, the problem will simply disappear.
Semantics. I could just as easily say "we theorize that gravity is a force as we define forces in physics, but we don't really know" And that's my point. Gravity is a name we have given to a phenomena we have observed but do not yet know how it occurs. In this sense, gravity is an observed phenomenon, and a theory, just as evolution is. To be absolutely precise, Gravity is the name we have given to the theory that we use to explain whatever it is that keeps us from flying off into space.
Okay so there's 118 elements and you're learning about 109. What does the knowledge of the other 9 elements do for you? Does it make you a better engineer, does it increase the value of your degree?
The basics are still the same. The way the molecule is built up out of electrons, protons and neutrons is the same. The methods to predict if it will react with other molecules is the same. When dealing with element 116, it's just a matter of looking up the specs for it and applying it to the theory you learned.
I learned to program using Pascal. When I went to my current school, where c(++) was used to program, i was laughed at by my fellow students because Pascal was outdated, hardly used, etcetera. However, I didn't learn to write Psacal programs, I learned how to analyse a problem, split it up, write a functional program in whatever pseudocode I preferred if necessary, and translate that into Pascal.
When I got my first lab test back, the teacher commented that it was the best constructed, documented and comprehensible program he had seen from anyone in the first grade. It was my turn to laugh
Whether Pascal is outdated or not, or whether it is still used nowadays, doesn't matter. I merely used it as a tool to learn how to write good programs. Once I learned the c syntax I applied the methods I learned to write good c programs.
Same goes for your elements. Or learning datacommunication techniques on a 200 baud line. Or setting up a network with 10 Mbit lines while 100 Mbit is pretty much standard nowadays, with terabits being new and cool. Or microprocessing techniques with a 386....
To give you an idea of just how discredited it is, a few years ago Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the very liberal (American sense) Senator from New York, obeserved that the statistical correlation between eductional quality and per capita spending was so tiny, that even the Latitude of the school's location had more bearing. So he mockingly suggested we move all schools North 100 miles. Keep in mind that Sen. Moynihan is hardly known as a budget hawk.
The clamor for jacked-up school budgets comes from fatcat educrats who know nothing about efficient management. Catholic school systems, just as an example, operate at 1/3 the per capita spending but get higher test scores and graduation rates with worse kids.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
Slashdot always has a lot of intelligent comments, but quite often I get frustrated while reading them because nobody seems to nail the issue squarely. Well, I'll do it right now (and I'll bet I get rated 0!) Here's the problem, folks: we have a government-run monopoly school system. We pay taxes for education, yet we have to pay again if we want to send our children to schools of our own choosing.
Would you trust a government-run monopoly in any other industry? Imagine what the computer industry would be like if it were a government-run monopoly! Or any other industry, for that matter. Liberals claim that education is "too important" to be left to the free market. Well, so is food, and we leave that to the free market. By the way, you can live a lot better without without than you can without food!
The notion that government schools need more funding is patently ridiculous. Per-pupil funding has more than doubled (even accounting for inflation) in the past 20 or 30 years, yet performance has dropped precipitously. If you have kids, you might be aware that Catholic schools spend much less per student than public schools, yet do a better job.
You've heard all the canards about vouchers, but did you know that lower-class inner-city folks favor school-choice far more than the elite liberals who so vociferously oppose them. That's because they need an escape from non-functional schools more than anyone. Wake up folks, before we sacrifice another generation of not-so-rich kids at the altar of Orwellian liberal nonsense.
The first and foremost job of any school should be to teach students how to think, and how a particular discipline WORKS. But because people are being taught at a superficial level rather than being taught underlying concepts, it is suddenly taking at least a Bachelor's degree to accomplish what a HS diploma once would have in terms of training for the workforce. Sad, very very sad.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Examples of this kind of educational system are ofcourse shown in movies such as Dead Poet's Society and To Sir with Love. However, Hollywood aside, it truely is a dilemna on how to teach teachers to better able to do their job. Half the problem stems from the fact that a lot of school teachers are teachers not by choice but due to a lack of other jobs. This leads to apathy and lack of the joy of teaching.
What can we do ? Well, we need to remodel our educational system to make classes more about children going out and discovering information on their own. Here the internet can play a profound role. A class assignment could be:
- Read through the NASA web sites and find out as much information about Mars as possible.
- Starting with the CIA World factbook and followed by whatever links you can find, make a presentation on a country of your choice.
Science and math require special attention. These are the subjects that teach us scientific and logical thinking. Children have to be thought rational and logical thinking at an early stage, instead of being asked to know by rote how to solve a certain class of problems (as is done today). We may want to look at the educational models of other countries which are producing so many mathematicians, scientists and engineers (examples, Germany, India, China)
Ofcourse, all of this can come about only if we do launch into debate about this in the first place. And its going to take more than a few slashdotters to make a difference :)
The basic problems with the US education system have to do with attitudes of the parents, NOT failures in the formal school system. Everyone has noted that the money spent on schools in the US is very high; and in fact teacher educational requirements in the US are quite high too. Why is it in fact that this money does not deliver the desired result? The process has been studied and benchmarked to a fair-thee-well so if it were a problem with the process it would have been found by now.
This money is in fact wasted if the parents fail in their job to deliver a kid willing to learn to school.
The sad fact is that PARENTS are unwilling to accept any responsibility for the performance of their children in school, yet in fact they have FAR FAR more influence than teachers do. When Johnny can't find Canada on a map, the reason is because his PARENTS didn't treat learning achievement as important in the upbringing of the child.
The American media likes to trumpet low standardized test scores as evidence of the schools failing. Baloney. If you look at the DISTRIBUTION of test scores you will immediately see that the top 10-20% of American students perform equal to or better than the top percentiles in any other country in the world. If schools were incompetent this would not happen. These students were taught by their parents that learning is important.
Those that do not achieve are students whose parents have failed to do their part.
Funny how the
While I agree that it should be easier to remove an incompetent teacher, this is unfortunately open to all sorts of abuses. A good friend of mine is a high school English teacher, and if he didn't have tenure, he probably would have been fired because some irate parents (one of whom was on the school board, IIRC) complained about dirty words in a book he assigned to high school juniors.
Abolish the unions, and tenure? OK, fine, but don't come crying to me when freedom of speech evaporates and creation science is taught as fact.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
I'm a teacher, and I stay up to date. But why should I even TRY to teach a class when most high-school students are just interested in chasing skirts and joking around?
I deliver interesting courses. No book reading here. I have them work on the computers, make interesting labs, and deliver interesting theory. But most high-school "jocks" aren't interested, and when a student feels he's taking a course for nothing, he'll never listen.
An uninterested student leads to an uninterested teacher. Most teachers get so sick of teaching, that when they start a new semester, the first thing on their mind is "how can I get rid of this bunch of students the easiest way possible".
Many things need change in the ed system. Not just the teachers. Some of those changes can start at home, with Mom and Pop.
...what do you expect from a socialized education system? Socialism never works, because success in a socialist system depends more on pleasing your superiors than pleasing your 'customers' (i.e. in this case the kids and their parents).
Eliminate the education system, and you solve the problems; with private education the teachers either do their job or the kids and their parents go elsewhere.
"Science News" ought to do them fine, and is a lot easier to read.
Given this, why would you want to be a teacher? Well, either because you truly believe you can make a difference (and maybe you can, for the few dozen students who will truly listen) or because it's a living. The only thing that's standing between me and teaching is a few million dollars (ie financial independence) and an ability to pick and choose my students. What? We can't give that to every teacher? Uh oh.
Something else I'd add: Stop scaring off the bright but strange college kids. Someone I went to college with has decided against teaching thanks to the post-Littleton crackdown on kids in black. Why? He WAS one of those kids. He would have been a brilliant teacher, too. It pisses me right off.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Just admit you used a bad example. Trying to save face by using run on sentences is not working.
Teaching isn't as horrible and underpaid as some make it out to be, but it sure as heck isn't a "cushy" job, either. Especially not in this day and age.
As for firing "incompetent" teachers, who makes that decision? By what standards? It'd be really easy to stick a teacher with less-intelligent or less-cooperative kids as an act of deliberate sabotage so that teacher could be fired for "incompetence" by someone with an axe to grind. Better yet (this works best on male teachers), make accusations of sexual impropriety. Bye-bye, teacher.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Seems we'll have to free all the schoolbooks and put them under GPL-like thingie. Just like free software (free not in price, but in non-constriction of thought). See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
:)
... yaknowwhat :)
That would solve the problem, but would definitely face many problems in the short run, too. Think about it : in our structure of society, school is far more embedded in the state in which it is today than such thing as software (which seems to already be badly affected by a corporate pressure).
Freeing education, and definitely disabling all the existing institutions and bureaucracy a nowaday citizen is forced to use, would in many but the best ways help education become that of higher quality, and support (on a broad scale) science as we know it today; thus improving "quality of our live" in a way different (and, of course, better) than it is considered today.
To tell the truth, I believe this will happen if not in near future, than at least in the long run.
The same old question : who will win --
Corporation or
Free Thought ?
The latter, as long as I'm on that side (and I'll always will B
-Religion is only a temporary lesson of thought in a life of thinking being. Are you one?
--myself, being
(and not intending to start flamethrowing thing),
--Jurgis Bagociunas
Good luck !
P.S.: Email kept safe for the sake of
P.P.S.: As my native language ain't english, sometimes I sound really sucky. Sorry for that !
The U.S. spends more on education per child than any other industrialized country, but our students still don't finish near the top in international scholastic tests. No, lefty, more money is not needed. (that's ALWAYS the solution for you guys!) What is needed is less federal involvment, more control turned over to the states and less bureaucracy. The NEA and other organizations that are more interested in keeping their fat bureaucratic jobs and less on actually educating children. Cut out that waste and you would have more money than you know what to do with!
The decline of schools in America began with the forced integration policies of the 1960s. Negroes and Whites were forced to attend the same schools despite geographic, cultural and intellectual differences. Before forced integration, public schools in America were the best in the world. The proper way to fix the schools in America would be to let the Negro students attend schools tuned to the Negro culture and Negro values, while the White students could attend schools tuned to values more specific to their culture.
The point of the periodic table is that da elements fall into groups based upon their atomic composition and that these groups share various properties. It might be interesting to note that some scientists have managed to smash some particles together to create a new element that is stable for a billionth of a second or whatever, but this is going to distract from the heart of the matter. It's also more related to Physics than Chemistry.
Should students skip Newtonian physics because it is only an approximation useful in only a subset of physics? Of course not. It's also good to teach things a step at a time. Basic level courses are always going to be full of inaccuracies and approximations. A high school student that has mastered the crude basics should be encouraged to grow through reading other materials, talking to professionals, taking college level courses, etc. This is what I did in the areas that interested me.
As for a solution to "the problem", I would recommend new teaching methodologies. The shortcomings are the compromises of teaching "en mass." This refers to both the development of curricula that are applied rigidly to large populations (such as Federal government educational mandates), as well as the "lecture" methodology of teaching that is predominant today. If you target a "group", you will be teaching the least common denominator, or otherwise missing the potential that each individual has.
Other, more personalized, methodologies are possible (I've worked with one first hand) but it will be many years before "public" schools will make the transition. These can be more effective, economical (thanks to computers), and fulfilling to the individual. Improvements in method, not material is what I would recommend.
Spicoli
Where's the beef?!?
Around here (Newfoundland, Canada), the problem is not with teachers but with school boards.
Teachers are not permitted to teach anything other than what the school board dictates. What makes this really bad is the fact that the school boards are not made up of teachers but with scumbag politician wannabes and (in the Catholic schools) Christian fundamentalists. Science is extremely low on their priority lists. They don't even know what's happening in the classrooms.
I had a computer teacher who had to literally fight the school board to change the curriculum of the computer courses from CBM Pets to (then current) 286s.
I was lucky to have good teachers. My chemistry teacher spent his off-class hours in the lab trying to recreate student's science fair experiments. He went out of his way to learn from the students. Once he was looking at someone's fiber-optic demonstration project and videotaped me explaining the simple 555 circuit and how light traveled through the medium for future reference.
