I recall overhearing a few 10-year-olds in a Target around the time N64 came out (so I was perhaps 16. What I was doing in Target is anyone's guess). They were debating which system one should get, and I heard "SNES? That's a good beginner's system."
Is dogmatic regurgitation really how history is taught in the US?
For the most part, yes. Then, in college, my history professor talked some trash: "How many of you have ever been in a history class taught by 'Coach Whatshisname?'"
90% of the class raised their hands.
Nothing against Coach Whatshisname, but I'm going to take a wild stab that he wasn't a history major. He always taught by regurgitation. Often, the course was a "read the book and outline it" funfest. Oh yes, Paul Revere and Davy Crockett and such. Civil war because of slavery. Pilgrims because of religious persecution. American Revolution because the entire populace was sick and tired of the British.
Well, my mom went to elementary school in Argentina. Not a rich neighborhood by any means. Each day, school was just like this, morning core subjects, afternoon electives. You could even just go home in the afternoon, so that only the people who wanted to learn were there. The class was a bunch of grades together, rather than the "you are 7, you are second grade" system I'm used to. She moved to the U.S. when she was 12, spoke very little English, and skipped 7th grade.
I also find it odd that it seems essential through high school to have six hours of the exact same schedule every day, and in college, where you doubtless learn a whole lot more and are happier about it, classes are typically two days a week with enormous out-of-class free time.
Anyways, back to your comments. I think that if the electives are made enticing and are well taught, you won't have to worry about people taking "enough." I also recall spending an atrocious amount of time in elementary through high school in class doing nothing productive whatsoever (instead of doodling and goofing off, why can't I go home early?). So there's enough time to have it all, if only we would reduce wasted class time.
Many of the core classes could be reduced to a couple days a week, and many schools do this already. I think you could teach all the subjects you already DO teach, just in less time. In the afternoon you put music, art, sports (and don't give me the "but when will kids be active if we don't mandate it?" crap. The minute I got from home I was playing tag until it got dark.), advanced computer classes, and perhaps core-related courses that go above and beyond. I think that teaching the same subject for five days in a row quickly reaches the law of diminishing returns, as does having the same group of people together in the same setting for six hours a day.
Oh, and get rid of most homework. Uninspired busywork crap that robs kids of social and free time (if you don't MAKE them, perhaps they'll take the initiative to read on their own. Also, perhaps they'll be more inclined to take the optional courses) and turns them off to learning. Why do people seem to think that a lack of excessive day-to-day homework can only work in college?
Are overhead projector sheets used in a fashion that's so much better then powerpoint slides?
Not at all. Overhead slides were just more expensive to produce (transparency paper, anyone?), so teachers were more thoughtful about what they put up. You never had a class with 68 transparencies in a single lecture.
My freshman (college) history teacher always taught completely verbally, and cared that we understood general concepts. She believed it was silly to believe people, especially non-history majors, will get a greater understanding of history by memorizing dates and places. She was also an extreme technophobe, almost breaking the projector when she put up a map once. She would talk trash about people that use overheads, especially, as she called them, the "ambush lecture," where there's a big page of text that YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE YET so they cover it with paper, then AHA!!!, THERE IT IS!
That same technique has made the transition quite nicely to Powerpoint, and is, in my experience, magnified greatly.
Also, I probably learned more in her one semester class than in all the years I'd taken of history before.
I think that technology has the potential to make a class a little bit better or a whole lot worse. It's a shame which of the two happens more often.
Americans must be really stupid if there is anyone (who doesn't have physical disabilities affecting their cognitive skills) who believes English is the only language.
On a very slightly related note, I think it's a matter of awareness of different aspects of things. Sure, nobody thinks that English is the only language. There are a good deal of linguistic aspects of the world that the average American (or anyone, for that matter) are likely not aware of.
I've been to over a dozen countries, speak 3 languages to some degree, and have grown up often hearing those 3 languages mixed together. I think I have a decent grasp on languages. And I found myself feeling like an ignorant turd. I was in the Prague airport this January, and I witnessed a Vietnamese man having an argument with the airport attendant. Guessing that the attendant didn't speak Vietnamese, my Californian self expected to hear broken English. The man of Vietnamese descent spoke perfect Czech. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. It makes perfect sense, but the possibility had never entered my mind.
