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1912 Eighth Grade Examination for Bullitt County Schools
- sirsar 13y agoIt pains me to see how many I cannot answer. Also: >Sketch briefly Sir Walter Raleigh... I would have failed this horribly.
- chrisrhoden 13y agoUnless you're in 8th grade, that's not super relevant. I don't think I would do very well on this test today, but I'm actually surprised at how similar the topics and depth of these questions are to my recollection of 8th grade standardized testing.
- cpayne 13y agoSir Walter Raleigh - all I can think of is the actor who played him in Blackadder...
- defen 13y agoI'm guessing they wanted a brief biographical sketch and not a drawing...
- GigabyteCoin 13y agoI will admit that this test would look daunting to "eighth grader me", but should I feel less intelligent than the eighth graders we were producing 101 years ago? I think it would be more fair to show a criteria of how the students were taught back in 1912 as well. We could easily teach children in grade 8 today to answer the following question: "give at least five rules to be observed in maintaining good health" (question 9 of physiology) by teaching them "the ten rules of maintaining good health" one day in class and moving on the next. Health class and phys-ed today consists of much more than 5, 10 or even 50 rules of maintaining good health. Or how about question 5 in Geography: "locate the following countries that border eachother: Turkey, Greece, Servia, Montenegro, Roumania. If I was growing up in an Ottoman-empire-ruled world, perhaps I would be taught exactly which countries border with Turkey for example.
- GabrielF00 13y agoWhen I was about that age, NATO was in the process of bombing Serbia. The Balkans has receded a bit from the headlines, but today, Turkey remains critically important to the relationship between the West and the Muslim world. The ongoing struggle between the secular and Islamic forces may be crucial to determining the fate of the Islamic world over the next decades. And of course most of Turkey's other neighbors: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Bulgaria are in varying states of crisis. Something like 100,000 people have died in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Lebanon is in perpetual crisis. Georgia fought a war with Russia only a few years ago. Iraq and Iran need no further explanation. So maybe we should be teaching our 8th graders exactly where Turkey is on the map?
- xenophonf 13y agoDon't forget to include Greece in your list.
- cup 13y agoThe questions look daunting but It's naive to think the pupils were not taught the material before hand. I mean if you spent a week or two with year 8s and covered the necessary material I have no doubt the majority of them would answer all the questions.
- javert 13y agoIs a "year 8" student the same as an American eighth grader? That would surprise me.
- dsl 13y agoYear 8 students in England are ~13 years of age, so yes. They call pre-school nursery, kindergarten is reception, then it follows with american style numbered years. It is slightly off because they have 13 years and we have 12, but they both carry you to 18 years of age.
- anigbrowl 13y agoNote the biggest change from today: none of these are multiple-choice tests. Students are expected to write out the answers, and teachers are expected to mark them. I very much doubt whether the textbooks on 1912 had special teacher's editions with answer keys. Of course, back then you could also support a family on a schoolteacher's income.
- Retric 13y agoMost public School teachers make close to the meadean household income in the US (50,000$) with some earning double that. If it seems like there underpaid it's simply in comparison to other upper income professions requiring a collage degree or high cost of living areas. Also a teachers income is often looked at as a family friendly steady/supplemental income with good benefits as the time off matches up well with a dual income family raising children thus lowering aggregate pay. EX: Arlington VA, has an average classroom teacher pay of 52,003$. However, According to a 2007 estimate, the median income for a household in the county was $94,876, and the median income for a family was $127,179.[37] Males had a median income of $51,011 versus $41,552 for females. The per capita income for the county was $37,706. About 5.00% of families and 7.80% of the population were below the poverty line, including 9.10% of those under age 18 and 7.00% of those age 65 or over.
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- spamizbad 13y agohttp://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary Looks like they make less than the national median income. Doesn't look like you pass the median either until you've put in at least a decade. http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary#by_Years_Experience http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary... Teaching might be "Looked at" as being family friendly but unless you're working in a really nice district or are completely apathetic you're probably going to be working 50 hour weeks. Speaking of pay expectations... software developers with no college education and a few years of experience can be hired for twice an experienced teacher's salary - and these same developers consider themselves underpaid (which they are... but so is most of the middle class)
- yerich 13y agoMuch of this seems like rote memorization, to which I see very little use for in today's society. Need to get a list of state capitals? Google it. Need to plot a naval route from England to Malaysia? Look at a map. Students do not need a teacher nor a classroom to memorize facts. The time is better spent on developing problem solving and teamwork skills. Note the lack of any room for original expression or thought - no essays, no argumentation. Just rote memorization which will likely have no real use 99% of the time.
