One thing that unites all of us on Teamliquid is that we've all received an education. We've all experienced years of it, from the elementary school days when everyone received straight A's to the hours spent cramming for exams. You're all masters of learning.
You all know what's good and bad about the educational system. The one we're using today is outdated, and corrupt. We learn a lot of useless shit and too many people fall through the gaps. This is at least my opinion.
So I have a question. You're the new head of education in your country. How would you change the way education is taught? Would you change it?
Here's an example of how I would change education given my current experiences in University. + Show Spoiler +
I think my University is pretty hard, it's like the only big University in North America that hasn't yet subscribed (to some degree) to grade inflation. Average GPA for Engineers is still a 2.3, while the entering GPA of high school students is an 89.
I won't comment about the usefulness of my major since I have not yet graduated, I think that we students were taught a great deal of breadth, but not enough depth. In addition, I was hoping for real world applications to my courses, courses on the approaches to learning, to researching information that you didn't understand, to being responsible with credit cards, etc...
However one thing that I'd like to focus on is the number of assignments that we were given. Every week our merciless professors handed us five or six assignments with weekly quizzes and tests. Each day was just trying to finish the next assignment, which was rather counterproductive since, by giving us so many graded assignments, the professors actually hindered our learning. We students didn't have the time to learn the material, we just had to provide answers to questions and submit our reports. So the focus was not on learning the material, but rather on just looking for that blurb in the textbook that would allow us to plug in an answer to our questions.
The assignments were worth very little, 1 or 2% but it felt very important to get as many percentages as possible. Still, sometimes I think it would have been more productive to skip assignments and just focus on learning.
FUCK this SHIT! Were I head of education in Canada, I'd try to make sure that every student who wanted to try hard, succeeded and became a better person because of their education.
Instead of having professors give out a jazillion assignments, (which would inadvertantly lead to cheating and copying from overworked students then leading to the students not learning anything) I'd try to immerse the students in their assignments. I'd put them in a tutorial in front of their computers and have them go through everything in a step by step process.
Instead of using labs as a grading tool, students should be shown how to do their labs. Too much of University is just trying to get through the work, and memorizing formulas and steps to doing problems. I want to be immersed in the problem solving process. I want to understand my field. I want to know that I have the skills needed to do my job once I graduate.
This may sound like I miss having my hand held like in high school or middle school... but that's not it. I want to learn, and if that means that I need to have my hand held to do it, then so be it. It's better than 8 hours staring at a textbook trying to understand some technical jargon, and knowing that I can't even ask my professors face to face in a class of 120!
Simply put, I would make tutorials (classes where a graduate student known as a teaching assistant works with students) graded by attendance rather than testing the students on whether they did an assignment. I would have the teaching assistants go through the steps of how to do things in a step by step process, and having the students try it out themselves... slowly.
I think Universities should be obligated to make sure that once a student gets accepted, they are given the tools they need to succeed. (My school just started offering free tutoring... if you decide to skip lunch you can ask a paid grad student how to do a problem from a course they've long since forgotten the name of).
One thing my school is good for though, is being ridiculously hard on engineeers, so they learn to be more productive. But other than that, I'm going to come out of this school with less practical knowledge than I would have had I gone to community college... not to mention, probably a higher GPA to find jobs with.
Education comes from the latin 'educo' meaning to develop or draw out from within.
You are not gaining a lot of education through cramming and studying for tests. How much information you can remember from your textbook is not necessarily a reflection of how much education you are attaining. Education is attained through the development of your mental faculties (Imagination, will, reason, intuition, etc...) and then producing results that you desire, without violating the rights of others.
The public school system is also terrible. It teaches math, english, science, and history. From that children are expected to understand thinking. You do learn a lot about thinking this way, but without knowing exactly what is required to think effectively, the system is incomplete. Children also are not taught much about perspective, making decisions, the subconscious mind (its programming is responsible for 98% of your actions), etc... It really only sets people up to work at 9-5 jobs that they dislike rather than living life how they want to live...making as much money as they desire to live the life they want to live.