It's things like that, that exposure to different languages can give insight into.
More quantity, perhaps. However, with Powerpoints on the web, the process comes full circle.
10 In the beginning, you enroll for a course.
20 This course is taught in the traditional manner, i.e. information is thrown at you, you are expected to remember it for a few weeks.
30 That course has a book, which you purchase at the bookstore (supposedly).
40 However, a book alone is not sufficient for you to know the material.
50 So you get a teacher to run the class, because they (supposedly) know all about the material.
60 This teacher decides that you can learn a whole lot more by putting the notes on Powerpoint.
70 The teacher also decides that the students can listen if they don't have to be writing, which is actually quite nice. They post the notes online.
80 The test is, quite naturally, based on the notes.
90 With all this great quantity of material to cover, the teacher tends to mostly read from the powerpoint, perhaps sprinkling tidbits in.
100 The student realizes that all they need to know for the test is up on the web in powerpoint.
110 The student is quite bored at being read at, figures he can read it himself and not want to gouge eyes out.
120 Student stops coming to class, just downloads powerpoints.
130 Powerpoints are awfully similar to the book.
140 GOTO 40
There are a few ways to break the cycle:
1) Don't post powerpoints online. Result: Class is a big copy-over-fest.
2) Make attendance mandatory (talking from college experience). Result: Students become pissy and inattentive. You're now there because it's compulsory, not because you want to learn.
3) Cut out the @#$% PowerPoint. Result: If you can teach well, everything is happy.
4) Use Powerpoint effectively. I.E. don't just read from it, rather use it for illustration. Which is effectively #3 with computer pictures. Most teachers don't do this, because it's SO much easier to just vomit all over a bulleted list.
That's fine. Spending hours learning Premiere when you could be, say, reading Shakespeare is when it gets irritating. A nice compromise, in my opinion, would be to shorten the official school day to end at lunch time. Before lunch, the core subjects would be taught, and after lunch would be electives. Such electives could include a course on Premiere, which could then link nicely with the English class.
It's usually when the English teacher tries to haphazardly integrate video production into an English class rather than convey why the course material is really cool that things fall apart. It becomes a video production class in which, oh yeah, thar be some book-reading what needs to be done too. Which will only get the students to read far enough into the book to reach an appropriate scene.
Case in point: we did a video on Great Expectations in my freshman year of high school. We could pick any scene we wanted. 6 of 8 groups did the first experience at Miss Havisham's house because that's all anyone'd bothered to read. With the focus on the video, we all hated the book. With the book being hated, the video production was miserable. Just about every class with a video (or its ancestor, the skit) has given me a similar experience.
Planning, shooting, and editing a video is, in my experience, the most time-wasting irritation of any project, and is especially awful in foreign language courses. Time that could be spent on listening and speaking -- real IMMERSION, like what you'd get if you lived in another country -- is instead spent trying to work the darn equipment and set up scenes. Still the same horribly broken language skills (spoken without anyone to model proper pronunciation from), and now hours upon hours of work have been spent on a half dozen sentences.
And there are only two situations in which a student makes a video: solo or in a group. If the fates are kind, it will be a solo video, and the student will just have a very irritated parent or two. If it's a group project, one can only pray that they get along with the other group members, or else it's hours of bickering on a project nobody really cared for to begin with.
By the time you're done, the sense of achievement most often comes in the form of "Wow, that sucked, I'm glad it's over."
Which is not to say that the worksheets don't suck as well, because I agree that they are often crap. There are other ways of teaching these things, besides rote drilling "A is B and C is D" into people's heads. I just find it extremely unfortunate that, rather than exploring possibilities, courses always fall back on the big 3: skits, posters, and videos.
I contend that the culprit is BAD TEACHING, whether the fault of the teachers, the methods, the system, the long hours, whatever. Vomiting information at people and expecting them to absorb it I find absurd, but that's what many teachers do. For 6+ hours a day. Throwing a few computers into the mix will keep people amused with the "shiny" and "huzzah! she stopped talking!" aspect for a while, but as someone who made a good amount of videos over the years, the novelty wears off REAL fast.
