Genuine thank you for the apology. Sorry if I was rude, I forget to think before I type sometimes.
I kind of can go along with some of the other things you said, but I still think it's a very problematic area. I would like to see students have the opportunity to study the things they excel at and are interested in, regardless of whether they are "gifted" or not.
Hey, have a rant: Mm... a lot of the problem with specialized per-student curriculum, which in broad strokes is the direction you're suggesting to go toward (and it's a damn,
damn good idea, because there's basically jack nothing as effective in regards to education) is, well, logistical. We don't really have the number of teachers (raw numbers), nor the type of teachers (training), nor the classrooms (space), nor, really, the equipment and infrastructure (materials in general, venues outside of straight classrooms for education possibilities), we need to be
able to move towards something like that, outside of very specific, generally very specialized situations -- I've personally only seen that sort of thing in special ed programs and adult education, and to a large degree that was only because the ones I'm familiar with had some really damn good teachers heading them. A lot of the things we're trying to do now, from what I've seen,
would work
if we set up the environment we're trying to accomplish it in so that it
can. But we don't.
Kind of the sundry list. If you're going to get genuinely top-notch and better students, you need a smaller student/teacher ratio, period. Mid-teens or thereabouts have been about the highest I've seen genuinely
work. Anything much higher than that and a single teacher just doesn't have the goddamn time in the day to be able to do what needs to be done, and so things like "teaching to the test" happen, because they've gotta' do
something and it's the best way they have in the situation they're forced in to help the students. Current best practice I've personally seen is something my mother does, who teaches adult education (actual adults, as well as drop-outs and drop-overs) -- she's got it scheduled so even though she's got a good 40-50 students in a semester, there's generally only a dozen at most in the classroom at any one time, generally less. Students are staggered across hours in general (so you'd maybe have half before lunch, half after, or groups moving in and out every quarter day or so.) and may only attend her class a few times a week. Scaling it up would take juggling beyond me, and definitely more classrooms (and almost certainly more teachers), but outside of resource issues I couldn't say why we
shouldn't.Training's another
big issue, because education is
goddamn complicated if you're going to do it right and you need both theoretical and fairly extensive practical experience before you get thrown to the wolves. Not to mention that a good teacher is going to have a certain degree of support personnel, so to speak (most don't, in the schools I've seen. Teacher has a hard time teaching when they're spending a quarter of their waking hours doing paperwork instead of teaching.). Biggest issue I've seen here is that the proper education needed to really excell as a teacher is both expensive and time consuming, and teaching itself generally seems to pay pretty poorly in the states. We don't seem to have the system we really need to be able to produce
and support good teachers, nor entice or enable people to really go at it full tilt, and that's a pretty damn big deal.
Space is pretty obvious, and comes on two fronts. The first is size -- as insinuated, 30+ student classes with only a single teacher
does not god damn work. Everyone involved in that is getting shortchanged in regards to education, almost regardless to what the subject is. Second is, if you will, ergonomics. Most classrooms I've seen are flatly fucking uncomfortable, which is basically a flat out sin if you're going to stick children in one for hours on end (though it's generally just as bad in higher education), nevermind the teacher. They also have to make concessions due to student volume that makes material presentation sub-par for a lot of people involved. If we had the resources and the will, we could fix this. We know the psychology of education to a pretty damn extensive degree these days, and if we
wanted to design a classroom actually built from the ground up to facilitate learning, we
could. Why we don't, I don't know. Best guess is resource issues, either physical (cash money, buildings, etc.) or technical (people who know
how to do that. We've got them, but certainly not enough to cover the needs of the entire country.).
Materials and infrastructure are sumbitch issues. Most textbooks I've seen are shite, especially for teaching younger or less focused individuals. We could fix it -- we've got the know-how. I don't know why we don't -- and I mean that literally. If anyone's got an idea on that front, I'd love to hear more about it. Bringing in a great deal more of societal involvement would likely produce tremendous benefit as well -- we need greater involvement from our trades, to bring kids in and see what work gets done, from our sciences, from our arts. Maybe it's more involved in other areas, but where I'm at it didn't happen much. But it's a pretty simple concept -- you doing basic algebra this week? Go to a workplace or non-profit organization that
uses it, and do the teaching
there. Other than american society in general kinda' not giving a shit about education, and possibly the disruption it'd cause in a workplace (though you could work around that, damnit, if you wanted to), this is another one of those, "I don't know why the hell we're not doing this" kinda' things.
... didn't really intend to rant, but... whatever. tl;dr form, and possibly not fully explicated in that mess -- letting students study the things they excel and are interested in -- and, just as importantly, figuring out what that
is -- is a really tremendously huge project. I wish we'd throw people at it until it happened.
But... frankly? We have the people on the ground that know exactly what the hell's going wrong, and we've got the people on the ground that know how the hell to fix it, and I have no bloody idea why the hell we're having such trouble getting those people together and saying, "Get this shit done, me buckos." I'd probably be able to figure out some of the blockage if I stopped to think (nasty suspicion that good ol'American anti-intellectualism is raising its head a bit, ferex.), but for now... have all that above.
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Topic: Education (Read 5601 times)