Hye Caulley: I agree with you--education is stultifying right now. There is more innovation in a year in preschools than there has been in higher education in 30 years--and I know because I've worked in both and everything in between.I think online learning will inevitably grow, but I also think that apprenticeships, individually-designed programs, and students being able to do their degrees by attending multiple campuses or taking online classes at multiple sites would be some possible trends. Each student learns so differently that I can imagine future classes tailored to learning styles and challenges. How internationalism will fit into the mix is another area that offers possibilities.Of course, rightwing reactionaries will do everything and anything to keep things exactly as they are, with the result that students will continue to suffer, be bored, and waste their time. And, if students aren't vigilant, they will find their freedoms curtailed further and costs ri! sing under corporate education policies....Show more
Bianca Lannier: east...you are stuck in a rut dude, get over it.
Frank Crummell: We cant make education policy by looking at what *you* did not use. "those who want to be engineers" - you agree that society has use for those trained in math and sciences - but you are willing to allow kids who do not know what they want make the decision to limit their future? you can punch in numbers all day - ever seen someone at a pay counter unable to figure change because the register was stuck? its sad really. When do you force *kids* to make the decision to limit their future? 8th grade so they can skip algebra? high school? how can a high schooler make such an important decision?No - what we do is prepare everyone - so that those who do choose to go into math fields have the basics to get there. We dont allow people who call it "useless garbage" to make our education policy - instead we rightly leave it to the experts a! t Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech, Johns Hopkins - you get the point.I ! teach 7th grade math and science - I am lucky enough to have seen my former students graduate as engineers, nurses, a few doctors and a real rocket scientist - It is unthinkable that there is a suggestion that they would miss out on all that because of a decision they made as a minor when they didnt see the use. (yes - the rocket scientist had issues in 7th grade math)btw- there are many online schools as you suggest already - businesses consider them second tier - who would you want as your brain surgeon - Johns Hopkins trained or "american online medschool?...Show more
Raye Tredennick: I agree completely. It matters little if we can do something manually as the tools and resources no longer exist to accomplish it even if we knew how. People learn in different ways at different paces. Some are audible, where others like myself retain nothing from what is spoken but what I read I have excellent comprehension. Sitting through a lecture is excruciating torture for me, ! where as for some reading a text book is just as painful. Why not cater to what works best for the individual? It's less expensive and far more effective. Who actually learns ANYTHING in high school aside from social skills? I took honors classes and those were the only classes I learned squat aside from a creative writing course I took. Everything else was so remedial or so badly trivialized the subject that it was often distorted to the point we were essentially taught bad fiction rather than say science or history. The whole idea of memorizing names and dates has given history such a horrible rap that people flee it once out of school instead of understand it. A great number of our political debates would not exist today if most Americans had ANY historical knowledge at all. History isn't about names and dates it's about what happened, who it happened too and why. THAT is compelling, THAT is interesting and THAT is what should be taught. Home schooling and private school! ing dramatically outscore public educated individuals. Considering a hu! ge percentage of especially the home schooled are people kicked out of public schools for behavior problems and or dire circumstances which prevent normal school and it really magnifies the failure of our education system to teach even the very things it was designed to teach. I agree many subjects are outdated. Beyond basic algebra who but an engineer/Physicist/Astronomer has ever used Calculus or other higher math. Not many. Yet they don't teach how to balance a checkbook or today something all adults should know is how to check and fix your credit. Kids don't get exercise because schools are terrified they might get sued and bullying is a major problem I feel in part because kids are not allowed to just fight it out when they are younger. Instead they bottle it up until they go Columbine, kill themselves or wind up on serious meds. Meanwhile sentence diagramming is taught? Who would EVER use that for RL? Nobody !!!Self paced learning is essential and the whole idea of! being finished with school is itself obsolete. Instead of graduating OUT of school you should graduate into post high school as there is so much to learn that is so valuable to anyone no matter what your interest and how you make a buck that we could all benefit from continuing education pretty much until they throw dirt on us. Maybe it's just creative writing or art or philosophy but we can all enrich our lives well beyond the age of 18 and just the act of learning itself for longer periods will battle the severity and frequency of Alzheimer. So I suggest voluntary continued education for life. Some of the things you talk about are happening. Online universites are gaining credibility. More and more computers are in use and alternates like home schooling. In some areas sports teams are being made up of home schooled people. I also suggest reforming English spelling. A little a time. Look at how much time we waste trying to memorize ie or ei, le or el. That's just insane! . We want people to speak English why torture them? There is no need to! preserve the etymology of a word, it's already well documented at this point. Lets decide. Is it el or le, wipe out most silent letters. The whole idea of language is to communicate and our haphazard spelling in English is an impediment to communicating. It is an obstacle to learning and why we have spelling all the way into high school. A student should be done with spelling by 2nd or 3rd grade at the latest. We also need to reform grammar. Languages change with usage. They are like a river, it'll flow through the path of least resistance and all the artificial damns in the world can only hope to delay the inevitable change. We could teach things like science instead of wasting every bodies time memorizing how to spell words....Show more
An Trebil: Some of your ideas are really interesting. I hope you don't mind if I abscond with some of them for discussion at the next staff meeting. (I'll give you credit for the ideas, though.) Some of your ideas are already in ! place. My lectures are already available live on a Web-Cast, and students who miss the lecture can view it using the online archive. Those who do not attend the live lecture can participate in discussions via IM and email. I also hold meetings with students registered with the eLearning program via Skype, since many of them are in other cities or other countries. My course materials are available only in ePub format, readable using Kindles, iPods or other reader, or on laptops using the free Adobe Digital Library. Other textbooks I use for the course are also available in hard copy or ePub format for about 25% of the cost, and no dead trees. The reference materials I encourage the students to use can be found in the reference sections of libraries, or they can be downloaded at no charge from the Project Gutenberg online library. We still use classrooms or other meeting spaces for seminar groups and workshops. Thanks for caring about ways to revamp and modernize the! education system....Show more
Faviola Dewire: Eastacad...guess w! hat: Those morons who cannot count change when their cash register is offline...almost all of them took years of math. Just because a kid sits in a classroom, doesn't mean they learn anything. Understanding that 2+2=4 is not the same thing as memorizing that 2+2-=4. There are all sorts of ways kids can pass classes without learning anything. Studying, for example. I knew kids that studied til the cows came home, just to pass a test. Two seconds after the test is over, they can't remember a single thing about the subject, let alone have a conversation about it.Again, memorizing is not learning. Knowing the answer without knowing why that's the answer is pretty useless in real life. But it seems to be fine for school.GOZ2FAST, if you want to fix education, ban the tenure system. It is the worst thing that has happened to education ever. Protecting horrible teachers just because they have senority, rewarding teachers for their longevity rather than performance, it's just a mi! x of ingredients that can't possibly add up to properly-taught kids....Show more
No comments:
Post a Comment