Advanced interactive content... when that comes around, let me know. For now, I'll be sitting in a lecture hall, having a PowerPoint read to me. Or watching a horrid video on the mating habits of salmon. For the third time in as many years. Or getting tendonitis from a poorly-designed click-happy interface on a music theory program. Or spending 20 minutes working through a computer program that demonstrates something incredibly simple that could be more easily and much more effectively learned by actively drawing and working it out ourselves. Or watching a 45 minute demonstration on how to use a search engine. Or spending 15 minutes setting up an Excel spreadsheet to add up a few numbers and make it look pretty.
The closest I've come to using "advanced interactive content" in a mainstream (i.e. not college-level computer-related) course was the Quadratic Equation solver on the TI-82. Junior year of high school, it was the teacher's recommended way of solving such equations. Yeah, that came in really handy in college calculus.
There are lots of great ways to expose people to technology. In my experience, the signal-to-noise ratio of teaching standard courses with computers is atrocious.
Also, perhaps if we were to focus on offering kids ways to live well-balanced lives, and encouraging them to use technology for what it is, rather than for "job skills," they might actually enjoy their childhood, perhaps make a real connection with the technology, and not be disgruntled when they discover that they spent 20 years preparing for 40 years in a job just so they can have money to retire and supposedly enjoy the remaining 1/4 of their life, unless cut short by death, illness, depression, etc.
Indeed! Heck, when I played that in school (in second grade), there was a good 10 minutes of instruction on how to power on the Apple IIe and how to properly grip and insert the floppy disk into the drive and close the door after it. This in our bi-weekly 20-minute computer lab time.
Hopefully, the fad is computers being used poorly in the classroom. Heck, Powerpoint alone tends to reduce my engagement in a class by 90%. Computers used in courses where they're relevant is great, and I've had some excellent ones to that effect. It's when people decide that a class on English Literature or Music History could benefit from the wonders of computers, without even having a "wow this is better!" reason to begin with, that things go sour.
Thankfully, they're NOT flying over my house at the moment. Goodness knows the noise alone from airplanes is irritating enough in L.A. already, without adding a bunch of flying cars that perhaps little Bobby has borrowed the keys to without Daddy's permission after a few beers.
Slot machines are one of the very few computer applications that I'd trust the security of. There's too much money to be had in it, and any imperfection results in a loss of income for the casino, which translates to VERY BAD THINGS (both above and below the table) for the manufacturer. If they're lucky, they'll just lose business.
For e-voting, there are many interests all around that will cause poor coding... malicious coders, crooked people, cushy government funding and lax oversight, and the fact that if it just works "pretty good," the government doesn't immediately dump all your machines but rather, at best, sends out a lengthy court-run investigation.
For machines that make casinos loads of money on often as low as a 1% advantage, the slightest slipup can be devastating, so they're careful.
Now, if THESE are routinely cracked, I'll have lost all faith in any sort of computer security, ever.
Imagine a day when you can text-message a discount coupon to a cell phone user just as she walks past your shop. That day is here.
Wow, a COUPON!!!!! Goodness me, what glorious technology! Heaven forbid you spend 75 cents on paper and a marker to make a "10% off today!" sign for the window!
On another note, I'm sure looking forward to walking through the mall and being spammed by 35,000 text messages from Baby Gap, Cinnabon, and Old Navy. Perhaps they'll even have a price war, with Sears beaming me an extra 5% off as I approach the entrance to Macy's.
... they will no longer have "lack of technical advancement" as an excuse to have a happy, quiet society where people go from one place to another while communicating only with the people they actually see.
Because you can't turn a land line off as easily. While I personally despise cell phones, their greatest "feature" is the easily-accessible "off" switch. It takes a good deal of unplugging to get the same effect on a land line.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall overhearing a few 10-year-olds in a Target around the time N64 came out (so I was perhaps 16. What I was doing in Target is anyone's guess). They were debating which system one should get, and I heard "SNES? That's a good beginner's system."
Is dogmatic regurgitation really how history is taught in the US?
For the most part, yes. Then, in college, my history professor talked some trash: "How many of you have ever been in a history class taught by 'Coach Whatshisname?'"
90% of the class raised their hands.
