You're the sort of parent I love to have for my students. I send emails home to each parent at the start of the year so they have my email address. I get about 1/5 of parents taking advantage of this.:(
Damn straight. As a teacher I can say that the education system of Australia needs a major overhaul, but it will only work if it happens at the community level. Additionally, the needed overhaul is less about resources, training and funding, and more about attitudes and approaches.
Governments will try to put any... darned (gotta control my swearing)... thing in place, often with little thought about what's in the community, what types of jobs are available and what the teachers, parents and students are saying. It's something I've seen in lots of jobs, educational and non-educational.
There's always someone who thinks they can improve a system without actually taking the time to look at what's in the system. Absentee bosses and armchair experts.:(
Look at our economy today. All the "experts" with all their high-dollar educations have proven themselves to be inept bunglers.
I take it you are referring to the "Credit Crunch" and "Subprime Mortgage"?
In actual fact, the 'experts' as you refer to them, developed some very powerful mathematical models that are still in use, but they were smart enough to know that the models had limitations. (The big limit in the Scholes-Black model is that it's a way to assess risk in an investment instrument AT THAT TIME. However, risk levels change, and the Sholes-Black model can't predict that.)
Then arrogant, ignorant and over-privileged C grade CEOs' (Think George W. Bushesque rubes.) took those models and used them in ways that had the original 'experts' VERY nervous. (Effectively the CEOs' took the snapshot risk assessment of the Scholes-Black model and treated it as a forever-and-eternal gauge of risk.)
So it's more a matter of greedy and uneducated bosses taking mathematical tools they didn't understand and ineptly bungling things. Several 'experts' were screaming warnings years ago, but there were a lot of people out there were ignoring them because 'ho ho ho, they're just academic experts'. And then when things blew up, everyone starts blaming the 'experts', rather than the CEOs'. Pisses me off.
Actually, the problem is that there is no real job training in education. Believe it or not, not everyone has the desire to be that intellectual. Some would just like to have some marketable skills that they can earn a respectable living with. Unfortunately, we've created a belief that everyone should go to college and if they don't they will fail. For those that are better suited to job training, we just ignore. And, that's why you end up with a large population with no real skills in an economic environment where anyone without those skills isn't really needed.
But, if you want to get to the real root problem of education, it's the one-size-fits-all mentality. People have different interests and different capacities for learning. If it's not tailored for that, it's never going to be effective.
I'd argue with bits of that rather strongly. Last year I had a class of kids that didn't know that 1 x value = value. There is some stuff that nearly everyone HAS to learn. But over the last two decades in Australia, we've had everyone saying "Let's make education fun.", "Let's make education more 'real'." and "Let's tailor the learning experience to the individual." Fine sentiments, but from what I've seen, nearly everything that's been put in place has had the opposite effect, and lots of kids are missing out on fundamental skills.
The thing is that my father's and grandfather's schooling was much more "one-size-fits-all" than modern schooling, but most kids left with those real skills you've mentioned.
As a high school teacher, I would like to point out that mediocrity is effectively enforced on us in several ways:
1. Heavier, more splintered and more prescriptive syllabuses mean that we have less and less flexibility to adapt teaching to the individual. (It's not the amount of content that's a problem, but the fact that the kids get 3-5 weeks on each topic before we have to switch to a new area to cover the syllabus.) 2. Larger class sizes. In a class of 25, you may have one or two students who really struggle. You can just about keep these guys up to speed without disadvantaging the rest. Increase the class size to 30, and you have less time to spend on each kid, and you'll end up with five or six kids who struggle. Now you need to make a choice. Do you dumb stuff down to help the five or six, leaving everyone else bored out of their brains, or do you abandon 1/6 of the class? There is a limit to how large a spread of abilities it's possible to teach across in a single lesson. 3. Academic learning isn't highly valued in Australian society, but grades are. So some parents and most students get more upset about failing a single exam than they are about long term, effective learning. This causes a feedback loop where students treat education as something to tolerate. Schools become filled with a lot of kids that only want to do the bare minimum to get out of the class. Teachers struggle to encourage and motivate such students, but then the lesson DOES become something to tolerate, for student and teacher both. Go back to step one and wash, rinse, repeat. 4. Bureaucracy. Today I had a fellow teacher who is in charge of a subject called Marine Studies (a senior subject that gives kids a lot of skills for jobs in tourism) teacher. He had just found out he had to get a "certified qualification" to teach students how to catch and release fish. Seriously? My typical day (not week) consists of 4 1/2 hours teaching, 1 hour of meetings, 1 to 2 hours of paperwork, and if I'm lucky 1 to 2 hours of preparation time. Lunch is about 20 to 30 minutes jammed in there somewhere.
