Yeah it's more a list of what you don't learn if either the school was no good or the student did not pay attention whilst there- and more likely the latter.
If the complaint was that schools don't teach people skills like driving a car- a directly relevant practical like skill- as opposed to learning maths, then I could see the basis of the argument. I'd still rather we tried to educate people broadly though.
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Last edited by Ushgarak on May 23rd, 2015 at 09:28 AM
maybe in the american education plan, i am an aussie yr 12 student and my last math assignment was in relation to finding a house, finding a job and working out taxes, insurances, bonds, homeloans, getting a second house and managing financial issues like bills, inflation and diffrent jobs
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I can see an argument for learning some more practical skills as well. But I don't understand why maths is always the target of scorn though, surely people must realize that mathematics is the basis of basically all sciences, and that we'd be off pretty shit if there weren't any people pursuing those careers in the future.
In my highschool there was a required Life Management Skills class that included most if not all of these things. But no one really took it seriously. That's the deciding factor in all education--whether you as a student make an effort to learn or not.
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Speaking as a non-shitty teacher, I have to say it's absolutely true, with the caveat that a shitty teacher can ruin everything. That said, the best teacher can't make everyone learn if some of the students just don't give a damn. It's a two-way street, and all pieces (teacher, student, adminstration) must be working. Looking at only one piece of the mechanism, be it teacher, student, or administration, is overly-reductive and ignores the complexity of the process.
I just had a student yesterday from my last class who ended up with a grade in the 40s appealing for her grade. I basically flat out told her that she failed the class because she didn't take it seriously. I had a lot of students who did take it seriously and received excellent grades. In fact, I'm a pretty generous grader, so if you fail my class it means you probably weren't even in the classroom most of the time.
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“Where the longleaf pines are whispering
to him who loved them so.
Where the faint murmurs now dwindling
echo o’er tide and shore."
-A Grave Epitaph in Santa Rosa County, Florida; I wish I could remember the man's name.
Last edited by Omega Vision on May 23rd, 2015 at 01:56 PM
Lol the thread was supposed to be funny yet you try and disprove it, then backpedal on what you originally said, and take it serious then get called out and look just as childish as the kid who prolly wrote it.
Last edited by Time Immemorial on May 23rd, 2015 at 05:38 PM
Depending on how you define "good", I would say it's pretty common for none of the things listed up there to be taught in the core curriculum sans "what are taxes", based on my own experience.
My high school was the best in the district, but I didn't hear anything from teachers about how to do the things listed in the OP until, ironically, I was placed in retard math in my senior year (I kept flunking algebra). It was called "applied mathematics" or some such, and the teacher taught us how to do taxes, how interest rates worked, what different types of loans worked- basically a lot about how money works. Definitely a hell of a lot more rerelevent and useful than algebra in hindsight.
It's kind of a complicated issue because there are multiple factors. College prep is one; we're obsessed with college here in the states and over the past 20 years there's been a shift in philosophy where a lot of schools are prioritizing subject matter that's more likely to be encountered in college (like algebra).
The second problem is standardised testing. As teachers live and die by the scores students get on standardized tests, they're incentivized to focus on material that's relevent to those tests... like algebra.
God, I hate auto-correct.
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May 23rd, 2015 01:18 AM