Nothing against Coach Whatshisname, but I'm going to take a wild stab that he wasn't a history major. He always taught by regurgitation. Often, the course was a "read the book and outline it" funfest. Oh yes, Paul Revere and Davy Crockett and such. Civil war because of slavery. Pilgrims because of religious persecution. American Revolution because the entire populace was sick and tired of the British.
Well, my mom went to elementary school in Argentina. Not a rich neighborhood by any means. Each day, school was just like this, morning core subjects, afternoon electives. You could even just go home in the afternoon, so that only the people who wanted to learn were there. The class was a bunch of grades together, rather than the "you are 7, you are second grade" system I'm used to. She moved to the U.S. when she was 12, spoke very little English, and skipped 7th grade.
I also find it odd that it seems essential through high school to have six hours of the exact same schedule every day, and in college, where you doubtless learn a whole lot more and are happier about it, classes are typically two days a week with enormous out-of-class free time.
Anyways, back to your comments. I think that if the electives are made enticing and are well taught, you won't have to worry about people taking "enough." I also recall spending an atrocious amount of time in elementary through high school in class doing nothing productive whatsoever (instead of doodling and goofing off, why can't I go home early?). So there's enough time to have it all, if only we would reduce wasted class time.
Many of the core classes could be reduced to a couple days a week, and many schools do this already. I think you could teach all the subjects you already DO teach, just in less time. In the afternoon you put music, art, sports (and don't give me the "but when will kids be active if we don't mandate it?" crap. The minute I got from home I was playing tag until it got dark.), advanced computer classes, and perhaps core-related courses that go above and beyond. I think that teaching the same subject for five days in a row quickly reaches the law of diminishing returns, as does having the same group of people together in the same setting for six hours a day.
Oh, and get rid of most homework. Uninspired busywork crap that robs kids of social and free time (if you don't MAKE them, perhaps they'll take the initiative to read on their own. Also, perhaps they'll be more inclined to take the optional courses) and turns them off to learning. Why do people seem to think that a lack of excessive day-to-day homework can only work in college?
Are overhead projector sheets used in a fashion that's so much better then powerpoint slides?
Not at all. Overhead slides were just more expensive to produce (transparency paper, anyone?), so teachers were more thoughtful about what they put up. You never had a class with 68 transparencies in a single lecture.
My freshman (college) history teacher always taught completely verbally, and cared that we understood general concepts. She believed it was silly to believe people, especially non-history majors, will get a greater understanding of history by memorizing dates and places. She was also an extreme technophobe, almost breaking the projector when she put up a map once. She would talk trash about people that use overheads, especially, as she called them, the "ambush lecture," where there's a big page of text that YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE YET so they cover it with paper, then AHA!!!, THERE IT IS!
That same technique has made the transition quite nicely to Powerpoint, and is, in my experience, magnified greatly.
Also, I probably learned more in her one semester class than in all the years I'd taken of history before.
I think that technology has the potential to make a class a little bit better or a whole lot worse. It's a shame which of the two happens more often.
Indeed... if anything, it's an argument against CRAPTACULAR TEXTBOOKS.
Americans must be really stupid if there is anyone (who doesn't have physical disabilities affecting their cognitive skills) who believes English is the only language.
On a very slightly related note, I think it's a matter of awareness of different aspects of things. Sure, nobody thinks that English is the only language. There are a good deal of linguistic aspects of the world that the average American (or anyone, for that matter) are likely not aware of.
I've been to over a dozen countries, speak 3 languages to some degree, and have grown up often hearing those 3 languages mixed together. I think I have a decent grasp on languages. And I found myself feeling like an ignorant turd. I was in the Prague airport this January, and I witnessed a Vietnamese man having an argument with the airport attendant. Guessing that the attendant didn't speak Vietnamese, my Californian self expected to hear broken English. The man of Vietnamese descent spoke perfect Czech. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. It makes perfect sense, but the possibility had never entered my mind.
It's things like that, that exposure to different languages can give insight into.
More quantity, perhaps. However, with Powerpoints on the web, the process comes full circle.
10 In the beginning, you enroll for a course.
20 This course is taught in the traditional manner, i.e. information is thrown at you, you are expected to remember it for a few weeks.