Most of my teachers constantly cursed the foul school board. Our labs were understocked, the books were only updated every 6 or 7 years, etc. When I hit college it was a culture shock. New books every year or two (Some people didn't like that because they couldn't sell them, but I kept all of my books anyway), proper equipment in the labs, and best of all, small classes. I graduated in a class of 12 people.
I'm not one to comment, but this is a post where the responses absolutely disgust me. We blame the system for not working when really its ourselves. Tell me one excuse why a child can't get proper schooling? Teachers aren't updated. Boo Hoo. I didn't know that teachers were the centre of all information. I'm glad to see in an information age we still rely on someone telling us what is and isn't correct. A) Don't libraries exist? B) Oh look, this cool thing called the internet C) Don't take for granted what everyone else takes for granted.
The problem is not that teachers don't keep up with the information on their fields. The problem is that an average High School students doesn't know or give a shit about math or physics. The level of difficulty has been set so low that even the dummy people can get through it. This reflects to the teachers so that they won't teach even the proper basics for students. It all comes down to what teachers demand from the students. If high school is supposed to be a social institution then forget math or physics. It's all about the attitude in this issue.
I'm not one to comment, but this is a post where the responses absolutely disgust me. We blame the system for not working when really its ourselves. Tell me one excuse why a child can't get proper schooling? Teachers aren't updated. Boo Hoo. I didn't know that teachers were the centre of all information. I'm glad to see in an information age we still rely on someone telling us what is and isn't correct. A) Don't libraries exist? B) Oh look, this cool thing called the internet C) Don't take for granted what everyone else takes for granted. Everyone believes that teachers are the problem. Teachers don't care, teachers don't know anything. I once thought that way. But its not true. We give teachers no reason to care. I even ask all of my teachers why they teach, its one of the worst jobs you could possibly have. I'm going to get to the point, Read a book, and understand information rather than just memorizing it. Question what you read and the future is yours. The whole point is to truly understand, not memorize what someone tells you.
Today's picture of high schools doesn't always look good, but we can do with it.
If you really want good teachers in the schools, there should be a system that rewards good teachers and sacks bad ones. That means competition between teachers to offer their services, and competition between school boards to hire the best talent.
If you want to deregulate the labour market for school teachers, you will have to deregulate the market for education too and have consumers, that is, the parents, vote with their dollars; where else would the pressure come from, on the school boards to perform?
I'm absolutely sure that deregulating the whole lot would increase average quality, reduce costs, and reward the best players, say teachers, in the field.
On the other hand, not everybody would have equal access to the best education around. It would depend on the amount of dollars you are able and willing to throw at it, on your previous grades, and on your ability to perform during interviews. Maybe a small number of pupils would obtain protection through quotas or scholarships, but most would have to put in hard work and real dollars.
Don't you recognize this situation? It already exists in colleges and universities; the quality of which is variable on the talent you have, the willingness to work and, not to mention, the dollars you are willing to put in.
The best will get even better, but the worst will go down the drain, totally.
But then again, if we don't want any of that, we must continue to put up with the lack of incentives to perform, the self-serving bureaucracies, and the quite mediocre outcomes.
From the view of a high school student (although not quite an average one), here's what's happening at my school:
1. currently, about $5k is reserved for the purpose of building a fence around the parking lot, thus forcing evil people to use the same entrances as they usually would
2. annoying/closed-minded teachers. About half of the teachers at my school (+- a few) do not allow the students to think or learn on their own. Points can be taken away for using more advanced methods of solving problems, and teachers can send students who wish to have a debate over what's right straight to the discipline office, where they are assigned a 20-minute detention and sent back to class.
3. cosmetics. Currently, our principal is more concerned with making our school look pretty than with the fact that people are sending each other to the hospital for no obvoius reason.
4. stupidity: When one is late to class, to ensure that the offending student doesn't miss too much class (yes, that's right - so they won't miss too much class), he/she is sent to the discipline office, where he/she waits until about halfway through first period to get assigned a detention and a pass back to class.
5. hypocracy: Our principal, Randall Lee, ordered our friendly security guards to check the stalls for smokers. Mr. Lee can often be found outside smoking during class.
*yawn* i'm sleepy now, so i'll go before i start up an overly large flamewar...
-Speedracer
DynDNS - Dynamic DNS. Source Code.
I can't speak for him, but I would assume that his argument is based not observation within his own lifetime, rather the complete lack of any transitional forms in the available paleontological evidence.
May I direct you to the Talk.Origins Archive's list of transitional fossils, which includes far more than just the Archeopteryx. The table of transitional fossils is certainly not complete, since fossils are fragile and hard to find, but it is FAR more filled than Creationists would like us to believe.
(In the specific case of the Archeopteryx, we have yet to find its direct ancestor, but we have found many candidates and cousins which themselves bear many traits of both birds and reptiles.)
Of course, there is also the core issue of whether evolution can be reconciled with the second law of thermodynamics. Which of course brings in the debate about whether the earth can be considered a closed system or not, yada yada yada
LOL! You're basically saying, "Then there's this argument... which I know is completely bogus, but I'm just going to ignore that little fact and say it anyway."
"The debate about whether the earth can be considered a closed system"? What debate? If the earth were a closed system, there'd be no photosynthesis (since no light could enter from the outside), and thus no plant or animal life. At best there'd be some of that bacteria that feeds off of geothermal energy (which again is finite).
So yes.. the entropy argument is completely bogus because life on Earth is fueled by solar (and geothermal) energy, and the increase in entropy caused by those emissions of heat more than offset the decrease in entropy of more structured life.
You seem to be ridiculing his position, when the simple fact is that there is probably no way we will ever *prove* either a creationist or an evolutionary point of view. At best, several thousand years of observation (including, hopefully, the opportunity to observe planets other than our own), should more clearly show the likelihood of one or the other.
You're almost right, of course. The only issue is that we don't need several thousand years of observation. We already have plenty of evidence to support evolution. As for the whole micro vs. macro evolution thing, the Talk.Origins archive lists many documented cases of speciation.
I'm a graduate student, and I teach a class of Java to freshmen at a college in western Paris.
My main problem is all the bad reflexes learnt in highschool:
- reliance on formal details while not paying attention to the actual material taught;
- willingness to learn "tricks to do the exam" and to do in advance all the exercises that could be asked in the exam, but not really to understand things;
- no use of the university's library.
Pouring more money into such a system won't do much; stopping encouraging immature learning patterns in highschool might do more.
As for keeping up on current science advances: do not fool yourself: science taught in highschool and early college is mostly old science anyway. Complex numbers are 18th century stuff; Banach spaces are more recent, but still quite old.
[I also have a maths degree, so I take examples from maths as I know quite a bit on it.]
On the other hand, things aren't taught as they were discovered at the time. Early math proofs of a theorem are hairy and for specialists. Only with sufficient time, things are made clearer, more structured and learnable. Things that are now done in freshman years were at the time very advanced stuff.
This is the reason why I don't think it's so bad teachers don't know the latest discoveries. If only they could teach students some sound bases, it'd already be sufficient. Alas, we're far from there.
You can give schools all the money in the world, but if they don't use it right, it isn't going to do any good. The problem is, the school system is generally run by the same type of people that run a business. They want money, and they really could care less about education. They don't want intelligent children who could one day realize that there's more to money, and then where would the world be? No more capitalistic society.
OK, I really hate having to respond to people like this, but this really burns my ass.
First off, the $300b is TOTAL OVER THE ENTIRE US. And, in case you aren't familiar with the statistics, school funding in the US is about as uneven as you can get, primarily due to the fact that most of it comes from local property tax. Of that $300b, maybe $50b or so is evenly distributed. The other $250b is concentrated in the school districts in wealthier neighborhoods. So, no, your Indianapolis Public School is almost certainly NOT getting $8000 per student. I'd guess maybe half that, or less.
Secondly, the major reasons why public schools have gone downhill in the last 20 years has nothing to do with teachers and the schools, and less to do with funding; it's all about society. Schools (and by extension, teachers) no longer simply get to teach knowledge - they are expected to be surrogate families, social workers, psycologists, policemen, and daycare centers. The family and community structure that used to provide this have dropped their responsibilies squarely in the lap of the schools. So, no wonder why they're doing poorly.
As for school vouchers: this is one of the WORST IDEAS to ever come up. Let me tell you why:
Fundamentally, I think there is only one way to really save the US school system: fund them exclusively via income tax, fund all school equally, and REQUIRE all children to attend PUBLIC schools. That's right. From a societal standpoint, private and parochial schools are BAD. Just as many people advocate (and many countries require) univeral military service to create a common ground for all citizens, we should require everyone to attend the same school system. That way, we ALL have a stake in how well it's doing, and ensure that EVERYONE gets a fair start.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
... not keeping up to date. Think about it, is it even possible to stay up to date unless you are actively working in the field? Even then I'm not so sure it's possible.
As many other people have noted, but I feel should be emphasized, the real thing which school can teach but seems to happen more by accident than design, is how to learn. Critical and analitcal thinking. Experimentation. Figure it out for yourself. Creativity. Sound familiar? All the hallmarks of hackerdom right?
Beyond that, what school is good for is (broad) exposure to fields of thought and ideas you might not otherwise encounter on your own. This one area where the internet is poor, because people, in general, surf to reinforce their biases not extend them.
My 2c.
-matt
The major factor that prevents a science teacher or computer teacher from being totally up to date is time. At my school, I teach honors physics for two periods, basic chemistry for two periods, and some web design/programming during the two periods that I'm the unofficial technical coordinator for the high school, where I maintain a large writing & research computer lab, a FirstClass server, a linux web/cgi server, and the hundreds of PCs and Macs strewn about the school. I have a prep period where I'm supposed to have time to eat lunch and grade papers, but I'm usually running an errand or fixing a machine or trying to resolve a network problem, so I usually eat some stuff from the teachers' lounge vending machine while working on something unrelated to teaching. During the day, I have no time to prepare lessons or grade papers, so I do it after school or at night like most teachers. Usually, I'm still working on computer stuff after school, so I save the evening for grading/planning.
Realize that while our school day runs from 7:25 to 2:25, I never leave before 4pm at the very earliest, so when I get home, it's time to run quick errands before the bank/post office/any business except Meijer's closes, and then make dinner. It's 6 or 7pm before you're done with everything, and if I don't have an evening meeting for something, I can start working on school stuff.
Does anyone else see the problem here? Like lots of teachers, I'm heavily involved in the school; I advise National Honor Society, I'm on at least 3 committees that I can think of offhand, and I'm developing curricula for two new courses next year (one of which is A+ certification). When do I have time to stay current? It's nearly impossible to get everything done as it is, but to try to stay current while grading papers, making lessons, filling out the typical paperwork involved with education, dealing with students, dealing with parents, and maybe somehow in some way have a normal life... that's even more difficult.
There are solutions, however. I read lots of news web sites every day (CNN, Artigen, BBC, Yahoo, and of course good ol' Slashdot), and I turn around and bring that information into my classes. I've been teaching nuclear reactions in chemistry, which means you have to talk about The Bomb, and so I used the new Encyclopedia Britannica web site for lots of reference material that isn't in the book. More importantly, I make my chemistry and physics classes go out and find news articles related to the class, read them, and write a summary and response to them. Physics has to do it EVERY week, and even though they largely whine about the assignment, at least one student every week gets really excited about what they found. One student brought in an opinion article from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who believes there may be a Grand-Unified Theorem by 2050, and the kid actually read the article and understood some of it. Not all of it, of course, but the effort and the exposure were very important. I think this is a realtively easy assignment that nets great results (especially if your school has internet access like ours; the stuff they find online blows my mind, and I love reading the articles I hadn't seen yet).
