[roadtonowhere08]

THIS IS NOT A POLITICAL THREAD. THIS IS MEANT TO DISCUSS EDUCATION AND ITS FUTURE IN AMERICA.


Taken from CNN

Education chief favors longer school year - CNN.com

# Story Highlights
# Education secretary: U.S. students at "competitive disadvantage" with other countries
# Longer school year among options considered to boost student performance
# "We can't afford to get worse now," Secretary Arne Duncan says
# Stimulus money will help schools keep teachers in jobs, Duncan says





Let me start with saying that I am a high school science teacher where I live. I teach students that, for the majority of them, a UC school will not be in their future. Obviously there is nothing wrong with that; I love each and every day that I am their teacher, but the classes that I teach are not IB/AP cutthroat classes.

I think the idea of lengthening the school year for the sake of "being more competitive" academically with the rest of the world is a simplified, naive, and idealistic viewpoint. In my class, I cover all of the state standards in the allotted time, I include hands-on labs, and I make lectures and discussions as interesting as possible. Do I feel the pace is sometimes faster than I would like? Sure, but that is the case will all teachers at least part of the time. Would stretching the school year into the summer make one bit of difference with my class? I do not think so. In fact, I think it would discourage some students to be more apathetic about school than than they already are.

I talk to the science teachers who teach IB/AP classes, and even though they have a blistering pace, a healthy number of students each year go on to enroll in UC and Ivy League universities. Of those students, many of them lead very productive lives in our society. What about those that when to a CSU school instead? I am one of those people, and I think my job is a worthwhile and meaningful one. I attended school 181 (or so) days a year, I set a vocational goal for myself, and I achieved it.

What does this mean regarding this idea of extending the school year? Education is there for the taking. Those who are driven will take advantage of it, and those who are not will not. No amount of impedance into the summer vacation will change that. My students will achieve what they want to. The ones that go to a high end university will do so because they want to, not because the extra schooling allowed them to.

One thing often not mentioned in this quest for global academic competitiveness is that in countries such as China and India, only the brightest students go to school. All we hear in the United States is how those countries are leaving us in the dust, but in reality all they are doing is skimming off the cream and leaving the rest (the vast majority) to toil away their lives agriculturally or industrially. Of course the United States cannot compete when total enrolled student academic achievement is compared. It is a total apples to oranges comparison.

Where I think the United States educational model fails (as optimistic as it is) is that it attempts to prepare all students for college. I will be the first to say this: not all people should go to college. Some people are best served going straight into a trade school to be trained to be plumbers, electricians, etc. These are the people that are driven to work with their hands to make an honest living. For those college is a waste of time. Their energy should be spent improving their skills. Hopefully one day those students who might fail out of college would be diverted into trade schools earlier to let them get started on their career path earlier. The one size fits all model does not work.

Despite the flaws of the United States educational system, this purposed solution is counterproductive. If we really want to become fully competitive with countries with cherry-picked academic domination, we have to, as a nation, change our cultural values regarding education. Parents have to place an emphasis on education above all else. Students have to know that education is delayed gratification, and in this "charge now, pay later" society, a college degree will pay dividends later on when it counts. I am a firm believer in the idea of getting out of life what you want. If a student succeeds academically, it will be because they want to, not because an extra few weeks of school made the difference.

What do you guys think?

 

[TheMarchingMule]

Indeed, I have heard and read how the US of A is slipping past the other countries at an alarming rate.

My father has been a teacher for 35+ years (I lost track), and right now he's teaching a middle school in math and science. Recently, the school has split up all the mathematics courses so there are two levels of the same math concept: for the "behind" kids and the "normal" kids. My father has been stuck with the "behind" kids, and they've been stressing him out more than I remember when he worked at schools in gang areas. They simply don't want to learn, and only want to be defiant or make up their own fun by any means. Before I left for college, he was having parents calling him and scheduling parent-teacher conferences because of the homework he was giving the students. And the homework is really modest already, like fill-in-the blank (some student still managed to switch around the male and female parts of a flower though).

I do agree that education and its standards here in America are crumbling apart, and there needs to be a serious review of its infrastructure and how it can be genuinely improved (no, that NCLB thing doesn't even count).

Like, for starters, it's been proven that teenagers, because of their puberty and whatnot, tend to stay up late and wake up late. Great, so stop making a zero period for middle schools and high schools where the students have to wake up before seven in the morning! Honestly, am I the only one that has noticed that the children are getting shorter and shorter? It's lack of sleep and the rush to get to school, making them miss out on breakfast, and ironically, prevents them from properly learning in the classroom.