You'll never meet someone as subversive as a passionate teacher, because we'll often have to break five or six "rules" or "government mandates" just to ensure the kids get some sort of learning experience in a given day. Basic teacher motto? "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission."
Not to mention that whenever I try to prototype something the first time, it ends up costing 2-3 times what my final version costs. Trial and error is expensive and you can't always reuse the parts.:(
1. Condoms are often damaged if stored in a wallet for any length of time. 2. Just married and trying for a baby. I think I'd get shot if my wife found condoms in my wallet.:D
I assumed medical details were handled by the Social Security Number? I know it's a tax number, but from what I've heard, it's sometimes/often used for identification purposes as well, and I assumed that it is/becoming an over-arching identification system in America?
In Australia, the Tax File Number is only used to submit tax returns. Most of us have to look at last year's return in order to remember it to put on this year's return.
Seriously? That's your argument? A wallet's like a car and we only use a car for transport?
What I carry in my wallet, even when I'm cash-free. Driver's Licence, Medicare Card, business cards and phone numbers before I enter/scan them into my smartphone, receipts from expensive purchases (which I store when I get home) and lacteze tablets.
Now I know that people are going to say "Store your driver's licence in your car" but in Australia, the driver's license is an often-used piece of identification. Want to collect a parcel? "Do you have your driver's licence on you?" Want to get into a club. "Do you have a driver's licence or proof-of-age card?" (My wife still gets asked for ID and we're both in our 30's.) I also know that non-Australians are going to say "Why don't you remember your Medicare Card number and leave the card at home?" In Australia, everything medical is usually done from the physical card, and if a medical emergency pops up, you want the card right on you. Finally, EVERY purchase in Australia results in a receipt. (I've heard foreigners comment on the paper-happiness of Australia.) Most small receipts get tossed, but it's happened enough times that I get home, notice something wrong with a purchase (double charged, wrong item, etc.) and have to have some proof of purchase when I get back to the shop. If that doesn't happen, I throw the receipt away at home.
So you see, my options are: carry a wallet, even if it has no money in it; or carry a handbag.:P
As I commented in a post above, it's those $1 components that get electronic fiends into the store. If a shop only supplies $20 cell phone holsters and chargers, I pretty much won't ever have a need to go in there. You can get those things cheaper at department stores, and how many phone holsters do you really need?
It's interesting in Australia, because we seem to have this progression pattern in electronic stores.
First there was Tandy, which used to be the ONLY electronics component supplier in Australia, but then they decided to focus on prebuilt electronics. This encouraged Dick Smith (The man and the company) to start up a business to fill the component supplier gap. But then a decade or so ago, their choice of components suddenly dropped as they to decided to focus on prebuilt electronics. So everyone flocked to Jaycar. In a few years, will they stop being a major supplier of components?
I honestly don't see why either of the first two companies decided to go this way. The number of times I've gone into a store looking for one or two components, and end up buying something five times more expensive because it caught my eye while browsing. Apparently RadioShack has finally just figured this out.:)
I am old enough to remember the old system. But I also remember a lot of politicians saying "We'll use it to cut Income Tax." at the time. Some states kept that promise. Others didn't.
Because we've never had the Australian government put some thing in place, and then use it for some dubious use beyond the original purpose... you know, like the Goods and Services Tax.
"As of late?" I got pissed off with Sony when I bought a minidisk recorder and found out that because they invented/used a proprietary format, I had to pull the recordings onto my Linux machine at 1x speed through the line-in. That was over 10 years ago.
I can't remember who said this, but it stuck in my mind.
Proprietary software has the money to buy some of the best programmers in the business... but they can't buy ALL of them. Open source software lets everyone play.