Another thing I do for physics is introduce them to "new" physics by teaching them relativity, a very tiny amount of quantum mechanics, and some cosmology. I also have them read the Feynman book that someone mentioned earlier, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman , because it's important that they learn to see scientists not as all-knowing demigods, but real people with real lives similar to their own. I think this year we might also read about another scientist, but I haven't had time to research another book. Any suggestions would be welcome! Anyway, it's extremely important for all physics students to have a basic understanding of mechanics, but to leave out the most important discoveries of this century really disgusts me. Do you know when I first learned about relativity? The very end of the second semester of first-year physics in college; we spent 3 days on it. Of course, it was covered in-depth in second-year physics, but there's no reason every high school physics student shouldn't graduate without the basic knowledge that makes up general and special relativity.
I apologize for rambling, but I hope people realize that we science teachers (most of us, at least) really do care that students get an up-to-date, appropriate education. We're just bogged down by all the other stuff that makes it very, very difficult to supplement the course of study. Hiring more teachers to reduce class size, providing money for teachers to attend workshops or take appropriate college classes, or even training the head of the science department to keep track of recent science developments to pass out appropriate information - this things will all help. Ultimately, it requires a sacrifice of free time by the teacher in order to improve their course. Doing this during the summer isn't always the answer, either; lots of stuff pops up during the year and then slips back into obscurity, and it's more difficult than you'd imagine to accomplish changes while you're off and you have a job just to keep paying the bills.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
I haven't seen too many solutions to this problem stated. I think I might have one.
;-)
We all know that teachers don't have the time and/or energy after teaching a class full of 30 kids (another problem... I'll save that rant for another day) to do the proper research into the topics they are to teach. They mainly stick by the textbook, and follow through their lesson plans. The REALLY lucky students out there get a teacher that takes it a step further, and tries to connect the textbook learning to more practical real life examples and attempts to use other sources of information to supplement the textbook (such as internet info, science shows taped from public TV, and public library visits).
So - how do we get the latest info into the textbooks? How about revisiting the idea of books all together? Wouldn't it be great if the book you owned updated it's self automatically? Well, with the internet and tools such as CVS the idea becomes a little more realistic.
I'm not proposing that CVS be used for anything other than keeping code in check - but what if a tool could be developed to make web publishing and updating textbooks easy and straightforward for publishers?
This might kill the textbook market as we know it - everybody would need palmpads or small notebooks to use as their text for the year - but the great thing is the following year you could just download the newest text from the net - and you have the latest and greatest info!
Publishers would have to charge a yearly renewal fee vs. every 10 years the school would buy new books. Sounds OK to me!
So, who out there is going to be brave enough to offer such a service to schools? In my opinion, if textbook publishers really cared about the quality of education, this would be a no-brainer.
This is SOOOO close to becoming feasable. I saw pictures in EETimes of some of the 'internet appliances' that are coming - and they seem ideal for students! Imagine a $99 dollar keyboard/LCD combo with just enough horsepower to drive a web browser that you could easily pack into your backpack.... very cool. If only they could get the resolution of the LCD up.
Like I said.... close. Might save some trees too!
Patent Pending (tm)
Is there any competition in the market of education? I think the competition is minimal, compare to any other industry. If you have kids, how many schools are there can you really choose from without moving your home? Is there any way to change schools with only minor cost (including the lost time of catching up and adoptation)?
Is it really neccessary to have students lock to one school? School administrators, teachers will tell you "yes" such that to promote xxx and yyy. They didn't say, without this stablity, there're other ways to promote the same xxx and yyy.
Underfund? Take a look on poor countries and see, some schools are producing better quality education than in wealthy US/Canada/UK/...
The point is, without the competition, without the free choice from the customers, we lost the guidance of proper use of funding. If students can choose any school and change school easily, the market pressure will guide the funding to the best use. Bad teachers? No problem. Students can vote with their feet (going to other schools) if the school don't fire them. Too much job for the teachers? No problem, if they can't perform well, students will go to somewhere else, and so the school has to find way to help out teachers. Want your kids to learn more facts? Choose a school that's specialised in this area. Want your kids to learn how to learn? Choose a school that's good at that.
I believe many teachers decided to be good teachers at the first day. Just like there're good people who want to be good government officials. However, the whole mechanism does not encourage them to do their best.
Take a look on the successful case of deregulation of monopolies. Education system is basically a monopolists' market. A coupon system is the first step to achieve efficiency.
A sig is redundant.
Just admit you used a bad example. Trying to save face by using run on sentences is not working.
"Evolution" is the name we have given a theory. It also happens to be the name given to an observed phenomenon. Whether or not it fits into creationism really isn't of any concern...
...That is until creationism, which is as much an observed phenomenon as Shakespeare, Batman, or a Smurf, is presented to children as a truth which contradicts the observed phenomenon.
We all know the theory of gravitation is bunk too. We stick to the earth because God wills it. Why can't all those pesky scientists figure out that God wills F=Gm1m2/d^2, just like God wills Creationists to refute all modern evidence in favour of a 6000 year old text. :-)
This subject is one of endless frustration for me as a parent... I find myself having to supplement my daughter's education in ways that I never thought I would. Don't get me wrong - a large part of my job as a parent is to educate my child. The school's job, too, is to educate my child, and my daughter has been taught so far this year that Pluto is a planet and the Brontosaurus was king of the plant-eaters. The Brontosaurus was discovered to be a mismatched skeleton about 15 years ago, (replaced by the Anteosaur if memory serves, please correct me if I'm wrong, I don't want to perpetuate misinformation!) and Pluto was declassified this year.
So how do we keep our teachers updated? I think its easier for individual parents to do than for the educational system as whole. My solution is to take responsibility for the things that I learn and pass it on to my daughter's teachers... print/ clip interesting articles, maybe even write up an age-appropriate summary to include with the information. Not only is my daughter protected from misinformation, but the teacher has learned something that she will pass down to the rest of her classes.
What non-parents can do, I'm really not certain. Maybe the same thing. The problem is that most non-parents (and I'm afraid that most parents) won't care enough to do anything at all. The old addage that it takes a village to raise a child is not far from the truth. If parents were to get involved in their child's education (and their lives in general!) problems like this could be headed off. Take responsibility, parents - and for those of you who are just plain concerned, why not do the same? The need may not seem as pressing to you, but you have information that can help a great many people - its a tremendous power, use it!
Thanks for bringing up such a worthy subject.
Everyone should help with the PHPslash project so that anyone could easily setup and maintain a Slashdot like site. I think each school should have such a site for students and teachers and it'd be great if teaching associations offered Slashdot-like discussion areas for teachers to share news, information, and ideas with each other. Slashdot is the future of news. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
In Europe and Asia they spend FAR LESS money per student on education than we do here in the US and they get better results. I think the number 1 obstacle to improving the quality of education here in the US is the monolith of the teacher's unions. They oppose every measure that would hold teachers accountable for the education of the students.
Teachers get paid according to seniority and not to results.
MY solution, every yead give all teachers a competency test and a placement test for every student.
Every teacher that fails the test can't teach until s/he takes and passes the next test.
Teacher raises/promotions should be based upon where his/her students rank in the placement test.
If they had the incentive to be good teachers, they would be.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
1. Yes, that $300 billion is unevenly distributed. That's one of the arguments for school vouchers. If every student is provided an equal education check, then a student in a poor school district would have just as much of a chance as a student in a poor district. So this is not an argument against vouchers; this is an argument for them.
2. IPS did pay $8000 dollars per student. Indianapolis Star, "Is ISTEP Passing the Test?" Nov. 15, 1998.
3. You claim that only the rich would get to go to private schools, but the whole point of school vouchers is to counter that problem. By providing all students, even poorer ones, an equal educational check to apply to the school of their choice, then not only do create the problem you've described, you completely elliminate any trace of it. You make no sense whatsoever on this point. Furthermore, this would create the very mix of incomes and races that you point out: black or white, Indian or European... all students would receive an equal check, and therefore all students would have an equal chance. You would have exactly the kind of mix that you believe to be beneficial.
4. You claim that everyone would want to go to School A, and therefore only good students could go to School A, and bad students would go to School B. Again, this is simply not so. Everyone has a special strength. I happen to be good at music and mathematics, while you might be a strong athlete or a prolific writer. Sure, good students may get into the schools they want more easily -- just as better employees will have an easier time getting a job, or better students coming form high school may get into a better college. But a school is going to want to be balanced. Having a pile of Einsteins is going to be just as bad for a school as having a pile of dunces; it's neither healthy for the students or the school, and for that reason schools would want to be balance. Maybe you're not bright, but you're a good musician. Maybe you don't have the best grades, but you are very good at football. My point is, everyone has a strength, and while perhaps they won't get into the absolute best school in the area, they'll get into a good school if they try hard and they care. All they have to do is show their strength and how they can contribute, and it will happen.
5. The solution is to ban private schools? I agree completely. I also think that the way to improve computers is to have everyone use only Windows. If we all used Windows, we'd ALL have a stake in its well-being, and we'll be sure that EVERYONE had exactly the same experience on their computer.
I hope that sounds as stupid to you as it does to me.
--
What is right is not always popular. What is popular is not always right.
Nope, the inverse square law of gravity is not a theory, is an observable fact. It's just as much of a fact as gravity itself (as is the acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2).
The *theory* of gravity is Einstein's theory of general relativity, which relates gravity to massive bodies curving space-time. This is what can be disupted.
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
The problem is
"Those that can't do, teach"
Your teachers probably wouldn't be teachers if they were good enough at their subject to use it in industry.
1. My point on the funding thing was that vouchers aren't required to fix this. People seem to see vouchers as the only method for equitable funding of schools; this is false.
2. My fault. I was assuming you had taken the $8000 from the $300b / number of US students formulae. Sorry.
3. No, I wasn't claiming that under a school voucher system only the rich go to the best schools. I was pointing out that OVER TIME, the inherent advantages of being rich as relates to school performance would lead to the best schools being filled with the best students, the vast majority being rich. Conversely, the worst schools would be filled with the poorest students, which would be overwhelmingly from the poorer sections; thus, you'd end up with complete social stratification, and no hope of improvement withing the voucher system. It would be no better (and probably worse) than the current system.
4. & 5. (see follows):
As another poster here pointed out, if we wanted the "most efficient" system of public schools, vouchers would indeed work. You would end up with a system that looks identical to the college system in the US: the best students get the best schools, and the worst students get the worst schools. You don't get "balanced" schools, you get specialized ones. And massive stratification. That is a horrible idea. For it fails in the fundamental reason for public education:
Everyone is to be given a standard basic education that the society deems necessary for it to have.
Put it another way, Public Education is there to insure that everyone starts out with a reasonably even playing field.
The problem with school vouchers, private, and parochial schools is that they promote the attitude of (pardon the expression) "Fuck you, I got mine". There is no sense of community or societal responsibility. People not involved in something have no stake in whether or not it succeeds. With an issue so fundamental to the success of our country as basic education is, my argument is that it is both UNWISE, and ultimately DESTRUCTIVE to let people "opt out" of the public school system. By promoting the voucher system and private/parochial schools, you let those who have abandon those who have not (I speak in both terms of money and ability). Having a universal, compulsory, single school system, you insure that everyone gets the decent education and that everyone has a stake in making sure that "decent" education is damn good. Sure, you may hold back the top students, but that's where the college system steps in and works so well. And, as I've pointed out before, honestly, the Standard Education isn't about fulfilling everyone's complete potential, it's about insuring that we have a common base for all citizen to work from.
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
- - academic education
- - socialization
- - babysitting
All of these are substitutes for parenting.So what is the teacher's role given these purposes?
- provide academic education
- provide a social role model
- supervise students safety
On a surface level, I would say that it's not just academics that are suffering!! In a very pluralistic society like the one's in the US, Canada and a few other countries, providing a social role model is not going to work too well. And as far as supervising students safety is concerned, that seems to be getting worse as well.But what to do? Home schooling is an option that is becoming more popular - it addresses the problems at their root: reclaiming the role of parenting. Private schools that cater to specific educational philosophies, specific religious affiliations, and specific skills or subject areas are useful to a degree.
There are huge amounts of literature out there about the problems and their solutions. Check out books by Jonathan Kozol, Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire, Maria Montessori, Paul Goodman, Alan Bloom etc. etc....
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
At the risk of ruining your GPA, you will find out and prove to yourself (on paper and in the lab) what our best guess at how atoms work really is.
