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These kids are essentially the victims of a crime. When they get to college and/or the workforce they will have two skills: being quiet and taking tests.

by mjgoins 17y ago

dkarl 17y ago
I think these guys are jerks with a simplistic approach to success, but they're a good foil to current educational orthodoxy. Loopy liberal fuzzy-mindedness really does dominate in the public schools. In fact, as a liberal, I would say that public schoolteachers bear a lot of responsibility for the worst stereotypes of liberals in the US. Teachers have no appreciation for practice and the value of rote learning. If basketball were taught the way most public school subjects are taught, the kids would sit on the sidelines all day discussing "issues" like zone versus man-to-man defense. They'd spend ten minutes on the court every week, and nobody would have to touch the ball unless they volunteered, because you wouldn't want to embarrass anybody. Best case scenario: the keepers of orthodoxy are so embarrassed at getting whipped by conservative troglodytes that they adopt a few practices from them. More likely scenario: they just stigmatize the effective practices as intrinsically immoral and demand that they be banned.
- kragen 17y ago
  If basketball were taught the way most public school subjects are taught, the kids would sit on the sidelines all day discussing "issues" like zone versus man-to-man defense. They'd spend ten minutes on the court every week, and nobody would have to touch the ball unless they volunteered, because you wouldn't want to embarrass anybody. That sounds like the science class discussed in this article, not like the public schools. More generally, it sounds like "teaching to the test".
  - dkarl 17y ago
    The equivalent of the science class in the article would be a team that relentlessly trained basic skills -- doing movement drills, layup drills, passing drills, shooting drills, and free-throw drills all day -- without ever talking about teamwork or doing 5-on-5 scrimmages. (Kids trained that way would beat the hell out of kids who had a well-rounded theoretical background in Xs and Os but who never spent hours in the gym shooting baskets.) In other words, the science class in the article taught basic mechanical skills but didn't teach the higher-order thinking required to apply them. The dippy liberal (i.e., orthodox) approach is to try to teach kids the higher-order thinking needed to apply the basic skills without actually teaching them the basic skills. Between the two, I prefer erring on the side of basic mechanical skills. Shallow, mechanical understanding is easier and comes first. You can't do higher-order thinking on concepts that you never understood in the first place. Plus, I'm pretty sure that higher-order thinking is best developed by application to lower-level problems. Higher-order thinking is thinking about lower-level problems -- abstracting ideas from them and applying abstract ideas to them. Without any lower-level problems or skills, you can't actually practice higher-level thinking. You can only talk about it, which isn't the same thing. And actually, when I said the science class in the article didn't teach the higher-order thinking required to apply the basic skills, I wasn't being fair. Standardized tests have come a long way, and they do require kids to analyze problems, decide what physical principles and equations to apply, and apply them successfully. Teaching to the test isn't nearly as bad as it used to be. The tests are designed to make "teaching to the test" as similar as possible to ideal teaching, without allowing slick-talking idiots to BS their way through. The conservative approach (I hate to call it that, but credit where credit is due) may produce overconfident kids with narrow skills, but the liberal approach gives you kids who are demoralized by their inability to solve simple test problems and who don't really believe (or worse, do believe) their teachers' reassurances that they have a deep, ineffable, unmeasurable understanding of subjects that they can't pass basic tests in.
asciilifeform 17y ago
> These kids are essentially the victims of a crime I would argue that the kids attending (almost) any American public school are the victims of a far greater crime.

These kids are essentially the victims of a crime. When they get to college and/or the workforce they will have two skills: being quiet and taking tests.

by mjgoins 17y ago

These kids are essentially the victims of a crime. When they get to college and/or the workforce they will have two skills: being quiet and taking tests.

dkarl 17y ago

I think these guys are jerks with a simplistic approach to success, but they're a good foil to current educational orthodoxy. Loopy liberal fuzzy-mindedness really does dominate in the public schools. In fact, as a liberal, I would say that public schoolteachers bear a lot of responsibility for the worst stereotypes of liberals in the US. Teachers have no appreciation for practice and the value of rote learning. If basketball were taught the way most public school subjects are taught, the kids would sit on the sidelines all day discussing "issues" like zone versus man-to-man defense. They'd spend ten minutes on the court every week, and nobody would have to touch the ball unless they volunteered, because you wouldn't want to embarrass anybody. Best case scenario: the keepers of orthodoxy are so embarrassed at getting whipped by conservative troglodytes that they adopt a few practices from them. More likely scenario: they just stigmatize the effective practices as intrinsically immoral and demand that they be banned.

kragen 17y ago
If basketball were taught the way most public school subjects are taught, the kids would sit on the sidelines all day discussing "issues" like zone versus man-to-man defense. They'd spend ten minutes on the court every week, and nobody would have to touch the ball unless they volunteered, because you wouldn't want to embarrass anybody. That sounds like the science class discussed in this article, not like the public schools. More generally, it sounds like "teaching to the test".
- dkarl 17y ago
  The equivalent of the science class in the article would be a team that relentlessly trained basic skills -- doing movement drills, layup drills, passing drills, shooting drills, and free-throw drills all day -- without ever talking about teamwork or doing 5-on-5 scrimmages. (Kids trained that way would beat the hell out of kids who had a well-rounded theoretical background in Xs and Os but who never spent hours in the gym shooting baskets.) In other words, the science class in the article taught basic mechanical skills but didn't teach the higher-order thinking required to apply them. The dippy liberal (i.e., orthodox) approach is to try to teach kids the higher-order thinking needed to apply the basic skills without actually teaching them the basic skills. Between the two, I prefer erring on the side of basic mechanical skills. Shallow, mechanical understanding is easier and comes first. You can't do higher-order thinking on concepts that you never understood in the first place. Plus, I'm pretty sure that higher-order thinking is best developed by application to lower-level problems. Higher-order thinking is thinking about lower-level problems -- abstracting ideas from them and applying abstract ideas to them. Without any lower-level problems or skills, you can't actually practice higher-level thinking. You can only talk about it, which isn't the same thing. And actually, when I said the science class in the article didn't teach the higher-order thinking required to apply the basic skills, I wasn't being fair. Standardized tests have come a long way, and they do require kids to analyze problems, decide what physical principles and equations to apply, and apply them successfully. Teaching to the test isn't nearly as bad as it used to be. The tests are designed to make "teaching to the test" as similar as possible to ideal teaching, without allowing slick-talking idiots to BS their way through. The conservative approach (I hate to call it that, but credit where credit is due) may produce overconfident kids with narrow skills, but the liberal approach gives you kids who are demoralized by their inability to solve simple test problems and who don't really believe (or worse, do believe) their teachers' reassurances that they have a deep, ineffable, unmeasurable understanding of subjects that they can't pass basic tests in.

asciilifeform 17y ago

> These kids are essentially the victims of a crime I would argue that the kids attending (almost) any American public school are the victims of a far greater crime.