- zecho 13y agoFacts are the building blocks of argument. One shouldn't expect an 8th grader in 1912 or 2013 to have particularly well-developed arguments until they understand basic facts. You might think "rote memorization" has little value, but I have to disagree with that here. We're not talking memorization of mathematical theorem without proving them. We're talking about having a rather basic understanding of the world in a handful of subjects. Yes it's easy to look at a map if you're unsure which countries border Turkey. It's much easier to remember which countries border Turkey if you've studied geography, which allows you to move on from looking up the basics every time so that you can have a deeper understanding of the subject.
- m3koval 13y agoNit: You can't, by definition, prove an axiom. Memorizing axioms is quite necessary because they are the building blocks for all other theorems. In any case, I don't disagree with your high-level point.
- zecho 13y agoOops. My bad. I fixed it. Thanks.
- solistice 13y agoHonestly, as someone who grew up looking this up on Wikipedia, my ability to base an argument on credible sources has suffered immensely. Often, I want to make a point, and when I try to back it up I go through the "Did I read this on a reputable website, and if yes, what was the link". Or in total internet manier: Source: Myself.
- beloch 13y agoI find it interesting that the test actually has a couple questions based on the war of 1812. Perhaps that war had a higher profile in 1912, it being the centenary? Also, it's interesting that several questions basically come down to the student knowing the definition of imperials units like cords or the number feet in a mile. It makes sense that students would need to know those definitions for daily life, but I still find it odd since I grew up using the metric system! I know the test isn't meant to serve as a comparison of students from 1912 with those from today, but I must say, it certainly makes the teachers in some states of the U.S. today look like dunces!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- philwelch 13y agoBefore the World Wars, what other war in US history, other than the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, would be well known? The Spanish-American War was recent events, the Mexican War was forgotten as it lay between two bigger and more impressive wars (just like Korea is easily forgotten between WWII and Vietnam), and that was it as far as major conflicts go.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- agilebyte 13y agoHow high do the the wars with the native population/first people rank? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars
- jimhefferon 13y agoI can't speak for 1912 but when I was in school in the 60's they ranked not at all, in my white-person's school.
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- rkaplan 13y agoWhat is most interesting to me is how the test shows the value we enjoy of living in the information age. Without instant access to rote information, knowing some of these facts was probably rather important a hundred years ago. Schools today can avoid burdening the student with memorizing so many facts and focus more on developing conceptual understanding, which – coupled with free, rapid access to factual information – is much more valuable.
- damian2000 13y agoAgreed - the same way mobile phones freed us from memorizing dozens of phone numbers.
- eru 13y agoThey help to solve problems we wouldn't have without them.
- elteto 13y agoSo what happens when the lights go out? How do we get all the facts?
- nawitus 13y agoUse the battery.
- jmduke 13y agoThere's a plethora of ways to get Wikipedia offline.
- kolinko 13y agowhen the "lights go out", the society would collapse anyway.
- wil421 13y agoI've heard of these building that store nothing but paper books that you can borrow for a certain period of time and return at a later point.
- 3pt14159 13y agoThe problem with these types of posts is that they never come with the context or the gravitas needed to substantiate the underlying claims that are implied by the presentation. Were all eighth grade exams of similar difficulty? Did most children pass? Did the children that passed truly understand the underlying concepts? Don't get me wrong; I don't think that things are honky dory right now. I have serious problems with our education system, but I don't buy for a second that kids 100 years ago were so advanced.
- vixen99 13y agoTruly understand? Very doubtful. I expect they only wrote those questions to impress future generations.
- dylangs1030 13y agoPutting this in context, I'm sure the gross overall level of education for teenagers in the early 20th century was higher than it is now. Education was far less prevalent for minority groups, who, as an unfortunate side effect to class-wide limited incomes, don't have the same access to the kind of education which would give this sort of examination to an 8th grader. Now, if you attend a private grammar school in a Westchester suburb you can expect a lot of your children will have exams like this...
- jmduke 13y agoHow do you define 'level of education' on a per-student basis? (Well, I guess the whole issue is that that's hard a question to answer, right?) I think, for instance, that the average eighth grader knows much more in 2013 than they did in 1912, but that the proportion of that knowledge that they gained from an education system is much smaller. Knowledge has become universally accessible; reasoning, less so.
- a3voices 13y agoI think you're wrong about the gross overall education of teenagers. >Progressively fewer adults have limited their education to completion of the 8th grade which was typical in the early part of the century. In 1940, more than half of the U.S. population had completed no more than an eighth grade education. http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp
- analog31 13y agoI love that the Truant Officer is listed in the credits.
- slackwalker 13y agoWhat _does_ the liver secrate?
- defen 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bile
- claystu 13y agoYou can pretty much deduce what their history class must have looked like: war and discovery. It's interesting to note that they spell Sir Walter Raleigh differently than we do now. I wonder if that's a typo. Did anybody else have to Google kalsomining?