Statistical mechanics sucks. Quantum mechanics sucks. Thermodynamics sucks. Learning them all and being able to put together a decent picture of how things actually work... rules.
No pain, no gain.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
?
Did it ever occur to anyone that the truth is actually somewhere in between? First off evolution: We've seen adapting of species with out own lifetime. Bacteria resistant to drugs is a good example. I myself am a person who does academic research in genetic programming -- a computational method of using evolution to allow computers to automatically write programs. I don't just assert it work, I know it works, I use it to help computers solve difficult problems. Evolution defined as the adaption of species does exist. Secondly. Creationism. First off let us look at the source of this belief. Generally my understanding is that the creationists cite the Book of Genesis in the Bible. The read there that God created the Earth in seven days. Now lets step back and look at this. They are afraid that if this isn't true literally then their religion must be wrong. It's almost a defensive response. But my response is this. Who says that it should be taken literally? In the Bible one also finds verses like this: "If any man come to see me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Is Christ really saying we should all hate our parents, wives and children? I don't think so, I think he's saying you should love God before all else. Even literalists don't take this verse literally. So when do you know that you should take something literally and when shouldn't you? Well generally when the literal meaning doesn't make sense you shouldn't take it literally. Otherwise your religion becomes only a supersition. My point: If your a literalist, you have serious problems justifying your view to the rest of the world. God gave you a mind to think! so think! Otherwise you'll get left behind, like those people who made Galileo repent for believing that the Earth revolved around the sun and Jupiter had moons. Now the world acknowledges that fact. How long will it take for you to acknowledge the truth that the literal interpretation of Genesis is wrong as well? My third point. Just because there is evolution doesn't mean that a God didn't start all of this, and that evolution is false. The two ideas can co-exist. My last point. If you look at the animals they excel human qualities in any particular quality or attribute. Take memory for example. Birds can remember the way to their seasonal migration destination even though it is several thousand miles. Take the sense of smell -- a shark can smell blood over 2 miles away. Take the sense of vision -- an eagle can see small rodents from its path of flight. Name any attribute and the animal kingdom has excelled humans. Except of course for one thing ... intelligence. Why haven't the animals developed it? And this is my unproven assertion, supported only by circumstantial evidence: because the animals lack the capacity instilled into the human soul. The human soul gives us this extra capacity. Human beings might have had a tail at one time (as some evidence seems to indicate), they probably were hairy too! But that doesn't mean that human beings = apes. Human beings could have always been seperate.
Maybe one problem is that it's unclear what teachers are actually supposed to do. In reality, teachers are the first encounter most kids have with "The Man." The Man doesn't give a shit who you are, how special you are, or whatever crap your parents loaded on to you. The Man just wants you to submit. THIS is the job of a teacher in the american system. It doesn't matter if teachers don't know shit...it doesn't even matter if the teacher is competent. What matters is that the teacher is there as a minion of The Man. And teachers are put down too, just like students. No pay, no respect, no future, no materials. In fact, everyone in the sytem is victimized by The Man, because The Man wants it that way. If it wasn't that way, the US would be a place like France, full of over-intellectual bozos who think they think for themselves, but are just puppets for the Alter-Man.
Be proud that The Man in the US has it under control. And don't talk in class, either.
Teachers knowing about current events is nice but it is no substitute for them knowing their material. FIRST learn the subject you are going to teach well and then, if possible, learn about current events.
Too often teachers will "study up" on current events gaining a vague understanding (in a difficult area like physics) which helps their students no more than being told to read magazines. If instead the teachers could actually master NEWTONIAN mechanics (developed several hundred years ago) it would be a much better world. Merely pluging numbers into formulas is not sufficent.
Only in very rare cases (some CS classes) is this nescessery. Besides C++ has been around for a long damn time. Just make sure the teachers know their shit before you let them teach!
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
I certainly agree with what most people have said so far, but I also believe that this is part of a greater problem with American schools. Everybody and their brothers know that American schools and students have been falling behind with respect to nearly every other nation in the world in math, science, and all other basic subjects. However, I think the problem lies in the fact that schools are no longer a place of merely learning, they have been forced to take the role of child care facilities, disciplinary institutions, self-esteem caretakers, and nearly everything else that a school simply shouldn't be used for.
In every other nation of the world, teachers are not burdened with having to discipline students, ensure that they are well-adjusted, be a mentor, a family counselor, a baby-sitter, and play so many other roles. In the US, parents simply send their kids off to school in the morning, pick them up in the afternoon, and essentially exculpate themselves from any responsibility of what happens in between.
Another major problem is that parents of disabled and/or mentally handicapped students have to stop whining about equal rights for students in the classroom. Sure, any handicapped student has the same right has every other student, but only to a certain extent. I certainly don't believe that a student with a handicap that places them at the learning level of a 3rd grader should ever be placed in classes like Number Theory, or Calc-based Physics. What about my rights? When the teacher has to stop teaching and go call the school nurse, all because some handicapped (i use the pc-term with reservations) student started peeing in their pants, or started taking off his shirt and jumping around, doesn't that encroach upon my rights? So another thing that teachers have to do is stop giving a damn about students emotional and psychological problems. Sure, if a student starts crying because they failed test, the teacher has a responsibility to help him to do well, but if a student starts crying because he doesn't think he fits in, tough luck; go talk to the counselor, and do not ever burden the teacher with it.
I really think that there are major problems with schools these days (I'm still referring to the pre-secondary and secondary school level) and the only way to fix them is with a radical change in policy and implementation.
So teachers, fight back the urge to be a humanitarian and help that emotionally deprived student; it is not your responsibility, you are there to teach, and if you take time out of class to help a single student, you are hurting yourself and the other students.
So to come full circle with this argument, schools are being used for all the wrong things (see above), and because of all the responsibilites delegated to schools, (which are then handed down to the teachers) teachers simply will never have time to keep pace with developments in their respective fields and maintain a strong curriculum.
There are a lot of good books out there on this topic, and lots of great solutions, but because of the bureaucratic process, they'll never get through.
~sig~He who waits for opportunity to knock will never hear the doorbell~end sig~
First I think a post titled "what dose it take"
.Waiting for high school and college is way to late .
got a very important point across. the students have to want to learn before any learning can take place.
that being said America's education system is indeed in need of a overhaul. most other children in other countries are simultaneously taught both their native and the English language . I think this is a very important attribute to be teaching and do not see why America has not adopted the teaching of a second language to our nations youth
Another thing is that kids who are really trying to learn but are having difficulties are generally passed over in favor of gifted children, where these gifted children are giving special attention, sperate classes and more advanced course of study . Where as the others are usually lumped into large classes and do not receive very much help in the course they are having trouble with, due to the teacher being swamped with the details of their job . These students tend to fall behind, if they are lucky and go to a good school they may be singled out and placed in a special class to help aid them . Although these classes seem to be the exception and not the rule.
Classes should be more interactive with a attitude towards a hands on approach to learning you can have students read and fill in the answers to worksheets all year long but nothing reinforces what you have learned more than applying the skills to real world activities . Other wise its all abstract to the students and thus of lesser importance.
I know this is controversial and difficult to implement . but course books need to be updated every year no school kid should have a school book that is 5 years old .
also night schools should be implemented for adults so they can easily continue and or enhance their basic skills . The cost of such a program should not be prohibitive to those with little or no income and there should be as little red tape as possible .
The funding of such programs are expensive and of course there is always the arguments of who is going to pay for these services.
On one hand if we choose to ignore these problems we will end up paying for the damage done buy the resulting effects of this action .
On the other if all bickering is placed aside and funds are attributed to where they are needed all of those involved would benefit and it result in a better America "To live work and play.".
music the paint
dancefloor the canvas
Music the Paint dancefloor the canvas your body the brush
But fully as important as "learning to understand" is "acquiring the skillset needed to function in society". That is the traditional "3R" education, which some might call "vocational" since you may have to (be able to) R(ead) T(he) F(*) M(anual) before you can (learn how to) D(o) T(he) F(*) J(ob).
Most history which I learned in grades 1-8 was very basic, and then when I took the required history courses in high school all I got was more information covered in more depth. Some subjects it is very important to teach in the lower grades before high school (you aren't going to pit a kid into Geometry, Pre-Calc, etc without giving him a lot of math background before-hand, reading is obviously important, etc...) but some of the overlap time would be better spent devoting more weight to learning how to learn and think.
One of the things I noticed about a few of the teachers I have had over the years of my schooling was how they stood out from the rest. How their classes got higher grade averages than the rest of the country. And how they managed to keep the students captivated.
They showed us how to learn, and where to find things. They didn't expect us to just soak up everything in the class, but to use our brains. And most importantly they showed us how to apply what we were being shown in life with examples, in many cases relevant to what we were interested in, or later on, what courses we were attending.
The system itself tends to bring this about, as it doesn't allow for much in the way of corrective feedback to fix any of the problems. And the students are often left out of the loop as well, even as they approach the end of their schooling.
I don't think the answer is teaching only maths and speed reading, but mebbe teaching less of the subject and encouraging more learning in an of itself, in and out of the classroom. There are many subjects that simply must be learned at a very basic level to encourage individuality, and to encourage these people to take different careers. It might be nice for the IT industry if a whole year level was to be focused on computing, programming and system administration, but the woodworking, metalworking, textile, produce, marketing, et al, industries might get a little peeved.
I attended a public school all my life, so this isn't just the dedication of private school teachers that is rubbing off on me. In fact I tend to see the opposite here in Australia, where they teach to what is required and nothing else simply because the contracts at private schools are so long, and the pay is reasonable.
I was in the unfortunate position at school during my 8th year of education wanting to do Electronics but ending up in Accounting because there was one student under the class minimum required. My mother (thankfully) stormed up to the school, and after garnering support from other student's mothers, raised a petition to get the class running.
Something that I am also proud of is that while I attended school, I never did much in the way of homework out of school hours, preferring to do so within the school environment, and enjoying myself outside of school. In most subjects (unless they seemed utterly ludricous, or the teachers specifically did not understand what they were teaching) I did exceptionally well, because I learned the subject, and not just absorbed the information.
Those that I refused to participate in, I usually refused to do almost any work in at all. History in my 9th year of education was one such subject, where I failed deliberately. The subject matter was in fact the exact same course information that I did the year before. Only a very few parts were removed and new bits replaced. I did all the new bits, but refused to re-do all the work I did last year. Near the middle of the year I suprised the teacher when they started teaching new parts of the subject for the first time and I got 90+% for each of them. She apparently thought, even despite my complaints, that I had a learning disability. It's amazing what it takes to convince some people.
Unfortunately, one thing that some teachers are not good at is learning from their mistakes. It's a pity really, because this simple thing makes so much difference. Unfortunately because of this, the system on a whole suffers the same fate, despite the few good teachers out there.
As proudly hand-crafted Open Source is to selfish proprietary "production line" business models, so Home Education is to traditional faceless "production line" schooling - with comparable results.
SlashDot follows the Home Education "find out for yourself" free-for-all mentality, not the we-must-complete-module-four-first mentality. Early hackers called it "the Hands On Imperative."
While the large majority of educational problem lie within the system, many educators remain in that system because it suits them (and many don't, I'm related to some). There really are still people teaching Haeckels' recaptulation fraud as gospel, and no system requires them to do this. There are still people teaching that a Trilobite is a simple animal, and nobody tells them that they must.
Their revolution must come from within. Our contribution is to be the solution. "Do as I say, not as I do" is a hallmark of the failed education system; "live your beliefs" is what any evangelist, be they urging technology, animal rights or a religion, must do if they are not to die a failed hypocrite.
When people can see, feel, hear, smell and touch a working system and its benefits, then they will adopt it. Seldom otherwise.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
... is a)clueless and b)doesn't care anyway.
I recently found out my High School has gotten computers for a class since I left 7 years ago. And, I think they just got them withing the past couple of years. They're running Windows 3.1. I think they're used for typing classes first, and VERY BASIC computer class electives second.
I know the system has money, because they just built a brand new $1 million football stadium for the football team (who hasn't scored in nearly as many years).