I noticed this exact same effect when Blender was open sourced. For years it seemed that new semi-commercial versions only included minimal improvements (bug fixes really), and then everyone seemed dead-set determined to shoehorn new subsystems and engines into the application in the shortest time possible.
Then you get gimp, who until recently, seemed determined to keep new features (filmgimp extensions for one) out. I know they said it was because they wanted to use gegl, but it seems open source projects (Enlightenment, anyone?) either die or get very ill the instant someone says "rewrite".
They're finally back on track, but I can't help thinking that it's too late. If someone could combine the one-layer select/paint and transform tools of Gimp (forget layers and masks) into Blender's image editor, Blender's node compositor could conceivably become the new paradigm of image editing. (Going from layers and groups, to nodes and flows.) Blender's node editor already supports film-level colour resolution.
I used to use Evolution at home, and Outlook at work. I still use Outlook at work, but feed it through Gmail/Calendar/Tasks as a backend. If it wasn't for the fact that I didn't want my students to know my private Gmail address, I'd still be using the Google apps exclusively. I don't use Google Docs much, mainly because most of the data I work with is private student/school data, and I don't want to risk that big of a security hole. At home I just use the Google apps.
In your own words, encyclopedias were overpriced. If they hadn't tried to screw people over so much, would there have been such a strong drive to create Wikipedia? I find this significant, because you can see the same thing starting to happen with textbooks and big label music. If they hadn't been so greedy in the past, they would have held out longer before making themselves redundant in the present.
And ramping up resources for education won't do a DAMN thing while kids are being told by everything else in society that it's more important to be pretty, popular and 'fun' than smart and successful.
My evidence for this stance? Jackass I and II Reality TV Every ad/CD/movie/product targeted towards teenagers in the last two decades.
An apprenticeship is much like a black belt in martial arts. Attainment doesn't denote proficiency or the end of training, just that they're now save enough to let them play with the big boys. It can take years of experience to create a master machinist or welder.
I'm academically trained and I'd definitely NOT class toolmaking as 'low-skill' - metallurgy, tempering, shaping, cutting edges, welding, etc. Anything involving engineering practices (mechanic, carpentry, plumbing for example) is pretty complex to learn and do, even if it's done through trade schools (TAFE) rather than universities. (Have you SEEN the books recommended for Australian TAFE engineering or mechanical degrees? *shudder* There's a lot of very high level maths there.)
But on the other hand, a hypothetical job-swap between true 'low-skill' jobs such as house cleaning, fast food service or politics isn't going to cause the country to collapse. In Australia we have something called the "Tall Poppy" syndrome (As in "Tall Poppies get their heads cut off."), where people seem to delight in classing people as "arrogant Ivory Tower Academics" or "humble, honest Average Joe's" with no recognition of the existence of the (very wide) middle ground or cross-over. I've met plenty of self-labelled "Average Joe's" who can out-arrogance anyone I've met at Uni.
Very true. There is only one feature that I find Microsoft Office has that I wish LibreOffice would get, and that's the solver algorithm in Excel (Generalised Reduced Gradient). There are a small group of problems that I CAN'T solve in Calc, that Excel chews through. *sigh* So at work, I'm stuck with switching back to Microsoft Office (Uggghhh) whenever I need the stronger solver.
"If our public education required a couple of semesters of common sense..." IF? IF?????
I'm a teacher in Australia. I just recently finished off teaching two year 10 (Think 14 to 15 year olds) maths classes a unit on Percentages and Budgeting, including: calculating discounts; overtime; simple interest (as a gateway to compound interest later on in the year); and Goods and Services Tax, as well as applying all this to coming up with budgets. Now tell most adults about this, and they go, "Oh, that stuff's useful, not like that algebra stuff." (Fair enough - they may have a point for most people.) How did one third of my kids react though? "Why do we need to know this?" or "I can get an accountant to do that for me." One quarter of the class didn't pass the exam, despite me busting a gut to get them to try and learn this, and despite me telling them how important it was. (Because hey, who ever listens to someone over 20 when you're a teenager nowadays.)
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You're the sort of parent I love to have for my students. I send emails home to each parent at the start of the year so they have my email address. :(
I get about 1/5 of parents taking advantage of this.