If I were to restructure the education where I went to grade school, I'd change the elementary, intermediate, and senior high system.Elementary school will be from K - 6th. Middle School is gone. High school will be from 7th to 10th or 11th grade depending on how fast you finish or if you wanna have a less workload. I then would proceed to start making classes last for only one semester. That means AP tests will be administered every semester, not just in May. Then, I'd start the school day at around 9AM and let it end around 7PM. There will be a break for lunch where you could go home, study, or do whatever you do from 12PM to 2PM. Since classes don't span a whole year, you can take 3-5 classes a semester. You would only take those 3-5 classes daily and have a whole new set next semester. Also, in high school, you can take specialized tracks starting in 9th grade. Tracks for if you want to become musician, engineer, journalist, and whatever.
my school bones me in the butt with gpa too true facts
but seriously i would put more money into the average kids. the ways most schools work are:
top 10% of kids = 30% of funding bottom 10% of kids (i.e. special ed) = 50% of funding remaining 80% = 20% of funding
basically the more top students schools produce the better they look, so there's an incentive to boost the top kids. There are also subsidies to help disabled kids so they get a lot of funding too. But the middle kids get squat, and end up basically... average. They need to be taught to exceed in other ways, like creativity. Creativity, while certainly encouraged more in US schools, is still not as encouraged as I think should be necessary to create people with new ideas. Sure you have a lot of these super smart 12-14 year olds going to school because they've memorized all of the world's history or whatnot, but you never hear a lot of them amount to anything. It's because their creative complexes have been stunted with their memorization.
We live in an age where you basically need a college degree to do anything. But in the 1980s, we had people that were heads of Wall Street that barely finished high school. And they were doing just fine without a degree. Instead of producing a narrow system where everybody needs a college degree to go anywhere (and therefore, gets essentially brainwashed just a little bit more) we should favor a system where less people need to go through college to do things they want in life. Advancement should be possible whether or not you have a PhD or don't even have a GRE. Some people just hate school, that's all.
As a teacher, I'd say privatizing education would go a LONG way in helping the collective educational prospects in the nation. That, and the wholesale acknowledgment by the communities we work in that we're actually doing a job xD
Can't tell you amount of shit you get as a teacher. Nor the degree of political finagling that goes on within a school board and it's relationship with a community. It's downright DISGUSTING. Total overhaul would be nice. And my solution would be privatized education that would function the same as our current system, but where by schools compete for students under the state's umbrella. Greater latitude for teachers to adjust themselves per class would be nice too.
Honestly, there's just so much shit I would change, and I don't have the time to write it all.
Also, Caller has the right idea. College is NOT for everyone. People need to realize that a degree is just a piece of paper that says, "I jumped through the hoops," nothing more. It has not actual reflection on the skills of that person outside of a cursory understanding that they can write a paper (which is a very useful skill given some professions).
On January 02 2011 12:41 Hidden_MotiveS wrote: One thing that unites all of us on Teamliquid is that we've all received an education. We've all experienced years of it, from the elementary school days when everyone received straight A's to the hours spent cramming for exams. You're all masters of learning.
You all know what's good and bad about the educational system. The one we're using today is outdated, and corrupt. We learn a lot of useless shit and too many people fall through the gaps. This is at least my opinion.
So I have a question. You're the new head of education in your country. How would you change the way education is taught? Would you change it?
Here's an example of how I would change education given my current experiences in University. + Show Spoiler +
I think my University is pretty hard, it's like the only big University in North America that hasn't yet subscribed (to some degree) to grade inflation. Average GPA for Engineers is still a 2.3, while the entering GPA of high school students is an 89.
I won't comment about the usefulness of my major since I have not yet graduated, I think that we students were taught a great deal of breadth, but not enough depth. In addition, I was hoping for real world applications to my courses, courses on the approaches to learning, to researching information that you didn't understand, to being responsible with credit cards, etc...
However one thing that I'd like to focus on is the number of assignments that we were given. Every week our merciless professors handed us five or six assignments with weekly quizzes and tests. Each day was just trying to finish the next assignment, which was rather counterproductive since, by giving us so many graded assignments, the professors actually hindered our learning. We students didn't have the time to learn the material, we just had to provide answers to questions and submit our reports. So the focus was not on learning the material, but rather on just looking for that blurb in the textbook that would allow us to plug in an answer to our questions.