Some teachers care. One science teachar I had was really into demonstrations and sharing new information with the students.
Other teachers don't give a shit about academics. A math teacher couldn't get out of the classroom fast enough when the bell rang, because he was a coach heading for practice. He, incidentally, wouldn't let me run track because my ear was pierced, Even if I didn't wear it for the track meats! When I took the matter to the principal, he told me that they usually let the coaches make whatever decisions they see fit.
Manchester is a small town in Tennessee. The graduating class is around 300+.
What is needed is less federal involvment, more control turned over to the states and less bureaucracy.
That is an interesting theory and commonly stated theory in this forum, but one that has very little basis in evidence to support that it would make things better.
The states so far seem to be doing a very poor job of keeping politics out of the classroom. Look at the mess with the teaching of evolution. Just based on this issue alone I would be in favor of totally REMOVING the states from having any control over the education system.
The fact of the matter is that the countries that are doing very well in these international standardized tests of factual knowledge have far MORE centralization than we do in the US. France, for example scores very well in these sorts of tests. Their education system is so centralized and rigidly controlled that at least until recently you could count on exactly the same material being taught in EVERY French classroom on exactly the same day at exactly the same time.
Personally I have a great deal of mistrust of the commonly accepted statement that our schools are performing very badly. US students do poorly compared to the rest of the world in regurgitating factual material, true. But when they are tested on things like creative writing and problem solving skills, they are in fact equal to or even the best in the world. I have heard educators in other countries complain that the rigidity of their educational system, in particular rules on what factual material the students must know, combined with competitive college entrance examinations that are the SOLE determinats of acceptance to college prevents them from developing the reasoning skills that they consider to also be important.
What is the bottom line? I think if that the American schools were to be doing as badly as people think, we would see the difference in the productivity of our adult workers. But the fact is that the American worker is the most productive in the world. To me there is a real contradiction here.
I think people that are blasting the American education system have in part been taken in by the news media in the US who are want to try to build an impression that something is disasterously wrong when in fact the question is not at all that clear.
If you were to believe the news media on the Y2K issue, you would have taken all of your money out of the bank 3 times this year, have a generator and 6 months worth of food and medicine in you basement. It will be interesting to see what happens Jan 1 when in fact the disruptions are very minor to non-existant. Will the media acknowledge their propensity to shout the sky is falling after we get just a whimper this New Years day?
I agree! I teach maths in Australia, and I spend most of my working day not teaching maths. I hit the deck at around 8am and work through to 7pm most days. The last 2-3 hours is either at home or at school. After that, I try to catch up with my family and do the stuff I want/need to do. During the working day I have two cups of lukewarm coffee, but I don't get the opportunity to eat. I do try to read professional journals but it is rare that I am able to follow up with work in the classroom. We are told what to teach and we have a very short time in which to cover the basics. Every year that time is eaten into as they add another subject/activity and reshuffle the timetable. I see my year 7 class around 2-3 times per week for 50 minutes. Some weeks I don't see them at all. This is not enough time to teach a core subject. I suppose the biggest problem is that many people outside education see the teacher as in charge of the classroom (based on their own school experience). In reality, the teacher is responding to many outside influences, including a very restrictive syllabus (which in many cases is outdated). I rarely deal with parents who understand the problems faced. Mostly people say "You don't know what it is like in the real world". I worked in private industry for three years and in the public service for 4 years before I became a teacher and I do understand the "real" world, I work in it everyday. Kids with severe emotional and educational difficulties are real. I'd like to say "I'm sorry I can't deal with your problems now because you are not real", but in fact they need help and someone has to do it! I don't know what the solution is, but I would like some more time with my students in order to do what I was trained to do...teach maths. I would also like the support of the community to do this job. I don't expect adulation or riches beyond my wildest dreams, but it would be nice to see adults move past their adolescent memories of school and take a second look at what is really happening in education. We all have a stake in how these kids turn out.
complacency
Pronunciation: -s&n(t)-sE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -cies
Date: 1650
1 : COMPLACENCE; especially : self-satisfaction accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies
2 : an instance of complacency
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
I think teaching in these stupid schools makes even the smart teachers become dumb.
For example, I was talking to a high-school math teacher the other day. She has a masters in math, so she's no dummy.
I was going over the solution I used in a program and we got into an argument: She believe that you should round both 3.5 and 4.5 up!
I couldn't get her to grasp the satistical bias this would introduce, all she could say was that even the remedial kids knew how to round.
First, I would like to say that I gave this post some thought before putting one finger to my keys. I'm going to take some potshots and make some sweeping claims. But bear with me...
RCN purchased a string of ISP's over the course of about a year. One of those ISP's - Javanet - powers something called MassEd. This is a service provided only to Massachusetts teachers at the rate of $25/yr for the SOLE purpose of school duties. Research, assignment ideas, that sort of thing.
First and foremost, they DO *NOT* (by their own admission) use this service for what it was designed for. They give it to their son to play games with (and you just know he's boning up on his calculus, right?), to surfing for smut themselves. We even had one person suspended last week for apparently handing out his login to a business!
Secondly, out of all the ISP's that we tech, they are regarded as the most ignorant, ill-temptered and just plain stupid by a WIDE margin. We get the usual gems like "Will checking off REMEMBER PASSWORD help me remember my password?" to "What's a comma?". Now I know that this stuff is cannon fodder for userfriendly fans, but an uncomfortably large portion come from our Massachusetts teachers.
One conclusion we've come to is that private schooling will be a necessity, not a luxury. We're horrified at not only the demoralizing lack of intelligence but the dearth of normal, everyday communcation skills displayed. I mean, we're REALLY worried.
Now let me at this as a disclaimer... I have met some very bright, very patient, WONDERFUL teachers in my travels. It's just that they are far and few between.
It seems like a valid question, but in my (for once, sizable) experience, I've found that teachers offered the ability to become better simply do not avail themselves of that opportunity.
And yes, it makes me mad. More than I can express here.
School does many things other than just teach --
It gives a chance to develop our social skills (which well, as we can see what's going on in current events, isn't working in many places), and it gives us a general smattering of many topics, so we can find what interests us, and what doesn't.
As for your concept of school, I believe there are schools that give the kids the materials to learn, and the kids are given the option to learn if they want to, but from my understanding of it, it's only shown to be an effective form of teaching at younger ages. (I wish I could remember the name of this style of teaching, but it escapes me)
Speed reading, if I recall correctly, was found to have a lower retention rate than standard reading. Unfortunately, as many people 'study for the test' rather than studying in general, it's a bit of a moot point, as students may prefer this method.
Math and the like are useful in life, but they're not typically taught in such a way as to show how useful they are. I mean, we've all had the stupid 'presentations' for an english/history class that we had to do, which effectively taught us how to prepare and execute a public presentation. (which as an introvert, I despised)
Math, unfortunately, many people see as useless...
Geometry and Trig come into much more use when you're working on building something in a TechEd class; I've even heard of private schools in Vermont who have 'applied geometry' classes, which is essentially surveying. I thought Differential Equations was the most useless thing, until I actually had a chance to apply it in fluid dynamics and solid mechanics.
What's more important than just teaching, is in finding how each student learns. Some people are hands-on, some prefer self-learning. Some like lectures, some need the one-on-one question/answer sessions.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
First, on the spending issue, the U.S. is right near the top on spending per pupil in public education among Western industrialized nations -- clearly we don't get our money's worth.
o lbonds/
Where does the money go? A good example of just how corrupt large school districts in America are can be found at:
http://www.detnews.com/specialreports/1999/scho
It profiles wasteful spending of almost unbelievable proportions in Detroit. The school district spent, for example, almost $500K on a piece of land that was only appraised at $80K. The school system paid $350K for a computerized system that was never actually implemented. All the contracts go to friends of the people on the school board.
And, of course, students in Detroit's public school system are among the worst in the state as measured by the state assessment tests.
The answer is competition. We have a charter school experiment here in Michigan and their school construction costs are far lower because they're private companies who can't afford to put up with such cronyism and other nonsense.
Like any good religious person, you appeal to the unknown. As our knowledge advances, the further your precipice receeds. We find an intermediate animal (C) between A and E, creationists cry that we still don't have intermediate B.
.02
Theology has shown itself to be impotent to explain the seen, and you want us to take your word on the unseen??
If the bible said that 1+1=20, I imagine you'd not see a problem with a creationist being a mathemetician, right?
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
The single greatest book I've read on how misinformed teachers are, and how bad textbooks are in pre-university schooling, is "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" by James W. Loewen, published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1995.
In it, Loewen surveys 12 American history textbooks and itemizes point by point the errors, falsehoods and lies. He starts the the Indians and Columbus, mentions the evilness that was Woodrow Wilson, examines slavery, the Pilgrims, everything. He finds many sins of omission, plain propaganda and lazyness on the part of teachers and textbook publishers alike.
Loewen tends to overuse exclamation marks and ride the deep left line a little too often, but there's no denying the book explains clearly how you were cheated. Any liberal or even Marxist perspectives are so obvious as to be easily spotted and ignored if one so desires (there's not a lot of subtlety here on any count; Loewen could never be called mealy-mouthed, waffling or hesitant).
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
As for fixing the deeper problems with the school system, I tend to favor the Sudbury Valley approach, best described by Danny Greenberg in the article Back to Basics. As he says, learning is something you do, not something that is done to you. The fundamental problem with modern schools is that kids are force-fed a preplanned curriculum rather than allowed to make their own decisions about what to learn and how and when to learn it.
If you're in Silicon Valley and have school-age kids, you should check out Cedarwood Sudbury School in Santa Clara.
I play Nerd-Folk!
Before I moved to California, I lived in a suburb about half an hour from NYC. When it came down to the school budget, we had meetings about once every 2 years. The interesting thing was, we NEVER had meetings to lower the school budget, just to raise it. They always passed. (Disclaimer: I have no experience in any other areas of NYC, though I know there are plenty of schools out there with dismally small budgets). The reason they passed was simple: You want an extra thousand a year for the schools, in a population of, say, 8000? What is that, an extra 8 bucks a year for individual tax-payers? Come on!
Most teachers already do more work than most IT workers. Why, then, should they be expected to do more work?
After two years in IT, I earn more than all the teachers I know with twenty years experience!
Hardly motivating, is it?
I am so tired of hearing people whine that the problem with the public schools is lack of funding. We are spending far more per student today (in constant dollars) than we did during, say, the 1950s. Yet the kids today, when compared with those of that less well funded era are stupid, violent and illiterate - why? Because most people have no choice but to send their kids to the public schools. We have a government enforced monopoly that is doing what monopolies always do, reduce quality, raise costs and generally screw people.
You people who get so upset about the Micro$oft monopoly ought to think about that. The American public school system is the educational equivalent of Windows. Only by giving people a choice and allowing competition will we ever get schools that run with Linux-like quality and efficiency.
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Nothing to see here. Mooooove along...
I think that a teacher who knows and loves his/her job would be updated. But you always cant blame the teachers because they dont have the infomation or the textbooks to give you. The person incharge of that is the goverment. In all the system sucks because you have gym teachers teaching english and dont know WTF they are doin. I think that those teachers should be payed less, they are not helping the students. They are just makin them fustrated and leading them to an incompleteness in thier education. I experinced having a physics teacher as my AP computer science teacher. I had to basiclly teach my selfs in order to pass the exam. Now I dont think you should put a non professinal computer science teacher to teach a AP course.
from a european point of view, the us education system is a laugh. period.
;-)
:-)
wanna fix it? simple. have a look at how we do things in europe
for high school curricula/courses that prepare for college/univ, focus ought to be on teaching people how to think/learn
for most subjects, you can easily do that with manuals that are 25 years old...
(but not for OOP for instance
for curricula/courses that directly prepare for a job, it's evidently important that courses be as much up-to-date as possible...
about the chem teacher:
his students could still get an excellent understanding of basic chemistry, but at least he should make an effort to tell the TRUTH,
would suffice to simply say 'new elements have been and probably will be discovered'
electronic courses yet to 'evolve' will solve a lot of the 'updating' problems...