Damn straight. As a teacher I can say that the education system of Australia needs a major overhaul, but it will only work if it happens at the community level. Additionally, the needed overhaul is less about resources, training and funding, and more about attitudes and approaches.
Governments will try to put any ... darned (gotta control my swearing) ... thing in place, often with little thought about what's in the community, what types of jobs are available and what the teachers, parents and students are saying. It's something I've seen in lots of jobs, educational and non-educational.
There's always someone who thinks they can improve a system without actually taking the time to look at what's in the system. Absentee bosses and armchair experts. :(
Look at our economy today. All the "experts" with all their high-dollar educations have proven themselves to be inept bunglers.
I take it you are referring to the "Credit Crunch" and "Subprime Mortgage"?
In actual fact, the 'experts' as you refer to them, developed some very powerful mathematical models that are still in use, but they were smart enough to know that the models had limitations. (The big limit in the Scholes-Black model is that it's a way to assess risk in an investment instrument AT THAT TIME. However, risk levels change, and the Sholes-Black model can't predict that.)
Then arrogant, ignorant and over-privileged C grade CEOs' (Think George W. Bushesque rubes.) took those models and used them in ways that had the original 'experts' VERY nervous. (Effectively the CEOs' took the snapshot risk assessment of the Scholes-Black model and treated it as a forever-and-eternal gauge of risk.)
So it's more a matter of greedy and uneducated bosses taking mathematical tools they didn't understand and ineptly bungling things. Several 'experts' were screaming warnings years ago, but there were a lot of people out there were ignoring them because 'ho ho ho, they're just academic experts'. And then when things blew up, everyone starts blaming the 'experts', rather than the CEOs'. Pisses me off.
Actually, the problem is that there is no real job training in education. Believe it or not, not everyone has the desire to be that intellectual. Some would just like to have some marketable skills that they can earn a respectable living with. Unfortunately, we've created a belief that everyone should go to college and if they don't they will fail. For those that are better suited to job training, we just ignore. And, that's why you end up with a large population with no real skills in an economic environment where anyone without those skills isn't really needed.
But, if you want to get to the real root problem of education, it's the one-size-fits-all mentality. People have different interests and different capacities for learning. If it's not tailored for that, it's never going to be effective.
I'd argue with bits of that rather strongly. Last year I had a class of kids that didn't know that 1 x value = value. There is some stuff that nearly everyone HAS to learn. But over the last two decades in Australia, we've had everyone saying "Let's make education fun.", "Let's make education more 'real'." and "Let's tailor the learning experience to the individual." Fine sentiments, but from what I've seen, nearly everything that's been put in place has had the opposite effect, and lots of kids are missing out on fundamental skills.
The thing is that my father's and grandfather's schooling was much more "one-size-fits-all" than modern schooling, but most kids left with those real skills you've mentioned.
As a high school teacher, I would like to point out that mediocrity is effectively enforced on us in several ways:
1. Heavier, more splintered and more prescriptive syllabuses mean that we have less and less flexibility to adapt teaching to the individual. (It's not the amount of content that's a problem, but the fact that the kids get 3-5 weeks on each topic before we have to switch to a new area to cover the syllabus.)
2. Larger class sizes. In a class of 25, you may have one or two students who really struggle. You can just about keep these guys up to speed without disadvantaging the rest. Increase the class size to 30, and you have less time to spend on each kid, and you'll end up with five or six kids who struggle. Now you need to make a choice. Do you dumb stuff down to help the five or six, leaving everyone else bored out of their brains, or do you abandon 1/6 of the class? There is a limit to how large a spread of abilities it's possible to teach across in a single lesson.
3. Academic learning isn't highly valued in Australian society, but grades are. So some parents and most students get more upset about failing a single exam than they are about long term, effective learning. This causes a feedback loop where students treat education as something to tolerate. Schools become filled with a lot of kids that only want to do the bare minimum to get out of the class. Teachers struggle to encourage and motivate such students, but then the lesson DOES become something to tolerate, for student and teacher both. Go back to step one and wash, rinse, repeat.
