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...high school is wondrously efficient at making interesting things dull..." Ain't that the truth. I learned that not because I recognized it my day to day as

...high school is wondrously efficient at making interesting things dull..." Ain't that the truth. I learned that not because I recognized it my day to day as a student, but because I had one or two teachers in high school that were absolutely exceptional (I was lucky, some kids encounter none) and the droning background noise of the rest of education became very stark in comparison. It's impossible to teach hundreds of students a year and make everything fantastical the whole time (not to mention that some kids will never give one f*ck about US History or whatever their natural predilections dictate) but man oh man does the current Common Core driven, test-everything, no-rote-learning-except-test-all-rote-learning way of looking at education just crush students. And you don't have to ask a student - most teachers today will bemoan the degree to which their hands are tied to properly educate and, more importantly, make learning fun, by bureaucracies run by educational theorists who have never spent a day in a classroom.

jandrese 10y ago
Standardized testing really doesn't help this either. Yes you could take a couple of weeks to do a deep dive on an interesting topic to get the students engaged, but to pass the test they need to be memorizing the same dates and names that everybody in the country has to memorize in order to pass the test. Granted, most teachers were doing that anyway, but for the few who bucked the trend they were reined in by the SOLs.
khedoros 10y ago
I can think of three high school classes that were great because of the teachers (an English class, a geometry class, and a shop class), and maybe three that were great because of their self-learning nature (my first programming class, an engineering class, and an after-school electronics+engineering class taught by the shop teacher). For everything else, I've got to agree. Take my US History class. I think it's important to know the events that shaped our culture, know roughly the order they came in, and about when they happened and why. The name and date of a 19th century law involving share croppers? Sure, I'll be able to write an essay on it for the test, because I know that's the requirement, but ask me 6 months later, and I won't be able to tell you much about it.
- bitwize 10y ago
  "Sure, I'll be able to write an essay on it for the test, because I know that's the requirement, but ask me 6 months later, and I won't be able to tell you much about it." Here's a secret: That's the point of the class. School is mainly there to teach you to take assignments, follow directions, and cough up results on demand, irrespective of whether you actually care about the subject. It's a much-in-demand business skill.
  - bsder 10y ago
    > Here's a secret: That's the point of the class. School is mainly there to teach you to take assignments, follow directions, and cough up results on demand, irrespective of whether you actually care about the subject. It's a much-in-demand business skill. I get tired of people dumping on schools. The problem with school is that most of the consumers of said education are unmotivated slackers whom you practically have to beat the information into. There are many reasons for people to not like school (social aspects--both personal and community--certainly being a big problem), but, I have ZERO sympathy for anyone who complains that it was boring, uninteresting drudgery from an educational standpoint. Yes, everybody has bumped into the teacher that is retired-in-place--these people exist in any long-lived institution including companies. But, dear God, most teachers are desperate for any student to show even a modicum of interest in what they are teaching. Even in the worst schools, there always seems to be a handful of teachers lighting the way. If you found your education boring, it's because you didn't exert even the minimum amount of effort necessary to get the attention of those teachers. And that's your own damn fault.
    - TillE 10y ago
      Even assuming that bad teachers are the norm, there's always an interesting way to look at any subject. A curious mind will find those. Start by reading the textbook - again, some are awful, but most aren't.
    - catshirt 10y ago
      > "The problem with school is that most of the consumers of said education are unmotivated slackers whom you practically have to beat the information into." I almost stopped reading after that bit and I kind of wish I did. there is some, some truth to what you are saying. but to paint this picture that "the problem with school" is the students.... is disingenuous at best, completely ignorant at worst.
r00fus 10y ago
Could common core be saved if the NLCB mandatory testing and rating of schools be removed? It's the testing and what's being tested that sounds mind killing.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  IMO, the whole idea that all children must exit school knowing the exact same things is the problem, not any specific thing like NCLB or Common Core. The people designing our education system appear to think of children as a raw material to be processed into a uniform commodity, and that's where all the trouble comes from.

jandrese 10y ago

Standardized testing really doesn't help this either. Yes you could take a couple of weeks to do a deep dive on an interesting topic to get the students engaged, but to pass the test they need to be memorizing the same dates and names that everybody in the country has to memorize in order to pass the test. Granted, most teachers were doing that anyway, but for the few who bucked the trend they were reined in by the SOLs.

khedoros 10y ago

I can think of three high school classes that were great because of the teachers (an English class, a geometry class, and a shop class), and maybe three that were great because of their self-learning nature (my first programming class, an engineering class, and an after-school electronics+engineering class taught by the shop teacher). For everything else, I've got to agree. Take my US History class. I think it's important to know the events that shaped our culture, know roughly the order they came in, and about when they happened and why. The name and date of a 19th century law involving share croppers? Sure, I'll be able to write an essay on it for the test, because I know that's the requirement, but ask me 6 months later, and I won't be able to tell you much about it.

bitwize 10y ago
"Sure, I'll be able to write an essay on it for the test, because I know that's the requirement, but ask me 6 months later, and I won't be able to tell you much about it." Here's a secret: That's the point of the class. School is mainly there to teach you to take assignments, follow directions, and cough up results on demand, irrespective of whether you actually care about the subject. It's a much-in-demand business skill.
- bsder 10y ago
  > Here's a secret: That's the point of the class. School is mainly there to teach you to take assignments, follow directions, and cough up results on demand, irrespective of whether you actually care about the subject. It's a much-in-demand business skill. I get tired of people dumping on schools. The problem with school is that most of the consumers of said education are unmotivated slackers whom you practically have to beat the information into. There are many reasons for people to not like school (social aspects--both personal and community--certainly being a big problem), but, I have ZERO sympathy for anyone who complains that it was boring, uninteresting drudgery from an educational standpoint. Yes, everybody has bumped into the teacher that is retired-in-place--these people exist in any long-lived institution including companies. But, dear God, most teachers are desperate for any student to show even a modicum of interest in what they are teaching. Even in the worst schools, there always seems to be a handful of teachers lighting the way. If you found your education boring, it's because you didn't exert even the minimum amount of effort necessary to get the attention of those teachers. And that's your own damn fault.
  - TillE 10y ago
    Even assuming that bad teachers are the norm, there's always an interesting way to look at any subject. A curious mind will find those. Start by reading the textbook - again, some are awful, but most aren't.
  - catshirt 10y ago
    > "The problem with school is that most of the consumers of said education are unmotivated slackers whom you practically have to beat the information into." I almost stopped reading after that bit and I kind of wish I did. there is some, some truth to what you are saying. but to paint this picture that "the problem with school" is the students.... is disingenuous at best, completely ignorant at worst.

r00fus 10y ago

Could common core be saved if the NLCB mandatory testing and rating of schools be removed? It's the testing and what's being tested that sounds mind killing.

jschwartzi 10y ago
IMO, the whole idea that all children must exit school knowing the exact same things is the problem, not any specific thing like NCLB or Common Core. The people designing our education system appear to think of children as a raw material to be processed into a uniform commodity, and that's where all the trouble comes from.