Teachers didn't recognize your brilliance, your boredom - they only picked on your inability to spell and punctuate. They didn't encourage you to dream big enough, didn't congratulate you enough, didn't draw you out of your anti-social shell far enough to demonstrate to the other kids that you really were somebody. In short, your teachers didn't care - not about the material, but about you. But did you ever care about them enough for them to care about you?
Everyone's had a bad experience with a teacher, either in grade school, middle school, high school, or college. They're definitely out there, but if the comments in this forum are to be believed, they're everywhere. Education is about learning concepts - reading, writing, arithmetic. Logical thinking. How to bake muffins. How to build a chair. How to write a computer program. Education is not your own private Golden Ticket to the "Become a Better Person" self-help seminar. It is not a garden hose of structured, up-to-the-minute information that you can suckle from.
There was a posting a few days ago about the intellectual property rights of students' college notes, and the debate raged back and forth about IP laws and staid/stupid colleges, and how backwards they were for not wanting their notes all over the Web. That debate, like this one, seems to miss the bigger issue: That you, and only you, are responsible for your success. Take your own damn notes.
I've seen complete idiots come out of the best schools in the country, and I've seen the best students come out of educational hell holes. We blather incoherently about "opportunity", or lack thereof, and yet it reeks of the loathsome self-pity of the unrecognized genius who isn't getting his or her fair shake by the system.
If information was equal to knowledge, this generation would by far be the most advanced and intelligent in history. Sadly, I don't see that becoming reality any time soon.
I personally can barely, barely take 75 minutes per class. After half an hour, I usually just tune out and let the teacher babble. If it happens to be something particularly interesting or new (yeah, right, as if) maybe I can stay focused a little longer. I don't know about others, but I can't take sitting in math class day after day and trying to figure out where Car A and Car B meet day after day.
i say that teachers should be rotated every term. like crop rotation, high school teachers should have an intense teaching schedule for one term and then have a single class schedule. In the lad back term other teachers will take over the tough schedule. The teacher with the laid back schedule will be paid to take classes into required subject matters as well as some electives that might interest the teacher.
it is the funds it is the parents it is the teachers it is the culture some one needs to give a thought
The main problem in the schools today is a lack of funding. However, this lack comes not from a unwillingness to have children learn,but from a lack of return on the investment. The government knows that our schools are horrible, but have no clue on how to fix them. Some think that throwing money at them is the solution. Others think we need more teachers. Some think it is better equipment.
None of these is truly the problem. The problem is we use the same division of subjects that students were taught at the end of the Middle Ages.
For instance, Math teaches you about logic and patterns. Great, a useful skill. What about the impact advancements in math had on say history, or science, or even politics. An example, pythagoris's [sic] theorem that allows people to calculate distance of the edges of triangles. It allowed the romans the abilty to better plan their attacks.
The point (yes, i know i took my time) is that all ideas have an impact on their world and most importantly spawn more ideas. It is these connections between ideas that shaped history, technology, and our entire society. Communism was created from the same set of ideas that spawned the american revolution (with different emphasie[sic]).
Look at how history is taught. In 1492 stuff happened... in 1493 some other stuff happened. Not in 1492 columbus discovered america this impacted spain in this manner..., the natives in this manner, ect....
Or science, (at least until high school) today chemistry, tommorow geology. How are our children to learn if they are just told to memorize a series of facts and not even shown how they relate. Children aren't born with efficient signal to noise filters. They must be developed. By showing them the signals, they can then recognize them in the noise.
If we teach our children to think in terms of ideas and their impact, then they will know how to learn, think and react to their world. Perhaps even better than we do.
"Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy
Anyhow, they let her go last year. They said that she had to pick between continuing her research or teaching, that doing both showed a lack of committment to education. She, as any reasonable human would do, opted to continue her personal education. I wrote an angry letter to the Dean of Education, and I haven't taken a class there since. It's pretty unlikely that I ever will again.
What we need are Open Source schools!
I'd like to point out right now that I'm a freshman in HS.
Now, let me tell you something: there *IS* time to be on the Internet to learn stuff, if a teacher cares enough. I wake up at exactly 6:05 a.m. EVERY day and get home at 6:30 p.m. No joke at all. Granted, 2 hours are in there for sports after school, but still. I get more than enough time to search the Internet to learn stuff after school.
Somebody also mentioned that schools should teach HOW to research, not WHAT to research. I couldn't agree more. As early as 5th grade, I wondered the relevance in learning where all 50 states are and knowing their capitals if I could just look it up in a few seconds (I still don't know them all).
This ties in with another topic: schools concentrating on the "extras." Three words: you are right. Why do I have to take Spanish for 3 years and Band for a year? Because the school wants the taxpayers to know their kids are getting a "balanced" education. Now, how balanced is it when our math teacher can NOT multiply two 2x2 matrixes without a calculator (real quote: "I could show you how, but I forgot, and that's why we have graphing calculators.")? I don't really consider myself smart, and I'm in 11th-grade math right now in 9th-grade, and practically falling asleep in it. Learning extras like Spanish is not only completely useless (not like I'm going to need to really use it much), it also takes away funding from IMPORTANT things, like math, science, and CompSci (a note about CompSci: I know a friend that took AP CompSci in C++ and he has no freakin clue what a class is. This was 3/4 through last year).
Finally: about teachers that don't care. Again, you're right. In 8th-grade, I had the best math teacher of my life. He really actually teached BEYOND what he was simply was supposed to. He used a math book that the school STRONGLY recommended him not to use because it was too difficult. Guess what? I covered about 3 years of math in his class. I commonly help out my sister in 11th-grade with her math homework. And 2 years ago I came from base school in Rochester.
Now here's a story of a negative teacher: my current band teacher. He usually doesn't say more than 3 real words in 1.5 hours. He comes in, raises the conductor stick, and says "Piece 5, Measure 148." We play a chord. He then *sighs* VERY loudly, and repeats "Piece 5, Measure 148." He then *SIGHS* again, and repeats "Piece 5, Measure 148." The other day I counted that we played one note a total of 47 times and he did not say anything about what was wrong. (BTW, fsck off, Mr. Simon, teaching from TJHSST).
People, throwing cash at a problem will NOT fix anything! Sadly, the US has reached a stage where schools have to deal with teacher unions and all that crap (my excellent math teacher in 8th-grade proudly exclaims that he is the only teacher in the building not in some stupid teacher union). Did you know in my area education makes up 60%+ of the budget? It is time for new education standards for teachers. Trust me... having 15 students-per-teacher ratio *WON'T* solve jack. There's no good excuse for the US to be so far behind in education compared to countries like Japan. We are literally shooting ourselves in the foot. What to do? I suggest:
1) Demote the paycheck of teachers that receive multiple complaints against.
2) ACTUALLY fire teachers that receive lots of complaints against.
3) Get rid of the crap! I'm planning on applying for a tech college and business school (perhaps). There is *NO* reason for me to have to take band and Spanish to get my diploma!
4) Put saved money from "extras" into important stuff, like math and science.
*Phew.* This took a long time to write. I'd like to hear your responses.
~Arrakis123, "The Voice of Reason"
When you experience true educational moments, both the teacher and learner profit from the experience. However, in school settings, many times teachers feel they have already crossed the "learning" side of the fence and are now on the "teaching" side. When there is not an equal level between teacher and student, teaching suffers. If you really love learning, learn to teach yourself, and make friends with people who share your passion for learning with a blind eye to their age or experience.
The biggest problem that I see with todays schools, is that schools don't use the money they have in the right areas. For example, the schools system I go to bought something like 100 new computers. The problem with this is that the teachers in the school have absolutly no knowledge of them, so the computers sit there unused. The teachers have no idea of how to work them into a lesson plan, or use them constructivly. Instead of buying 100 new computers, they could have trained teachers how to really use the computers and buy less of them. Or spend the money on desperatly needed textbooks (I once had a physics book from '82).
- *Normality Is The Root of All Evil*
Certainly I concede that science teachers often do not keep up on new information, but 109 elements are plenty. Even some of these aren't important, especially the ones named after people. And places. And the ones with names that are just the number in latin or something. A lot of the planet ones are superfluous, except when you're making nukes.
-- Religion is a major weapon in the war against reality.
The local community college isn't any better. Two years ago, they were so busy allocating every spare dime they had to underattended liberal arts classes that they didn't notice students camping out overnight in line to get into what few math and science courses were being offered.
The problem with school systems is not unlike most governement run agencies: too much time in the "non-profit bubble", and not enough contact with the real world. A perfect example is the concept of 'tenure'. When most people can't perform their jobs adequately, they are canned. Why should teachers be exempt?
Keeping on top of their respective fields should be their own responsibility, even if it's simply getting together with their co-workers to discuss their fields of study. I'm not sure how much most school districts encourage or fund this sort of thing, but I can't imagine it's an adequate amount.
I think it would be far better if teachers in math and science actually had a degree in the area they teach... Most of mine seemd to have BA in Education, and a minor in history and some form of state certification. Yet...they teach math, biology, physics, chem, etc. every so often you'd get one actually qualified who could answer questions that weren't straight from the text.
First, everyone always wants more civil servents. You may say to yourself... no I don't! But look, you always want more police than you have. But who would want to be a cop, only people who are dedicate to the idea of low pay, high stress, high divorce rates, and the possibility of death or dismemberment on the job. They get to carry a gun and wear armor. Now teacher, there ar never enough, they are underfunded individually and as a system. They deal, in many areas, with high stress, troubled teens, and get the rap for just about the entire state of education today. They don't get to carry or wear armor (well I guess they could wear armor if they wanted to).
The minute the american people let education become less than a priority in our society... the society itself took a fall. We are moving into a more high tech world with a smaller percentage of our work force being able to handle the load.
In most schools I know of...a 5 year old child needs know there ABC's, 123's, and know a few colors and shape. That's IT!!!! I am no Rocket Scientist (and rely heavily on spell checkers) but I could read J.R.R. Tolkien. How, because my family took in interest in my education.
We need to use the tools we have available at home and in school. If that means computers... then use them. Who knows what advances will be made in the next 30 years... but the fundementals will stay the same. Reading, Writing, and Mathmatics. Throw in science and history as you go and BOOM! We are back off to a good start. But it needs to start and stay on the home front.
we can see gravity but do we know what causes it? You say gravity is a fact and then cite einsteins "theory" to back it up? I wounder whats holding my pc to the desk? Oh yeah, its the warping of space time.
When I started teaching high school physics & chemistry, I was allocated 12 graduated cylinders, 3 dozen test tubes, and 6 scales to teach chemistry classes, and this was in an affluent district. My education was pointedly graduate school preparatory, but my colleagues had little more than introductory collegiate coursework in the sciences. As for how I spent my time off-hours, being a first-year teacher, I had the choice of either standing knee deep in spilt Coca-Cola while manning a concession stand at basketball games, or become an assistant swim coach. As for classroom time, with 30-35 students per class, there wasn't a lot of time to work one-on-one with students, but I was lucky to have a solid academic foundation in the sciences, such that I could look myself in the mirror knowing that I was at least offering a credible curriculum. Perhaps too much so; by the time I quit teaching four years later, I had numerous students earning scholarships through their science fair projects, and one actually placed second at the international level. Obviously, I saw that teaching was a dead end, so I went back to school, got a second BS in Computer Science, and now make 5 times the salary made before. Now tell me, why are we debating this question of staying updated? The cards are simply against maintaining a credible curriculum year after year because funding is so limited at the institutional level, and teachers make so little money at an personal level that the idea of offering a credible, rigorous, continually up-to-date education for the college-bound is ridiculous. The resources simply aren't there.
Well, that's really the fault of the US educational system which makes you pay for higher education. In Finland and other Scandinavian countries the University (and other high level) teaching is free for all, so parents don't have the burden to work long hours to gather money for 20 something years in order to get any sort of higher education for their children. Everyone has an equal chance to get in (if they are bright enough, that is).
And oh yes, the free school system, like the excellent public health care network etc., is mostly paid by high income tax (up to over 50%), which is fine for me, thank you.