4. Bureaucracy. Today I had a fellow teacher who is in charge of a subject called Marine Studies (a senior subject that gives kids a lot of skills for jobs in tourism) teacher. He had just found out he had to get a "certified qualification" to teach students how to catch and release fish. Seriously? My typical day (not week) consists of 4 1/2 hours teaching, 1 hour of meetings, 1 to 2 hours of paperwork, and if I'm lucky 1 to 2 hours of preparation time. Lunch is about 20 to 30 minutes jammed in there somewhere.
You'll never meet someone as subversive as a passionate teacher, because we'll often have to break five or six "rules" or "government mandates" just to ensure the kids get some sort of learning experience in a given day. Basic teacher motto? "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission."
Except that his feelings of loyalty or ownership will quickly vanish when he realises that very few employers have any sense of loyalty to him.
Not to mention that whenever I try to prototype something the first time, it ends up costing 2-3 times what my final version costs. Trial and error is expensive and you can't always reuse the parts. :(
What, no condoms? ;-)
1. Condoms are often damaged if stored in a wallet for any length of time. :D
2. Just married and trying for a baby. I think I'd get shot if my wife found condoms in my wallet.
I assumed medical details were handled by the Social Security Number? I know it's a tax number, but from what I've heard, it's sometimes/often used for identification purposes as well, and I assumed that it is/becoming an over-arching identification system in America?
In Australia, the Tax File Number is only used to submit tax returns. Most of us have to look at last year's return in order to remember it to put on this year's return.
Seriously? That's your argument? A wallet's like a car and we only use a car for transport?
What I carry in my wallet, even when I'm cash-free.
Driver's Licence, Medicare Card, business cards and phone numbers before I enter/scan them into my smartphone, receipts from expensive purchases (which I store when I get home) and lacteze tablets.
Now I know that people are going to say "Store your driver's licence in your car" but in Australia, the driver's license is an often-used piece of identification. Want to collect a parcel? "Do you have your driver's licence on you?" Want to get into a club. "Do you have a driver's licence or proof-of-age card?" (My wife still gets asked for ID and we're both in our 30's.)
I also know that non-Australians are going to say "Why don't you remember your Medicare Card number and leave the card at home?" In Australia, everything medical is usually done from the physical card, and if a medical emergency pops up, you want the card right on you.
Finally, EVERY purchase in Australia results in a receipt. (I've heard foreigners comment on the paper-happiness of Australia.) Most small receipts get tossed, but it's happened enough times that I get home, notice something wrong with a purchase (double charged, wrong item, etc.) and have to have some proof of purchase when I get back to the shop. If that doesn't happen, I throw the receipt away at home.
So you see, my options are: carry a wallet, even if it has no money in it; or carry a handbag. :P
As I commented in a post above, it's those $1 components that get electronic fiends into the store. If a shop only supplies $20 cell phone holsters and chargers, I pretty much won't ever have a need to go in there. You can get those things cheaper at department stores, and how many phone holsters do you really need?
It's interesting in Australia, because we seem to have this progression pattern in electronic stores.
First there was Tandy, which used to be the ONLY electronics component supplier in Australia, but then they decided to focus on prebuilt electronics.
This encouraged Dick Smith (The man and the company) to start up a business to fill the component supplier gap. But then a decade or so ago, their choice of components suddenly dropped as they to decided to focus on prebuilt electronics.
So everyone flocked to Jaycar. In a few years, will they stop being a major supplier of components?
I honestly don't see why either of the first two companies decided to go this way. The number of times I've gone into a store looking for one or two components, and end up buying something five times more expensive because it caught my eye while browsing. Apparently RadioShack has finally just figured this out. :)
I am old enough to remember the old system. But I also remember a lot of politicians saying "We'll use it to cut Income Tax." at the time.
Some states kept that promise. Others didn't.
Because we've never had the Australian government put some thing in place, and then use it for some dubious use beyond the original purpose ... you know, like the Goods and Services Tax.
"As of late?"
I got pissed off with Sony when I bought a minidisk recorder and found out that because they invented/used a proprietary format, I had to pull the recordings onto my Linux machine at 1x speed through the line-in. That was over 10 years ago.
I can't remember who said this, but it stuck in my mind.
Proprietary software has the money to buy some of the best programmers in the business ... but they can't buy ALL of them. Open source software lets everyone play.
