4 ms·

As a parent and married to a wife who's a teacher in a public elementary school in a large school district, I can say all this talk of improving school, train t

by dba7dba 12y ago

As a parent and married to a wife who's a teacher in a public elementary school in a large school district, I can say all this talk of improving school, train teachers, etc is missing the mark. More of the responsibility rests with the parents, not with the school or teachers or administrators. Sure teachers/school matter, but not as much as the parents from my observation.

prawn 12y ago
Should tackle improving both. And it's obviously not US-specific by any stretch. If we can make it easier, cheaper and more enjoyable to teach and encourage children, it will happen more often. Same goes with food - if the bad stuff is cheaper and quicker, people will tend to eat it. Makes me wonder - has anyone built courseware for 5-15 year olds that dynamically adjusts problem topics based on the interests of the student? e.g., maths problems featuring soccer players (angles, speeds, curves, etc) or maths problems featuring rockets or whatever a kid might fancy.
DiabloD3 12y ago
I agree here. My time in high school (which largely was just a prison, for both kids in and out of special education) was full of people I met that their parents thought kids were just fire and forget. Some of them were smart kids, but they had no proper upbringing. They didn't know what to do, how to act, how to be, and the school sure as hell didn't teach them that. The school filled their head with interesting but useless facts, such as George Washington was our first President. Sure, we should know that, but that won't help us navigate the increasingly complex world that we keep building around ourselves. To put it bluntly, these kids, some of them I called my friends, had no spiritual health (or whatever you want to call it). They didn't know how to force their minds to focus, they didn't know how to prioritize their goals, they didn't know how to make goals in the first place. They did what they were told. Some of them have moved out of state and went to college (again, because they were told to, our school pounded it into our heads that we need to do well on tests to get into college, as if college was the end goal, or even a meaningful step on the journey of life), and are most likely now in debt in over their heads. Some of them probably lost their jobs, some of them probably lost their homes, some of them probably had kids and now work at shitty jobs just to keep food on the table. The ones that didn't move out of state? I know that some of them are in prison or jail somewhere (thanks, grapevine). I know some of them do drugs (some of them did drugs in high school just to deal with how shit their lives were, I doubt they quit when they got out of school; nothing hard though, virtually all of them were potheads). Teachers matter, but your first and most important teachers are your parents. You learn how to be and act through them, and if you don't learn what you're supposed to from them, you're just going to turn into a rather angry human that doesn't really make it in life. What I'm afraid is, my entire generation isn't going to make it in life, and that is terrifying. I'm 31 now, and if I knew what I knew then, I would have probably kicked a few teachers in the nuts for what they put their students through.
- stevekemp 12y ago
  > Some of them were smart kids, but they had no proper upbringing Which is one of the conclusions of series four of The Wire ..
- dba7dba 12y ago
  "They didn't know what to do, how to act, how to be" Kids have to be taught how to be normal human beings first, BEFORE school can teach anything. And that education to be a human starts at home, with parents.
kethinov 12y ago
The blame game is unhealthy. As long as our public discourse is about blaming parents, blaming teachers, or blaming anybody, we won't strike at the root of the problem, which is poverty. Kids living in poverty simply won't do well in school in statistically significant numbers. If we solve that, then we'll solve our achievement gap.
- tom-lord 12y ago
  How do you fix education? By fixing the poverty. How do you fix poverty? By fixing the education. Oh wait, hang on...
  - kethinov 12y ago
    How do you fix poverty? By having a safety net not full of holes like swiss cheese.
  - spacemanmatt 12y ago
    You don't fix a vicious cycle by addressing only one aspect. So yes, we have to fix both. Then it will become a mutually reinforcing cycle like it used to be.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  Reading through here I see a lot of assertions and very little evidence. Could you back up your claim?
  - kethinov 12y ago
    This program did an excellent deep dive and the panelists have written books on the subject if you're looking for more depth: http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-02-18/rethinking_standardized_testing http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-02-18/rethinking_stan...
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  Seconded. I'm amazed that people are still so willfully blind that they need to see the proof. My take is, if you can't perform your own validation here, your eyes are not open. Poverty is written all over America but we keep misreading it.