The assignments were worth very little, 1 or 2% but it felt very important to get as many percentages as possible. Still, sometimes I think it would have been more productive to skip assignments and just focus on learning.
FUCK this SHIT! Were I head of education in Canada, I'd try to make sure that every student who wanted to try hard, succeeded and became a better person because of their education.
Instead of having professors give out a jazillion assignments, (which would inadvertantly lead to cheating and copying from overworked students then leading to the students not learning anything) I'd try to immerse the students in their assignments. I'd put them in a tutorial in front of their computers and have them go through everything in a step by step process.
Instead of using labs as a grading tool, students should be shown how to do their labs. Too much of University is just trying to get through the work, and memorizing formulas and steps to doing problems. I want to be immersed in the problem solving process. I want to understand my field. I want to know that I have the skills needed to do my job once I graduate.
This may sound like I miss having my hand held like in high school or middle school... but that's not it. I want to learn, and if that means that I need to have my hand held to do it, then so be it. It's better than 8 hours staring at a textbook trying to understand some technical jargon, and knowing that I can't even ask my professors face to face in a class of 120!
Simply put, I would make tutorials (classes where a graduate student known as a teaching assistant works with students) graded by attendance rather than testing the students on whether they did an assignment. I would have the teaching assistants go through the steps of how to do things in a step by step process, and having the students try it out themselves... slowly.
I think Universities should be obligated to make sure that once a student gets accepted, they are given the tools they need to succeed. (My school just started offering free tutoring... if you decide to skip lunch you can ask a paid grad student how to do a problem from a course they've long since forgotten the name of).
One thing my school is good for though, is being ridiculously hard on engineeers, so they learn to be more productive. But other than that, I'm going to come out of this school with less practical knowledge than I would have had I gone to community college... not to mention, probably a higher GPA to find jobs with.
I don't have many complaints, the system worked very well for me. I'd stop giving admissions advantages to kids from private schools and instead put heavier emphasis on standardized testing
I haven't watched the entire video, but so far the video made a very good point:
Public school according to zip code is not fair. In Toronto, regions with good public schools (such as A.Y. Jackson) have very high land price.
Part of my argument for privatizing education, at least partially. Give the parents a choice as to where they send their children and you make the schools compete for students, thus resulting in superior education programs.
Well I got about six minutes into the video... I really enjoyed watching them compare a group clearly unprivileged minorities with an all white, well groomed and obviously upper class group of Belgians.
OP makes it sound like the professors just give you a text book and tell you to learn everything in it and prepare for an exam at the end of the semester. I'm not quite sure how it is at other universities, but even at my university, which is a large public university, there are plenty of resources freely available to students if you reach out just a little. There's free tutoring, office hours, online tutoring, etc. And the assignments may seem pointless, they may even be pointless as far as your future career is concerned, but they are necessary to weed out the students who are just there to party, or lack the skills to succeed later on in their major and career. Last semester I felt like 99% of the assignments I had to complete were pointless for me, just look up the answer in the textbook and extract the useful information needed to complete the webwork. But just like doing something rote like copying notes is very useful for learning information, it turned out to help me a bunch. I didn't study at all for my finals and aced every one of them simply because I stayed awake in class, did all the webwork, and understood the labs.
I never got the impression that the labs or recitations were simply being used as a grading tool. Its really not difficult to write an A or a B lab report, and if students don't understand the lab, they can always talk with a TA.
As far as university level education goes, I think everything is ok. You have to endure jumping through hoops for the first couple of years, but it really is necessary to make sure everyone in a major is qualified for upper division classes.
For high school and younger, I would have to say there are a lot of problems, some of them related to the way public schools are set up. I spent my high school years bouncing around between a few charter schools, all of which proved better than typical public schools. Besides the fact that you get to know your teachers better (Students at the first charter school I attended often played with some teachers at a nearby PC bang type lan cafe), charter schools have more freedom on how to set up their curriculum. The weakest part of public school education is that it doesn't require students to write well or think critically. You'd be surprised at how many kids in college don't know how to put together a reasonably organized and thought out paper. A lot of the redundancies in undergraduate education are probably put in place to make sure that students pick up skills they really should have learned in high school or sooner.
