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Yeah, your experience was an outlier. Do you know what the biggest meta-lesson throughout my education was? The single thing that was hammered home in every si

by tikhonj 10y ago

Yeah, your experience was an outlier. Do you know what the biggest meta-lesson throughout my education was? The single thing that was hammered home in every single class? Following directions. I think that says a lot. The learning experience was highly regimented and structured. Show up on time, do your work the way we tell you, get an A. The actual content of any given class was a bit more varied but none of the classes had much flexibility. When they set out to teach or engage creativity, it was always in narrow, controlled ways: assignments and projects with specific, detailed instructions. The creative aspect was confined to how you fulfilled those instructions—the moral equivalent of coloring within the lines. I think I had a grand total of two truly open-ended assignments in all of high school: one in a CS class and one in a physics class. I built a single thing for both (with permission, of course), and it was easily the best thing I ever did in high school. But that was definitely the exception, not the rule; every other "project" was just a bigger homework assignment. Maybe I'm being too harsh but, looking back, the experience absolutely did not nurture independence—quite the opposite.

com2kid 10y ago
> The actual content of any given class was a bit more varied but none of the classes had much flexibility. When they set out to teach or engage creativity, it was always in narrow, controlled ways: assignments and projects with specific, detailed instructions. The creative aspect was confined to how you fulfilled those instructions—the moral equivalent of coloring within the lines. Ironically, a lot of my assignments were free form, and I hated it! I had to sit through so many poorly done video presentations other groups of students did that I eagerly wished for teachers to teach us how to make a proper presentation and make students stick to the format! There are some basic rules to structuring a presentation that I don't think ever got taught, heh. But those were the monthly assignments. On a larger and more fun scale, both my Middle School and High School had free form graduation projects. My Middle School project was on the history of video games, my HS project was on LED lighting. A minimum report size was dictated, but we also had to come up with a presentation on our own, with no real guidelines given other than a minimum time we had to present for. A lot of my English reports were open ended. Sure I was given a general topic to write about, but that is sort of the point of a classroom, to provide general structure for students to learn within. I remember one middle school project were we had to design a life form. That was pretty much it for instructions, just go off and design a new life form and be prepared to present it to the class. I ended up with a scale model, a description of locomotion, vision systems, and a general outline of culture. Another project was to write a children's storybook. Then there was the student produced school news channel. We were given instruction on how to operate equipment, but everything else was left up to the students. Biology class, open ended report with presentation, mine was on the quality of life enhancements that genetic engineering of humans would bring about. Elementary school, second grade, students wrote and directed a play, we did Stone Soup, we ended up performing it at the Senior Center as well as in front of the school. Countless classes writing poetry. Either structure or theme was dictated, rarely both. My social studies class had multiple debate sessions throughout the year. I remember one of them, Rome vs. Greece. My team was arguing Rome, my counterpoint to their claim of philosophers was "You cannot claim the great philosophers that you killed! In Rome, even the lowliest of gladiators could rise up to be a powerful and respected man. You kill your wise men." Not logically sound, but appeals to emotion work. I'll admit, my parents worked hard to get me into the best public schools that they could, but at all times these were just public schools! Thankfully I graduated before No Child Left Behind made testing all the rage, from what I gather, things have been going steadily downhill in regards to how much flexibility teachers have in their job.

by tikhonj 10y ago

com2kid 10y ago

> The actual content of any given class was a bit more varied but none of the classes had much flexibility. When they set out to teach or engage creativity, it was always in narrow, controlled ways: assignments and projects with specific, detailed instructions. The creative aspect was confined to how you fulfilled those instructions—the moral equivalent of coloring within the lines. Ironically, a lot of my assignments were free form, and I hated it! I had to sit through so many poorly done video presentations other groups of students did that I eagerly wished for teachers to teach us how to make a proper presentation and make students stick to the format! There are some basic rules to structuring a presentation that I don't think ever got taught, heh. But those were the monthly assignments. On a larger and more fun scale, both my Middle School and High School had free form graduation projects. My Middle School project was on the history of video games, my HS project was on LED lighting. A minimum report size was dictated, but we also had to come up with a presentation on our own, with no real guidelines given other than a minimum time we had to present for. A lot of my English reports were open ended. Sure I was given a general topic to write about, but that is sort of the point of a classroom, to provide general structure for students to learn within. I remember one middle school project were we had to design a life form. That was pretty much it for instructions, just go off and design a new life form and be prepared to present it to the class. I ended up with a scale model, a description of locomotion, vision systems, and a general outline of culture. Another project was to write a children's storybook. Then there was the student produced school news channel. We were given instruction on how to operate equipment, but everything else was left up to the students. Biology class, open ended report with presentation, mine was on the quality of life enhancements that genetic engineering of humans would bring about. Elementary school, second grade, students wrote and directed a play, we did Stone Soup, we ended up performing it at the Senior Center as well as in front of the school. Countless classes writing poetry. Either structure or theme was dictated, rarely both. My social studies class had multiple debate sessions throughout the year. I remember one of them, Rome vs. Greece. My team was arguing Rome, my counterpoint to their claim of philosophers was "You cannot claim the great philosophers that you killed! In Rome, even the lowliest of gladiators could rise up to be a powerful and respected man. You kill your wise men." Not logically sound, but appeals to emotion work. I'll admit, my parents worked hard to get me into the best public schools that they could, but at all times these were just public schools! Thankfully I graduated before No Child Left Behind made testing all the rage, from what I gather, things have been going steadily downhill in regards to how much flexibility teachers have in their job.