High income tax is good if spent accordingly, sadly you just haven't got the idea yet.
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OTTERS RULE.
Sheesh. Where to begin ... this is such a chestnut, it's hardly "fun" anymore.
First of all, about units and translations -- the text is certainly "cubits," it's just that translations sometimes attempt a units conversion, since nobody measures things in cubits anymore. (A cubit, IIRC, was the distance from fingertip to elbow -- kind of like that personal unit of measurement, the "foot," that no modern country uses anymore. :^)
Second, ever notice that 3 is a fine approximation of pi, to one significant digit?
Third, the text says "round", but does that truly mean perfectly circular? Tell you what -- you cast a 15-foot diameter basin, using iron age technology, and we'll see how closely your ratio of circumference to diameter approximates 3.14159...
Fourth, since I Kings doesn't come with an engineering schematic, who's to say that the basin didn't have an overhanging lip? That's a common enough design.
Fifth, this is a straw man anyhow. Practically nobody, other than anti-Christian propagandists, take the notion that "I Kings 7:23 means that the Bible teaches that pi is equal to 3" seriously -- including those (fnord) fundamentalists and (fnord) inerrantists. (I say "practically" because, in a world with more than a billion Christians, you might find a crank or two as who does believe that pi is 3 "because the Bible says so.")
I too am married to a teacher.
I want to amplify on three areas: pay, responsibility and hours
Would you accept crap pay for such a heavy responsibility, and still do you do over 20 hours unpaid work per week, every week?
And, yes, I was a terrible pupil at school. It's only after I married a teacher that I saw the other side of the desk.
Too any of my teachers who may read this (and I doubt that any of them will..) I apologise...
Speaking as a teacher... Pay teachers competative salaries so that we can attract qualified science (etc.) teachers. It's hard to compete with the salaries people with the same, or even less training, can make in industry. Give teachers the time and financial support to attend conferences, university classes, etc. to keep up to date. Technology and science are changing so rapidly it's hard to keep up. I often attend conference at my own expensive including trading vacation days (I'm at a year round school) so I don't have to call in "sick." At a recent conference I talked to two teachers who had not only paid for the conference, travel and hotel expenses but were paying for the substitute teachers who were covering their classes! See that students have up to date textbooks. Some one mentions the case of not knowing how many elements have been discovered. Would you believe some schools still have reference books that talk about the fact that man may some day walk on the moon?!? And while your are at it, make sure that school libraries have up to date science and technology reference books! Teachers and students need up to date tools to work with. It's hard to teach cutting edge science with 19th century tools! Provide computers with Internet access. Develop web sites and listservs with current science and technology information. Make it easy (and quick) for teachers to find the info they need. Most work long hours after school developing lessons, reading student papers, etc., etc. Well this is my 2 cents worth!!
I'm sorry, bit this is just plain WRONG
Did you know that teaching has an abnormally high rate of Alcoholism, Divorce and Suicide, compared to other professions? There must be a reason....
Also, the second law of thermodynamics is
A) not a fundamental law. it is only valid if the basic assumption of thermodynamics is valid, which is "a system is equally likely to take any accessable state". How this implies all of thermodynamics and much observable phenomenon would take too long to explain. There are many systems for which the second law does not hold since the basic law does not hold.
B) and anyway it doesn't matter since the second law does not forbid local decreases in entropy, just global decreases. look at your refrigerator- it is capable of freezing water, ie. putting it in a well ordered state. if you just look at the ice in the freezer than it appears that the second law has been violated, but in fact it hasn't been. if you feel the back of your refrigerator, you'll notice that it is hot. that is because the extra entropy (+some more entropy from other stuff) has been released as heat into the room. if you consider the room as a whole, the entropy of the room has risen.
The solution is simple : the goverment should have the taught material organized in web pages and available through the internet. Therefore, the teachers and students would be able to stay in touch with the latest developments of their field; we would also save rainforests because books in school is really an outdated concept. Not only that, but teachers would be forced to update their knowledge because the taught material would be up for the students to read : if a teacher teaches 109 elements in chemistry and the web page says 118 elements the students would react and render the teacher improper to teach them.
Furthermore, the government would save a lot of
money from having to print books : each school
can print the material needed from the HTML pages found in the web. And updating the knowledge in these pages would be instant, because one could simply update the material stored in one place.
On the downside, each school would have to be equipped with one computer for one student at least, which may be possible or a reality in your country but not in mine. Nevertheless, old 486s at 100 MHz with 16 MB ram and S3 VGAs (which one can buy for a buck) would be cheap and if properly setup with an affordable OS (hmm, Linux is better at customizing it for such perposes that Win95) could be a great solution.
Another viable option would be to make the taught material available to teachers only through the internet, and then each school could either make the material available to students through paper or through the internet (or send the stuff to each student's home, if they have internet access in their homes); this option would force the teachers to update their knowledge and keep the costs low, because each school would need one computer with internet access to download the taught material and one computer per class (and a projector) to project the html pages onto the class wall (which many schools already have).
IN the UK, to much controversy, a National Curriculum was introduced about 10 years ago, which pretty much set in stone what should be taught and what should be in examinations from nursery up to A-Level education.
While I'm a little concerned that it takes away teacher's flexibility, it does ensure that content is reasonably up-to-date (since there are bodies constantly revising the curriculum for every subject). I know that fractal geometry and some basic chaos theory has been introduced somewhere in the curriculum since when I was at school, for example.
... and of course it means that nobody ends up with great big holes in their education because their teacher was biased against a certain subject.
I know very little about the US education system, though, except what I've seen on Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Weird Science. Oh, and Heathers.
--
Scientists do not believe ANYTHING to be fact.
:-)
Suuure! (-: Nice theory
Have you actually read any science texts or even popular books in the last 30 years? They almost universally begin by assuming that evolution is a fact, even when they actually say "theory", then scrabble around trying to support their assumption. Many of them have phrases like "the fact of evolution" dotted around.
So, do they really believe, or are they lying?
And of course, I must plug The Talk.Origins Archive, which has lists of this and other common misconceptions about evolution.
Such as: that Trilobites are a simple organism? That spontaneous generation, or as some title it, abiogensis is not really impossibility squared, cubed and tesseracted but indeed likely? Ahuk, ahuk, ahuk...
T.O statements about the petrified Yellowstone trees growing in situ are classic; how did they do it without any roots?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Smithian economics would have you believe that it is
/.ers for bringing this up, and do feel free to turn my karma to a thick yellow spray, but this is a crusade of mine . . .
All apologies to
Don't blame Smith for this one. The Wealth of Nations is a great book, and it doesn't take this sort of view at all. Smith has an incredibly sensible view of the power of free-market economics, while remaining utterly clear-minded about its drawbacks. And one of the things he is clearest about of all is the need for publicly funded education.
Karl Marx's Capital is also a great book. The nineteenth century was a great century.
jsm
One bloke gave a business talk to a class of Hispanic high-schoolers. They weren't paying attention. Then he announced that he'd pay the Uni tuition of any student who graduated fom this class. 98% (ie, all but two of those present) graduated.
Still, as system is a system, and one as monolithic as the typical State school in any Western country is always going to present each student with more of a problem with fighting the system than with the actual learning part. The student has to not only learn, but has to either change the system or go outside of the system (as the hispanics did: the local library actually became popular) to do it. Precious few students fit into the system even roughly.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Surely it wouldn't cost too much to create a monthly (or maybe quaterly, or whatever) mini magazine that contains articles highlighting the latest interesting developments in science, that would get distributed to every school. They may even be taken from (and sponsored by) some of the more mainstream science journals like Discover, Nature etc.
A few possible effects:
- teachers are kept up to date
- a percentage of teachers may become more interested in their subject (obviously not all, but even 2% would be a lot)
- a percentage of pupils may become more interested in the subject (the magazines would be made available to students)
The (a) increased interest by students/teachers and (b) the increased exposure in relevant fields would increase the readership of the magazines that might sponsor something like that, so they would also win - essentially every american school graduate with any interest in Science would have been exposed to such magazines and may continue to buy them once they're working.
Just an idea.
I believe it. Last spring I took a C++ class at a private university that was an undergraduate or graduate class (CS275 or CS500) depending on how you registered. We didn't cover classes until the very end of the semester, and it was just breifly mentioned. Fortunately I was taking the course for free, but I would have been VERY pissed off if I was paying for it. -- Fran
Well, the math books would still be full of the same letters as before, since math doesn't tell you anything about this world. Math is perfect, because it makes up its own assumptions (axioms).
BTW evolution: "evolution" isn't just one theory, it is a set of theories. Darwin's theory is just one evolution theory, it bases evolution on mutation and selection by survival of the fitest. Lamark's theory is another evolution theory, and it's based on something like a "genetic memory".
Actually, we know a lot more about genetics now than both Darwin and Lamark knew. We know that Lamark isn't completely off, since there are ways to exchange genetic informations, including gene ferries (mostly for bacterias and plants), and gene editors. We don't know if these gene editors are just deactivated retro virii, or if they are used once upon a time, but one thing we can say with pretty high accuracy: this live as it is now wasn't created, but evolved. Even the pope accepts this.
There is no observation whatsoever that any species ever was created. All creationist arguments I know of focus around "proofs" that this or that can't have evolved, mostly by taking something complex as the eye, and leaving out all the steps that led to that eye as it is now, and even failing to explain why the human eye has the sensors behind supply and sense, instead of having it in front of it like octopus eyes do.
Creationism is a "last resort explanation" - if everything else fails, assume it was created. It's also only shifting the problem, since it explains something lesser (the world) by being created by something higher (God), and completely misses to explain how this higher (God) came into being. He for sure hasn't evolved? So who created God?
In all my school days, only one teacher told us things as if they were facts, and that one was the religion teacher of elementary school. After all, her facts weren't based on observation or by formal proof, but on reading of just one really old book.
And so we are back on topic: why do teachers tell things from old books as if it was truth and no new insight has been gained later? Well, it's because teachers never left school. They haven't seen the real world. They aren't "authentic". For them, all knowledge is like a fairy tale, something that goes from generation to generation. It isn't. Knowledge is but a tool to get around with the real world.
What pupils really need, apart from meta-tools like letters and math, is to learn how to solve real world problems, problems they'll face in their future life. Today, the most important thing is to learn how to learn. I mean: to learn yourself, without being driven by a teacher. This isn't a budget problem, it's a cultural problem. Few, if any teachers like it if pupils know more than them. Many even dislike if they knew more than they have been teached in school yet. This must stop!
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
forgive me for being a left wing pinko commie bastard, but don't ya think we're spending a tad too much on, err, bombs and a tad too little on, oh, education? just a thought. glad we can keep those congressmen's big industries in business, err, yeah.
I'm sincerely confused.
.02
If a person claims to take the bible literally, how can they come to any other conclusion than the bible endorsing pi = 3.
I despise religion openly, but this is *not* a flame. This just seems like an outright contradiction.
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Quux26
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Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Quick responses, because I'm off to a meeting. 1)Yes, transitional form is a creationist invention, however the meaning is plain enough that you understood what I meant. You can maintain that everything is a transitional form, but you really don't have the evidence to back that up. How do you know this to be true? Evolutionists cannot agree among themselves what the proper sequencing is of the fossil record. I will continue to insist on the lack of transitional forms until the evidence of transition is at least obvious enough for biologists and paleontologists to agree on a proper sequencing. It certainly argues against a Darwinian approach to evolution; the fossil record simply doesn't contain the rich variety of critters necessary to support half-fish half-mammals, etc. Thus, most evolutionists I've read lately seem to be supporting punctuated equilibrium or one of the other models. One then must question what the causative factor in new changes is. Crap... out of time, must run. May respond more fully later. Probably not, as the article will have fallen off the front page by then and been condemned to rubbish bin of articles never read again.
