4 ms·
> So, what parts of high school do you want to throw out? Most of the traditional English courses, on the grounds that they're nearly always taught badly and h
by derleth 13y ago
> So, what parts of high school do you want to throw out?
Most of the traditional English courses, on the grounds that they're nearly always taught badly and have become jokes even in otherwise good schools.
Replace them with sections in the Adult Living course that teach how to do close reading on advertisements and contracts. The best, most practical part of a good English course is the close reading training, but it really needs to be applied to something practical, as opposed to languishing in a course most students and teachers don't take very seriously.
I don't care if eighteen-year-olds never read Hawthorne again if it means fewer of them get ripped off by unfair contracts or suckered by misleading ads.
Shop class should be folded into Adult Living in its entirety, and the 'make a birdhouse' stuff should be de-emphasized and replaced with 'fixing your toilet' and similar household maintenance tasks. Learning how to use a band saw is great, but other things are more important.
Beyond that, it would have to depend on what the individual school was doing and doing badly. There are general tropes but schools have a lot of local or at least state-wide autonomy, even public schools.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoMost of the traditional English courses, That's what I was thinking too. There's got to be some way to get them to understand their there and they're in less time than is usually taken. And, TBH, studying literature in HS made me hate it. It took years before I'd read again for fun. >'make a birdhouse' stuff should be de-emphasized and replaced with 'fixing your toilet' Agreed, but in my HS the wood-shop was where all the special folks went, it seemed to keep them busy.
- derleth 13y ago> There's got to be some way to get them to understand their there and they're in less time than is usually taken. You can learn this in any course which involves writing. It doesn't need to be the focus to be present. > Agreed, but in my HS the wood-shop was where all the special folks went, it seemed to keep them busy. This is something else again. 'Mainstreaming', as it's currently known, is probably better than just warehousing the less able, but the whole notion of everyone being in the same stream in the first place is damaging to everyone, because people typically have different aptitudes and will be at different levels in different subjects. For example, I'd progressed beyond secondary-education-level English classes before I'd actually begun secondary education, but my math skills were sub-par and didn't really catch up until college. Therefore, I was coasting through AP English and struggling with math courses, indicating wasted time in both endeavors. I know it isn't economically feasible to remove the lockstep entirely, but allowing people to pass or repeat subjects rather than grades would be an improvement.