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As I said, making it more competitive to become a public teacher would be a good idea. I had almost forgotten about how many elementary school teachers in the

by xiaoma 16y ago

As I said, making it more competitive to become a public teacher would be a good idea. I had almost forgotten about how many elementary school teachers in the US dislike or even struggle with basic mathematics until reading your link, but that's definitely a big issue. I don't think I ever encountered the craziness of using animals or fruits to represent tens or hundreds as mentioned in Dr. Ma's book, but it's no surprise to hear it. I know this isn't going to be a popular view, but some major problems in US schools are caused by an obsession with small class sizes. From everything I've seen, I'd say that the importance of small classes is dwarfed by that of having a good teacher. The smaller the classes are, the more teachers you need and the less selective you can be about them. I think this is one of the primary reasons the US (and just about every western country) spends so much more money per student than say Singapore and gets little to show for it. In general, I like the system of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore for earlier schooling. On the flip side, their weakness is college. What works well for giving everyone a basic grasp on fundamental skills doesn't work so well when they need to become self-directed learners. A lot of the current discussion is on increasing the focus on creativity and student autonomy, but there's a long, long way to go. The other huge problem is that after entering a school it's almost impossible to fail out of it and students not planning on grad school often just coast. But tokenadult, you must have already known all that! In your earlier comments, haven't you said you've spent a huge chunk of your life in Taiwan, learned to read Chinese well and already critiqued children's teaching materials there?

CWuestefeld 16y ago
some major problems in US schools are caused by an obsession with small class sizes. I started out disagreeing with you, but we're definitely on the same page here. In the US, there's a cult of small class sizes. It frequently seems as if class size itself is taken as a proxy for the quality of the education, to the exclusion of any other factor. But all the literature I've been able to find is inconclusive on the impact of class size -- and the very fact that it's inconclusive should boldly demonstrate that it's not the single, overriding factor. The only thing I can find that seems to be accepted is that smaller classes can help "at-risk" generally minority inner-city students who aren't getting educational support at home. But in the general case, nobody's been able to show conclusively that it's got any impact at all. So why do we still make this an end goal rather than a means to an end?

by xiaoma 16y ago

CWuestefeld 16y ago

some major problems in US schools are caused by an obsession with small class sizes. I started out disagreeing with you, but we're definitely on the same page here. In the US, there's a cult of small class sizes. It frequently seems as if class size itself is taken as a proxy for the quality of the education, to the exclusion of any other factor. But all the literature I've been able to find is inconclusive on the impact of class size -- and the very fact that it's inconclusive should boldly demonstrate that it's not the single, overriding factor. The only thing I can find that seems to be accepted is that smaller classes can help "at-risk" generally minority inner-city students who aren't getting educational support at home. But in the general case, nobody's been able to show conclusively that it's got any impact at all. So why do we still make this an end goal rather than a means to an end?