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Not an Anonymous Coward, just forgot my password today, Esperandi
esperan@1st.net
The problem in science classes is in part that high school science teachers are: 1.) too often overworked to do the necessary homework needed to keep their courses up to date (they usually teach 5-6 classes a day on top of grading papers, and preparing lesson plans.) 2.) Provided with poor materials. Look through your typical high school science text. It is typically filled with all sorts of errors of both the factual and logical variety. Key theories like evolution are represented so poorly that it could be said that it isn't even the theory of evolution that is being taught in the class. 3.) Force to teach standards created by the uninformed. Teachers and schools are graded by the performance of students on standardized tests. When I was in high school one of these standardized tests had a multiple choice question in which I was supposed to answer that evolution was a matter of adaption, when any reputable biology text would have said that evolution occurs by means of mutation and weeding out until equilibrium is established. Individual organisms do not adapt their genes. This is just one example, once when I questioned a test proctor about this, I was treated a lecture on Lammarkian theory that was presented as Darwin's theory.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Sorry, this post was a mistake. Please read the correct one below.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
As opposed to myself, who might have gone into teaching (love history! & know it well) except for the insane licensing requirements.
I expect I would have made an excellent teacher. People regularly tell me that I should be a teacher, rather than wasting my talents on the job I am doing now, but even the private schools could not hire me if they wanted to, because I'm not certified, and I'm not about to jump through hoops, and disqualify myself as a good teacher, by getting certified.
But this problem extends so far. The basic function of government is to restrain evil and encourage good, but our government restrains good and encourages evil. I wonder why we're having problems?
Alan Light
This just reminded me of the absolute *bane* of education in New Zealand - The NZQA (New Zealand Qualification Authority).
A few years ago they started to try to introduce a new for of qualification - the Unit Standard. Basicly put, every subject is devided into topics which are subdivided and so on until you get to the meat of the matter - the unit. A unit is basicly one skill or whatever with in the subject. you either pass or fail, dependant on wether or not you have that skill. you eith pass or fail a devision dependant on the number of subdivisions you pass.
So far, it doesn't seem to bad. But when you look at the actuall difficultylevel involved, you see it for the farce it really is.
The subject in which I encountered it was year 12 Acounting. Basicly I didn't give a f*ck about the unit standard assessment for the year, so descided to see if I could fail. Not, I should say, fail by not answering any questions, but by answering the questions in such a way as to make the marker laugh as much as possible. Despite my best efforts I still passed! C'mon! A subject that I *couldn't* fail!
Strangely enough, I seemed to be able to (accidentally) predict certain questions. I (jokingly) said, before the test, "God damn I hate these stupid Unit Standards. I'm telling you, the questions will be something like 'which of these is a asset' Then thell have a picture of a banana, a picture of an apple, a picture of a car, and then another freacking picture of a banana!"
needless to say, the first question of the exam:" which of these is an asset?..." no pictures though. And no fruit. But just about as difficult. It was funny. funny enough to make a friend and I unable to proceed with the exam for a minite or two.
Thankfully, enough people held as low an opinion of the scheme for NZQA to start replacing it... But I can't help but think that the replacement might be just as bad.
Shawn Poulsen (Fruan)
"On Slashdot, many obvious things are insightful." - Annonymous Coward, 2000/7/9
Half the comments on the article start with "the sad state of public education", or some such drivel, and go on to promote their favorite solution. Another large number talk about how public education is "bureaucratized" and bloated -- government waste, blah, blah, blah.
The trouble is, neither of these ideas are remotely grounded in reality. The failure of our public schools is widely regarded as fact these days, when every measure we have (standardized tests) reports that they're doing a better job than they ever have from when we started recording this information.
The only time this isn't the case is in some international comparisons which failed to use valid sample sets: many other countries allowed students to self-select who would take the tests, rather than picking at random as the U.S. did. So it comes down to whether or not you know how to construct a valid random sample.
This data is very widely available & can be found in any library. There is NO data that our schools are failing, except in the minds of some extremists who would prefer to have education only for the rich.
And regarding the "bureaucracy", please go look up the budgets! In particular, California school districts have their budgets on-line. Public education administrations run on a fraction of what private school administrations run on, and a *tiny* fraction of what private businesses run on. Overwhelmingly, the money is making it to the classrooms. There just isn't much money. Comparing to other countries, the U.S. not spending a significantly different amount (it's near the bottom or top depending on whether you're using flat comparisons or cost of living comparisons), though the states with the most problems, like California, are also the states spending the least.
And, by the way, one of the largest expenses in public schools is taking care of special needs students -- something no private school is required to do. Our public schools could be run on much less money if they had the liberty of always chosing the best students, and rejecting those with learning problems. Private schools are already more bloated (discounting "workbook" schools, where they don't bother hiring teachers). If private schools were held to the same standards, their costs would soar through roof.
In industry it is a matter of policy that investing in job training is a good move. Why isn't the same true of our school systems? Teachers typically get *no* training once they're hired.
Most remarkably, they get no training even after changes in the curriculum. Most curriculum documents are functionally paper weights, because the states that develop them never train their teachers.
Keeping abreast of new results in science is a similar problem. If you want teachers to know the latest science, to know the lastest studies of effective teaching methods, and to know how to implement a curriculum document, you have to train them.
... which, of course, takes money.
My parents are both high school teachers in the same, horrible public school system where I was miseducated. Accordingly, I have been very close to the politics and issues inside the faculty and administration there. My parents have a funny saying about the whole thing that really sums it up: "First you become a teacher. If you're too dumb to be a teacher, you become a coach. If you're too dumb to be a coach, you become an administrator." Honestly, IMHO, the greatest problem with our schools is the lack in quality in school employees:
There are a lot of good teachers out there. At my old school, my dad is a *great* math teacher and the chemistry teacher is also primo. But I argue that those shining stars are exceptions to the rule. A friend of mine once got this written on her report card: "Congratulatians on a perfect score on all your spelling tests." I've experienced many teachers giving out outdated and even false information, and I'm sure that many readers have also.
While teacher submediocrity occurs in all subjects, I believe that the worst area is computer science. How many high schools' computer rooms are still filled with Mac Classics and TRS-80s? How many schools teach their students that that the 'CPU' is the case? How many schools teach with GWBASIC? How many schools have yet to discover the Internet? Far too many, I'm afraid.
Too many of our schools are run by stupid people. At my own school, the administrators:
No matter how good the system gets, students have got to *want* to learn, or at least not be destructive to those who do. As nerd, geek, etc. will tell you, that is _not_ how it is. There is an enourmous pressure to conform and be cool or be cast out. (Subdivisions!) But how can the current student culture be changed? How can a desire to learn be injected into todays non-nerd majority? Hopefully, the Internet revolution is already helping to change that. Once by nerds and for nerds (er, and national defense), it is now mainstream, and we need only wait for natural selection to take its toll. The geek shall inherit the earth.
This should be a no-brainer. It takes dough to do stuff. Generally, the less dough, the less stuff you can do. Give the schools dough.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Second, the notion of decimal math was *NOT* something the Hebrews were even close to conceiving.
Third, 3 is close to pi, especially for inexact measurements.
Sheesh, I'm an atheist and I'm defending the Bible. Woah.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
We only believe the inverse square law because we have measured it. We know that in all the measurements we have taken, it holds. If we were to find an exception, we'd need a new theory.
Same with Newton's work. For quite some time, I'm sure many people called them facts. But then some guy with funny-looking hair came along and said 'no, there are exceptions.'
--
I wouldn't trust the government to run a hospital or a software company... so why would I want my kids educated by the government? One of the great things about capitalism is that it motivates even the most uncaring people to find a way to get the job done so they can feed their own families. Furthermore, the debates over subject matter, religion, etc. wouldn't exist if the government simply gave us education vouchers for private schools instead.
From time to time, it's a good idea to question our traditions, and that includes publicly-run school systems.
If you've ever managed a group of people in your life, you'd know that you can't watch them every step of the way and even if you could, you can't step OUT of your designated protocol to rectify any disturbing behavior (that's more of a gripe against our hyper-litigious society than anything else, but it relates). What are you gonna do, FIRE your student? So what if "hooligans" are roaming the streets at 1:30? Seniors with only a few remaining credits to graduate usually are allowed to leave early. The rest are cutting class (i.e., in no way whatsoever the teachers' problem)
Please, next time you are offered to get paid less than 40k/annum to teach children whose "hard-working tax paying" parents are too DAMNED LAZY and/or STUPID/IGNORANT/APATHETIC about teaching their own progeny the fundamentals of living in normalized society, then please jump at the chance. Make them turn off Jerry Springer and chatting on IRC and TALK to your child once in awhile.
I find it extremely disturbing whenever someone mentions things like taxes when talking about the education of a child. Ask the average person what is most important to their child's development and they will invariably reply "education." Ask the SAME PEOPLE if they feel shafted when it comes to paying taxes for luxuries like education, everyone all of a sudden becomes Rush Limbaugh. Disgusting...
"The parents are the best judges of whether their child is getting an education." Then you should pay through the friggin' nose if you want what's best for your child, capiche? If you are so fed up with "publically funded education" then bus your kid (or *gasp* drive them your own damn self) to a private school.
I bet you that you've never ever stepped foot on a public school grounds after graduation, right? If you are unhappy, take it up at a parent-teacher conference. You'd be surprised what kinds of personalized things some lazy-minded parents heap onto the shoulders of a teacher who sees >100 faces in a day. If the public wants to dictate to teachers what they teach, then get involved and stop moaning and bitching about how much money you spend to buy pokemon Trapper Keepers (which btw is NOT hard earned tax dollars if you can't distinguish the difference).
The police, fire dept., military and everyone in government do not have to teach, discipline, tutor, encourage, inspire, relate to, be culturally relevant to, look after and guard our children (and all this while lawsuit-happy "parents" look for easy pathways to instant riches by raising ire about schools teaching The Catcher in the Rye ). I bet if you did even ONE of those things, you'd be exhausted after your 8 physically arduous hours of sitting and staring at a computer screen every day... sheesh (and even if you're in construction or sanitation engineering or some other backbreaking labor-intensive job, I STILL wouldn't pity your moaning about helping Johnny with his geometry). Come on folks, if we are going to complain all day long about how tough it is to open up a wallet and throw money at solutions to REAL problems, then don't bring education up at all. When people talk about how much power they deserve to wield just because they pay their annual couple thousand for education, they just end up sounding greedy, loveless, and truly apathetic about their child's development. If you make the choice to have children, then pay for it with all your blood sweat and tears. And I mean all, and you better love it if you love them. Any concerened (and anonymously cowarded) Parent should.
But I didn't start typing this to write about me - I'm not, I hope, a Katz. I wanted to let y'all know about the writings of Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian. But I wanted to let you know that, as bad as conditions sometimes are here, it's not quite as bleak as the picture Mitchell paints. Quite rightly, he focuses on the bad, and there is certainly a worrisome quantity of that stuff to be found. But there are - and Mitchell does acknowledge this from time to time - also a great many souls who are, if not quite free of the Educationist disease, not yet incapacitated by it. But they are being worn down, day by day, hour by hour, by the system. And the system, I must confess, does seem to be beyond saving. Mitchell thought so, and I'm afraid I can't see any good grounds for arguing otherwise.
Yes, semantics. And scientists should care as much about how they use terms as anyone else. You cannot discount a creationist's comment that "evolution is just a theory" (of how things got to be how they are) by saying "gravity is just a theory too" when in fact, it isn't.
... like the exact density of Jupiter ... )
... (gravity).
... but we theorise about them. To throw out "just semantics" is discounting the point.
We KNOW that things are how they are (although not everything about them
We KNOW that things are attracted to each other on large-mass scale
We don't know WHY either of these things is the way it is
- Michael T. Babcock <homepage>
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
it's spelled epistemology, and if you had any real background in it you'd realise why saying that 'gravity' isn't a 'theory' is somewhat foolish.
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
I think that you are absolutely right. One of the keys to good teaching is admitting that you are not infallible. Teachers that presume to have all of the answers leave no room for their students to correct teacher errors, much less have different interpretations. If, however, teachers make it clear from the beginning that they do not have all of the answers, make mistakes, etc., the teaching will be more realistic and the students will be more involved in their own learning. Ideally. In a perfect, utopian, classroom.