by dba7dba 12y ago

prawn 12y ago

Should tackle improving both. And it's obviously not US-specific by any stretch. If we can make it easier, cheaper and more enjoyable to teach and encourage children, it will happen more often. Same goes with food - if the bad stuff is cheaper and quicker, people will tend to eat it. Makes me wonder - has anyone built courseware for 5-15 year olds that dynamically adjusts problem topics based on the interests of the student? e.g., maths problems featuring soccer players (angles, speeds, curves, etc) or maths problems featuring rockets or whatever a kid might fancy.

DiabloD3 12y ago

I agree here. My time in high school (which largely was just a prison, for both kids in and out of special education) was full of people I met that their parents thought kids were just fire and forget. Some of them were smart kids, but they had no proper upbringing. They didn't know what to do, how to act, how to be, and the school sure as hell didn't teach them that. The school filled their head with interesting but useless facts, such as George Washington was our first President. Sure, we should know that, but that won't help us navigate the increasingly complex world that we keep building around ourselves. To put it bluntly, these kids, some of them I called my friends, had no spiritual health (or whatever you want to call it). They didn't know how to force their minds to focus, they didn't know how to prioritize their goals, they didn't know how to make goals in the first place. They did what they were told. Some of them have moved out of state and went to college (again, because they were told to, our school pounded it into our heads that we need to do well on tests to get into college, as if college was the end goal, or even a meaningful step on the journey of life), and are most likely now in debt in over their heads. Some of them probably lost their jobs, some of them probably lost their homes, some of them probably had kids and now work at shitty jobs just to keep food on the table. The ones that didn't move out of state? I know that some of them are in prison or jail somewhere (thanks, grapevine). I know some of them do drugs (some of them did drugs in high school just to deal with how shit their lives were, I doubt they quit when they got out of school; nothing hard though, virtually all of them were potheads). Teachers matter, but your first and most important teachers are your parents. You learn how to be and act through them, and if you don't learn what you're supposed to from them, you're just going to turn into a rather angry human that doesn't really make it in life. What I'm afraid is, my entire generation isn't going to make it in life, and that is terrifying. I'm 31 now, and if I knew what I knew then, I would have probably kicked a few teachers in the nuts for what they put their students through.

stevekemp 12y ago
> Some of them were smart kids, but they had no proper upbringing Which is one of the conclusions of series four of The Wire ..
dba7dba 12y ago
"They didn't know what to do, how to act, how to be" Kids have to be taught how to be normal human beings first, BEFORE school can teach anything. And that education to be a human starts at home, with parents.

kethinov 12y ago

The blame game is unhealthy. As long as our public discourse is about blaming parents, blaming teachers, or blaming anybody, we won't strike at the root of the problem, which is poverty. Kids living in poverty simply won't do well in school in statistically significant numbers. If we solve that, then we'll solve our achievement gap.

tom-lord 12y ago
How do you fix education? By fixing the poverty. How do you fix poverty? By fixing the education. Oh wait, hang on...
- kethinov 12y ago
  How do you fix poverty? By having a safety net not full of holes like swiss cheese.
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  You don't fix a vicious cycle by addressing only one aspect. So yes, we have to fix both. Then it will become a mutually reinforcing cycle like it used to be.
tomjen3 12y ago
Reading through here I see a lot of assertions and very little evidence. Could you back up your claim?
- kethinov 12y ago
  This program did an excellent deep dive and the panelists have written books on the subject if you're looking for more depth: http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-02-18/rethinking_standardized_testing http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-02-18/rethinking_stan...
spacemanmatt 12y ago
Seconded. I'm amazed that people are still so willfully blind that they need to see the proof. My take is, if you can't perform your own validation here, your eyes are not open. Poverty is written all over America but we keep misreading it.