30 That course has a book, which you purchase at the bookstore (supposedly).
40 However, a book alone is not sufficient for you to know the material.
50 So you get a teacher to run the class, because they (supposedly) know all about the material.
60 This teacher decides that you can learn a whole lot more by putting the notes on Powerpoint.
70 The teacher also decides that the students can listen if they don't have to be writing, which is actually quite nice. They post the notes online.
80 The test is, quite naturally, based on the notes.
90 With all this great quantity of material to cover, the teacher tends to mostly read from the powerpoint, perhaps sprinkling tidbits in.
100 The student realizes that all they need to know for the test is up on the web in powerpoint.
110 The student is quite bored at being read at, figures he can read it himself and not want to gouge eyes out.
120 Student stops coming to class, just downloads powerpoints.
130 Powerpoints are awfully similar to the book.
140 GOTO 40
There are a few ways to break the cycle:
1) Don't post powerpoints online. Result: Class is a big copy-over-fest.
2) Make attendance mandatory (talking from college experience). Result: Students become pissy and inattentive. You're now there because it's compulsory, not because you want to learn.
3) Cut out the @#$% PowerPoint. Result: If you can teach well, everything is happy.
4) Use Powerpoint effectively. I.E. don't just read from it, rather use it for illustration. Which is effectively #3 with computer pictures. Most teachers don't do this, because it's SO much easier to just vomit all over a bulleted list.
That's fine. Spending hours learning Premiere when you could be, say, reading Shakespeare is when it gets irritating. A nice compromise, in my opinion, would be to shorten the official school day to end at lunch time. Before lunch, the core subjects would be taught, and after lunch would be electives. Such electives could include a course on Premiere, which could then link nicely with the English class.
It's usually when the English teacher tries to haphazardly integrate video production into an English class rather than convey why the course material is really cool that things fall apart. It becomes a video production class in which, oh yeah, thar be some book-reading what needs to be done too. Which will only get the students to read far enough into the book to reach an appropriate scene.
Case in point: we did a video on Great Expectations in my freshman year of high school. We could pick any scene we wanted. 6 of 8 groups did the first experience at Miss Havisham's house because that's all anyone'd bothered to read. With the focus on the video, we all hated the book. With the book being hated, the video production was miserable. Just about every class with a video (or its ancestor, the skit) has given me a similar experience.
Planning, shooting, and editing a video is, in my experience, the most time-wasting irritation of any project, and is especially awful in foreign language courses. Time that could be spent on listening and speaking -- real IMMERSION, like what you'd get if you lived in another country -- is instead spent trying to work the darn equipment and set up scenes. Still the same horribly broken language skills (spoken without anyone to model proper pronunciation from), and now hours upon hours of work have been spent on a half dozen sentences.
And there are only two situations in which a student makes a video: solo or in a group. If the fates are kind, it will be a solo video, and the student will just have a very irritated parent or two. If it's a group project, one can only pray that they get along with the other group members, or else it's hours of bickering on a project nobody really cared for to begin with.
By the time you're done, the sense of achievement most often comes in the form of "Wow, that sucked, I'm glad it's over."
Which is not to say that the worksheets don't suck as well, because I agree that they are often crap. There are other ways of teaching these things, besides rote drilling "A is B and C is D" into people's heads. I just find it extremely unfortunate that, rather than exploring possibilities, courses always fall back on the big 3: skits, posters, and videos.
I contend that the culprit is BAD TEACHING, whether the fault of the teachers, the methods, the system, the long hours, whatever. Vomiting information at people and expecting them to absorb it I find absurd, but that's what many teachers do. For 6+ hours a day. Throwing a few computers into the mix will keep people amused with the "shiny" and "huzzah! she stopped talking!" aspect for a while, but as someone who made a good amount of videos over the years, the novelty wears off REAL fast.
Advanced interactive content... when that comes around, let me know.
For now, I'll be sitting in a lecture hall, having a PowerPoint read to me.
Or watching a horrid video on the mating habits of salmon. For the third time in as many years.
Or getting tendonitis from a poorly-designed click-happy interface on a music theory program.
