Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
Education
There isn't a general thread discussing ideas, innovations, views, advice, experience, and anecdotes on education, so I am creating it.
To start the thread off, here is an article discussing a new school that attempts to minimize the class and income factors in public education. I think it is a pretty neat idea and would love to teach at such a school when I complete my Ed.M. if it fulfills its potential!
To start the thread off, here is an article discussing a new school that attempts to minimize the class and income factors in public education. I think it is a pretty neat idea and would love to teach at such a school when I complete my Ed.M. if it fulfills its potential!
Comments
His name is Gatto. He has metal joints. Beat him up, and get 15 silver points.
Really, we need to be teaching more critical thinking skills and less useless trivia. You need a body of factual knowledge, but it seems to me that the education system we've got is hell-bent on continuing to try teaching all the information we know, when we're at a point of having too much information for any one person to know it all.
The school of win.
What the hell is up with the bullshit I'm being force fed in education classes? These fuckers are some of the most terrible teachers I've ever had, and they are the ones training the next generation of teachers! I literally have a guy that is giving us a test on a PowerPoint presentation he put on the Internet about material he did not cover in class. What we did cover was "inspirational" clips of teachers from movies and even more "useful" and "exciting" buzzwords.
Fuck that guy!
Reform in the voluntary education arena, however, is quite possible and very necessary. Unfortunately, there are financial considerations. A large number of mediocre students being issued degrees after 4 years of tuition and fees generates quite a bit of money. If those students had been expelled due to poor performance, their revenue streams would have been lost. Granted, by increasing the caliber of the person graduated there are higher chances of hefty alumni donations in the future, but this is a very unpredictable source of income. In general it seems as if the goal for some schools is simply to get the maximum number of people paying the maximum tuition that their credit limit can bear, and giving them the bare minimum in return.
I think a wonderful place to start would be to reform hiring practices. Don't require a Masters for work where a Bachelors would suffice, and don't require a Bachelors where a high school diploma would suffice. It's because of these arbitrary inflated requirements that there is pressure to debase the value of a degree.
...I like them. Makes mornings easier and mostly eliminates fashion competition.
So some schools, like the military school, would have uniforms, and others wouldn't. Everyone would just go to the place that was best for them.
I needed to get this off of my chest, I feel so much better now!
My school wasn't as freewheeling as Sudbury Valley, but it was still pretty free-form compared to most conventional high schools. Basically, it was a self-directed program, meaning you could work on any subject at any time anywhere on school grounds, with seminars and most tests attended on your own personal schedule. You still had to take and complete all the core subjects (Math, English, Social Studies, one or two Sciences, PhysEd, and *shudder* Religion), but for all your other classes, you could take whatever you wanted as long as you at least filled up all your credit requirements for an Alberta high school diploma. I described my experience at that school a while back in this thread, if anyone wants more details. Overall, it was great! I really wish more schools like it existed in the world.
I would have hated uniforms. I imagine I would have been one of those rabble-rousers who would have refused to wear one and caused enough trouble to eventually have been spared the indignity. The district hinted and the idea of uniforms once, to the immediate and fierce outcry of the students, the parents, and the community in general. A petition signed by the majority of the student body agreeing to refuse to submit was delivered to the vice principle within a few weeks of the rumor about possibly considering uniforms getting around. Parents stormed the next PTA meeting furious that uniforms were even being considered.
Of course, if we had more stratified education, then I could accept uniforms for problem schools if there were evidence that it would help. I just feel that, for non-problem students, such as myself, all a uniform would have done is engendered my own disrespect for authority and general frustration with the school itself.
Actually, I have an interesting(ish) story about clothes. On an average day, I would wager than any of you would be able to pick me out of a classroom of kids--I'm always the one with the ROFLcopter shirt on, or the sleepy one in the caffeine molecule hoodie. However, Friday was picture day, and my mom insisted that I wear a polo shirt, rather than whichever ThinkGeek shirt paired with a pair of shorts I would have pulled out of my closet. Later in the day, my friends told me they didn't recognize me at first without a geek shirt on. My school has a robotics team. If this pressure you speak of exists in my school, I certainly don't notice it. I find ignoring this sort of thing makes everything easier. Also, at first glance, Hollister looked like Hitler.
The one that made the most sense to me was the argument that stated the goal was to have students aim for a professional appearance, since they would need to look professional in the real job market. (Yes, Rym, I'm aware of your Hawaiian shirts, but we're talking huddled masses here, not everyone being awesome /sarcasim) They basically told students that school was their work, and that work required uniforms. Their uniform was something they should be proud of, since the school was performing so well, and that they should be in 'school mode' while the uniform is on. Most of the students bought in to this way of thinking, and were great students in school, regardless of what went on outside.
Even now, the charter school I teach at (it's grades k-3) requires uniforms. You can either buy them from the school for a relatively inexpensive amount (profits go to buying supplies, helping the school maintain itself, or assisting other students buy uniforms), or you can go wherever and buy whatever as long as it fits the dress code. Most of the parents love this because they can buy school clothes cheaply. Families from poorer backgrounds like it because their child doesn't stand out for having poor quality clothes, or one or two sets of clothing because no one can tell. The kids also make an effort to look put-together in their uniforms (shirts tucked in, etc.) and most of them either like them or don't care.
Where I lived, there was definitely a bias based on clothing. Stupid? Yes. But it was a middle-upper class to upper-class area of Maryland. I ignored it by the time I was in Jr. High, but many students didn't understand why I thought they were morons for spending $100 on a pair of pre-ripped stone-washed jeans. Or why I laughed when they thought they were all ghetto and urban when they wore designer jeans & boxers, new Timberlands, silver wallet chains, and over-sized brand-name team jackets for the Dallas Cowboys in Maryland in June. If mommy and daddy bought you an Acura for your second car because you totaled the first one, you're not ghetto.