There's so much to say. I have so many problems with education on every level. I'm very happy that our school was far better than everywhere else. I think I managed to get some of the best teachers possible which by a national standard is a freaking miracle.
I'll post more when I can think of a really solid synopsis of my ideas since this is a really intriguing OP.
Well I got about six minutes into the video... I really enjoyed watching them compare a group clearly unprivileged minorities with an all white, well groomed and obviously upper class group of Belgians.
Honestly. >_> I'm more infuriated by this video than by the educational system because it just showcases America's dying media. My high school has a top of the line math team with kids who can compete internationally and get 3rd in the world together, yet they never get showcased. Also, that Belgian kid who said, oh, this is so easy? Yeah, you shouldn't be saying that when you get only 76% of the questions right. -____-"
But really, how would I change the school system? I wouldn't, yet. I'd change the culture first. America has such a crappy culture toward education where the smart kids get looked down upon as nerds, creating a schism. Who wants to be a nerd, a dork, or a geek? Also, who wants to learn about math? Who wants to think? I just wanna plug numbers into a formula and get an answer. -_-" That part annoys me the most because I see it even from my good friends when they start taking a well-taught math class. =/ They blame the teacher for them not learning because the teacher doesn't spoon feed them.
Parents also don't help this as they always blame some other cause for their kids failing. Blame the school system, blame the teachers, but never blame your kids or your parenting! I mean, if they don't listen in class, it's the teachers fault, not the parents! No, it's the parents' fault for not instilling some sense of obedience through disciplining the kids. It still goes on today. My kids are obese! Schools need to change their diets! No, maybe you should stop buying McDonalds for dinner every night and get them to eat some vegetables.
Blah, point is, kids are too dependent these days, and parents don't take enough responsibility. High School education in America is decent enough a lot of the times. I mean, even if you can't learn in class, there's ALWAYS a library *be thankful for that* that you can go to and read classics to expand your mind.
As for college, I feel like American colleges are doing fine considering MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Princeton are considered amongst the best in the world. =/
On January 02 2011 16:53 ghrur wrote: Honestly. >_> I'm more infuriated by this video than by the educational system because it just showcases America's dying media. My high school has a top of the line math team with kids who can compete internationally and get 3rd in the world together, yet they never get showcased. Also, that Belgian kid who said, oh, this is so easy? Yeah, you shouldn't be saying that when you get only 76% of the questions right. -____-"
<snip>
As for college, I feel like American colleges are doing fine considering MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Princeton are considered amongst the best in the world. =/
Too bad your school doesn't have a top of the line critical thinking team LOL Do they teach the concept of averages at your school? Are you seriously trying to cherry pick the top performers and claim they're an accurate representation of the American educational system as a whole? Never mind math, even your listening comprehension is wrong. I think you've made your point, just not the one you were trying to make.
Here in Slovakia we have really bad teachers. they cant teach and sometimes they just dont and prefer to read newspapers. Im in school 7 hours a day and i have maybe 2 lessons where im actually learning something. We should change teachers and im serious right now they SUCK ! Its like my payment is low im not going to teach you anything today... But there are some AWESOME ULTRA COOL AMAZING teachers who are doing they best but its not so often.
On January 02 2011 16:53 ghrur wrote: But really, how would I change the school system? I wouldn't, yet. I'd change the culture first. America has such a crappy culture toward education where the smart kids get looked down upon as nerds, creating a schism. Who wants to be a nerd, a dork, or a geek? Also, who wants to learn about math? Who wants to think? I just wanna plug numbers into a formula and get an answer. -_-" That part annoys me the most because I see it even from my good friends when they start taking a well-taught math class. =/ They blame the teacher for them not learning because the teacher doesn't spoon feed them.
I completely agree with this.
I'd go even further and say that iIn an ideal world school would be about fostering curiosity about the world. The kids would do much of the learning by themselves as part of a group activity. I mean we shield kids because they are supposedly "impressionable", yet we can't "impression" them to learn. Despite the fact that curiousity is a natural instinct.
In reality society and the current education system is actually making kids less interested in learning and that's just wrong. Even many parents who are concerned about their children's education frame it as duty instead of a natural exploration of the world, which it really is.
EPT