- sengstrom 13y agoWho invented "magnetic"? Hmmmm.
- jiisaacs 13y agothe insane clown posse? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs
- gjm11 13y agoI think the error here may be the comma after "Magnetic"; Morse's telegraph system, e.g., was commonly known as "the electro-magnetic telegraph" (earlier, less successful, telegraph systems were electrical but not electromagnetic) and the first company that commercialized his invention was called the Magnetic Telegraph Company. The effect of operating an electromagnet at a distance seems to have been thought of as "magnetic" more than "electrical"; see e.g. at http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/56/62/case.html http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/56/62/case.html comments from Morse and his contemporaries like "If I can succeed in working a magnet ten miles, I can go around the globe" and "The chief anxiety ... was to ascertain the utmost limits at which he, Morse, could work or move a lever by magnetic power". It seems plausible to me that even by 1912 the term "magnetic telegraph" might have been in use to distinguish the electromagnetic telegraph from other earlier sorts of telegraph. (Note 1: the above is based on a small amount of web searching and may be full of errors. Note 2: it appears that in fact other people developed electromagnetic telegraphs before Morse -- e.g., a chap called Schilling in Russia in 1832 -- but Morse is the one commonly thought of as inventing it, and is surely the answer the examiners were looking for.)
- jff 13y agoWhen people start reflecting on how it's so amazing that 8th graders were once expected to describe the Battle of Quebec, I think about this: http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education The math questions? I could have answered them in 8th grade. They're not hard, and they're the only part that's not just memorization.
- gcb0 13y agoYep, not hard considering everyone here probably likes math. My wife has to search matrix multiplication even if she has to use it once a month. Otoh i have to read about grammar anytime a child ask me help with any simplistic question... Damn those meddling kids Besides, The answer they present to #7 is a little crazy though when they try to equal 1/3b = 2/3g... I'm pretty sure it should be a simple 40g and 80b
- brazzy 13y ago> Besides, The answer they present to #7 is a little crazy though when they try to equal 1/3b = 2/3g... I'm pretty sure it should be a simple 40g and 80b Um, no. The problem statement was b = 2/3 g, not b = 2g.
- seanalltogether 13y agoI feel like this essay helps me understand why I have trouble working with developers in offshore countries. Things go okay when the instructions are clear and the task is straightforward, but when i need problem solving on a task everything starts falling apart. I'm always unsuccessful when I begin with "I need you to figure out a way..."
- ianb 13y agoI wish in one of these cases someone could also dig up the answers to the question. The questions are interesting, but the expectations are more implied than clear.
- tristanj 13y agoThere's some solutions linked on the page just before the questions start. http://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912ans.html http://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912... They look pretty thorough, but I think question 10 in geography should include the Strait of Malacca as well.
- Pitarou 13y agoAs an English teacher, I was fascinated by the grammar questions: much to love and much to hate. On the one hand, diagramming a sentence is a powerful skill, which I wish was taught today. On the other, this one made me chuckle: > How many parts of speech are there? If you put any two modern linguists in a room, you'd get about 5 different answers to that question. The model of English grammar that students were expected to parrot at the time had only a passing resemblance to grammar as it is actually used. The sad part is that, even today, there are still pedants who go around correcting others' grammar on the basis of those outdated grammatical ideas.
- dalke 13y ago"diagramming a sentence is a powerful skill, which I wish was taught today" We learned the Reed-Kellogg system in 9th grade. I was horrible at it, so I guess I should say we were taught it. It wasn't until I studied grammar theory for my CS degree that I finally understood the concept, and the symbolism of Reed-Kellogg is still nonsensical to me. Most linguists use tree diagrams instead. As you imply, few English teachers actually know linguistics, or the problems of diagramming Chomsky's "John is easy to please"/"John is eager to please", where John is the object of the verb in the first and the subject of the verb in the second. It looks though that diagramming was introduced in large part because the previous system required more rote memorization of abstract grammar rules, and applied them only to the analysis of individual words, and not phrases. http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=olddiagrams/beforediagrams http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=olddiagrams/beforediagrams "there are still pedants who go around correcting others' grammar on the basis of those outdated grammatical ideas." -- hear hear!
- Semiapies 13y agoI think someone needs to start posting modern-day eighth-grade tests, because a bunch of supposedly smart, middle-class guys going on about how horrifyingly hard they find tests like this is starting to worry me. I think your memories may be fading. There isn't anything here that I didn't do in eighth grade, and those tests were half this length or longer for each class. My history classes had a different focus, mind, more "What lead to X war?" questions on tests than "Who were the commanders of the last battle in X war?".