Or spending 20 minutes working through a computer program that demonstrates something incredibly simple that could be more easily and much more effectively learned by actively drawing and working it out ourselves.
Or watching a 45 minute demonstration on how to use a search engine.
Or spending 15 minutes setting up an Excel spreadsheet to add up a few numbers and make it look pretty.
The closest I've come to using "advanced interactive content" in a mainstream (i.e. not college-level computer-related) course was the Quadratic Equation solver on the TI-82. Junior year of high school, it was the teacher's recommended way of solving such equations. Yeah, that came in really handy in college calculus.
There are lots of great ways to expose people to technology. In my experience, the signal-to-noise ratio of teaching standard courses with computers is atrocious.
Also, perhaps if we were to focus on offering kids ways to live well-balanced lives, and encouraging them to use technology for what it is, rather than for "job skills," they might actually enjoy their childhood, perhaps make a real connection with the technology, and not be disgruntled when they discover that they spent 20 years preparing for 40 years in a job just so they can have money to retire and supposedly enjoy the remaining 1/4 of their life, unless cut short by death, illness, depression, etc.
Indeed! Heck, when I played that in school (in second grade), there was a good 10 minutes of instruction on how to power on the Apple IIe and how to properly grip and insert the floppy disk into the drive and close the door after it. This in our bi-weekly 20-minute computer lab time.
/has flashbacks of banging head on desk.
Nonlinear digital video editing?
Is that before or after we learn multiplication tables? The parent's key word was "schooldesk."
Yes, and we see how many people use bikes these days, especially in areas where there's too much technology in schools.
Hopefully, the fad is computers being used poorly in the classroom. Heck, Powerpoint alone tends to reduce my engagement in a class by 90%. Computers used in courses where they're relevant is great, and I've had some excellent ones to that effect. It's when people decide that a class on English Literature or Music History could benefit from the wonders of computers, without even having a "wow this is better!" reason to begin with, that things go sour.
Am 24 and got the reference, you insensitive clod!
Thankfully, they're NOT flying over my house at the moment. Goodness knows the noise alone from airplanes is irritating enough in L.A. already, without adding a bunch of flying cars that perhaps little Bobby has borrowed the keys to without Daddy's permission after a few beers.
Lick? Wow, you must have had a different relationship with your Nintendo than I did.
Slot machines are one of the very few computer applications that I'd trust the security of. There's too much money to be had in it, and any imperfection results in a loss of income for the casino, which translates to VERY BAD THINGS (both above and below the table) for the manufacturer. If they're lucky, they'll just lose business.
For e-voting, there are many interests all around that will cause poor coding... malicious coders, crooked people, cushy government funding and lax oversight, and the fact that if it just works "pretty good," the government doesn't immediately dump all your machines but rather, at best, sends out a lengthy court-run investigation.
For machines that make casinos loads of money on often as low as a 1% advantage, the slightest slipup can be devastating, so they're careful.
Now, if THESE are routinely cracked, I'll have lost all faith in any sort of computer security, ever.
From the article:
Imagine a day when you can text-message a discount coupon to a cell phone user just as she walks past your shop. That day is here.
Wow, a COUPON!!!!! Goodness me, what glorious technology! Heaven forbid you spend 75 cents on paper and a marker to make a "10% off today!" sign for the window!
On another note, I'm sure looking forward to walking through the mall and being spammed by 35,000 text messages from Baby Gap, Cinnabon, and Old Navy. Perhaps they'll even have a price war, with Sears beaming me an extra 5% off as I approach the entrance to Macy's.
I have 20/20 vision, you insensitive clod!
... advertising of the present?
... they will no longer have "lack of technical advancement" as an excuse to have a happy, quiet society where people go from one place to another while communicating only with the people they actually see.
/cancels migration to third-world nation
Because you can't turn a land line off as easily. While I personally despise cell phones, their greatest "feature" is the easily-accessible "off" switch. It takes a good deal of unplugging to get the same effect on a land line.
Well, I have my fallout shelter ready.
Am I going to have a handful of chips just to get into all my different clubs??
Indeed. Pretty soon Heroin addicts won't be the only ones with all sorts of needle marks in their arms!
"Dude, you should seek rehab. People can help you with your addiction."
"Addiction to what?"