I noticed this exact same effect when Blender was open sourced. For years it seemed that new semi-commercial versions only included minimal improvements (bug fixes really), and then everyone seemed dead-set determined to shoehorn new subsystems and engines into the application in the shortest time possible.
Then you get gimp, who until recently, seemed determined to keep new features (filmgimp extensions for one) out. I know they said it was because they wanted to use gegl, but it seems open source projects (Enlightenment, anyone?) either die or get very ill the instant someone says "rewrite".
They're finally back on track, but I can't help thinking that it's too late. If someone could combine the one-layer select/paint and transform tools of Gimp (forget layers and masks) into Blender's image editor, Blender's node compositor could conceivably become the new paradigm of image editing. (Going from layers and groups, to nodes and flows.) Blender's node editor already supports film-level colour resolution.
I used to use Evolution at home, and Outlook at work.
I still use Outlook at work, but feed it through Gmail/Calendar/Tasks as a backend. If it wasn't for the fact that I didn't want my students to know my private Gmail address, I'd still be using the Google apps exclusively. I don't use Google Docs much, mainly because most of the data I work with is private student/school data, and I don't want to risk that big of a security hole.
At home I just use the Google apps.
Hmmm. Look at the Hollywood stars and starlets - if there is a point where consumption hits a limit, we haven't found it yet.
In your own words, encyclopedias were overpriced. If they hadn't tried to screw people over so much, would there have been such a strong drive to create Wikipedia? I find this significant, because you can see the same thing starting to happen with textbooks and big label music.
If they hadn't been so greedy in the past, they would have held out longer before making themselves redundant in the present.
And ramping up resources for education won't do a DAMN thing while kids are being told by everything else in society that it's more important to be pretty, popular and 'fun' than smart and successful.
My evidence for this stance?
Jackass I and II
Reality TV
Every ad/CD/movie/product targeted towards teenagers in the last two decades.
An apprenticeship is much like a black belt in martial arts. Attainment doesn't denote proficiency or the end of training, just that they're now save enough to let them play with the big boys. It can take years of experience to create a master machinist or welder.
I'm academically trained and I'd definitely NOT class toolmaking as 'low-skill' - metallurgy, tempering, shaping, cutting edges, welding, etc. Anything involving engineering practices (mechanic, carpentry, plumbing for example) is pretty complex to learn and do, even if it's done through trade schools (TAFE) rather than universities. (Have you SEEN the books recommended for Australian TAFE engineering or mechanical degrees? *shudder* There's a lot of very high level maths there.)
But on the other hand, a hypothetical job-swap between true 'low-skill' jobs such as house cleaning, fast food service or politics isn't going to cause the country to collapse.
In Australia we have something called the "Tall Poppy" syndrome (As in "Tall Poppies get their heads cut off."), where people seem to delight in classing people as "arrogant Ivory Tower Academics" or "humble, honest Average Joe's" with no recognition of the existence of the (very wide) middle ground or cross-over. I've met plenty of self-labelled "Average Joe's" who can out-arrogance anyone I've met at Uni.
Very true. There is only one feature that I find Microsoft Office has that I wish LibreOffice would get, and that's the solver algorithm in Excel (Generalised Reduced Gradient). There are a small group of problems that I CAN'T solve in Calc, that Excel chews through. *sigh* So at work, I'm stuck with switching back to Microsoft Office (Uggghhh) whenever I need the stronger solver.
"If our public education required a couple of semesters of common sense ..." IF? IF?????
I'm a teacher in Australia. I just recently finished off teaching two year 10 (Think 14 to 15 year olds) maths classes a unit on Percentages and Budgeting, including: calculating discounts; overtime; simple interest (as a gateway to compound interest later on in the year); and Goods and Services Tax, as well as applying all this to coming up with budgets.
Now tell most adults about this, and they go, "Oh, that stuff's useful, not like that algebra stuff." (Fair enough - they may have a point for most people.)
How did one third of my kids react though?
"Why do we need to know this?" or "I can get an accountant to do that for me." One quarter of the class didn't pass the exam, despite me busting a gut to get them to try and learn this, and despite me telling them how important it was. (Because hey, who ever listens to someone over 20 when you're a teenager nowadays.)
You can lead a horse to water ...