That's my rant for now. I think it's funny that I just finished watching Falling Down, and then this thread pops up.

 

[Nocturnal310]

Education is so overrated...


the main purpose of education is to help u grab a job...after that u r on your own.

it just gives u a good head start.

i look at this guy Mark Zuckerburg (facebook founder)..he didnt even complete his education..and boy..he's richer than any Ivy League graduate will ever be.

also..i saw a group on facebook called 'I scored more than George Bush on SATs' ..all good on paper...

but in reality the guy was a president for 2 terms..smthg even SAT toppers will never be.


so reality proves that education is only design to help u earn a living..it doesnt teach how to live..it doesnt teach so much more.

 

[TheMarchingMule]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nocturnal310 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Education is so overrated... the main purpose of education is to help u grab a job...after that u r on your own. it just gives u a good head start. i look at this guy Mark Zuckerburg (facebook founder)..he didnt even complete his education..and boy..he's richer than any Ivy League graduate will ever be. also..i saw a group on facebook called 'I scored more than George Bush on SATs' ..all good on paper... but in reality the guy was a president for 2 terms..smthg even SAT toppers will never be. so reality proves that education is only design to help u earn a living..it doesnt teach how to live..it doesnt teach so much more.

I did forget to mention one part of my soapbox speech. And that is that education must become more "streamlined" in its ways of teaching technicality. In my opinion, we're being taught by sheer quantity of the information, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that most of this academic stuff we'll probably never use in our lives by the time we graduate high school. Heck, my parents had to hire a tutor and I had to get help from many of my friends just to pass Trig/Pre-Calc (in my defense, it was discovered that the teacher was teaching it in "AP mode"), and I'm a Screenwriting Major. I'm also of Asian descent, so there goes the stereotype.

But I digress. Education must become more focused on itself and how it is taught to improve, and not try to smother our social or family lives by the "reasoning" of "The more it's in their lives, the more they're be enriched by it!."

(Another reason why I hate the typical Asian way of education; having your life run off of how well you do in school only screws you over as you get older and want a social life like the rest of your happy friends.)

 

[Nocturnal310]

ya.. Asian way of education really is highly dogmatic...many students commit suicide if they score poorly....because everyone judges u based on your academic performance..not to mention the ridiculous level of importance it is given over everything else.

so due to such level of pressure..many students from young age are often stressed

 

[Calexico]

Nocturnal: Just because people DO succeed without good educations doesn't mean that education doesn't matter or that it's "overrated". They're simply outliers. I'm 99.9infinity% sure that Ivy League graduates average a higher income than community college graduates.

As for the actual topic of increasing the school year, I don't think it's necessary. As people have said, people who want to and can succeed will succeed, others might or might not. The school year won't change the final outcome.

 

[mark2410]

meh, im sure it cant be that much worse than the uk education system and its lowest common denominator attitude to teaching, so long as the remedials are passing the level the want all the brighter kids are ignored

 

[Computerpro3]

If they increase the college year significantly, I'll drop out and go it on my own. Samuel Clemens said it best: "I've never let school interfere with my education." Literally nothing defining who I am now was learned whatsoever in school. To make a living, I sell computers and invest in the stock market. I learned how to read/write/do math from my parents well before they were taught in school, and learned it much more efficiently too. It shouldn't take 5 years of English class to learn how to write a good essay for goodness sake! I'm in college now and 95% of the people I meet can't even write proper English.

Right now, I am in a music conservatory studying to be a concert pianist. Once again, this has nothing to do with my previous schooling. They don't even care about high school GPA. I hate school and always have hated school - I've always had to be successful in SPITE of school instead of BECAUSE of school. They wouldn't even let me practice piano during study hall in high school, even if I finished all of my other work. They literally told me I had to sit there and do nothing. The only reason I got into one of the best music schools in the world isn't because of school, but because I directly defied the administration and skipped Pre-Calc and my 2 study halls every single day and went and played piano. Then of course, when I got in, the school was fawning over me and trying to take credit. They even went so far as to hang my scholarship certificate on the guidance office wall. I made them take it down. Basically, school was damn near a complete waste of 15 years of my life so far.

 

[taylor]

For me at least, high school education was just to help me get into a decent university.

I feel that the raw amount of school shouldn't be changed. I had a summer vacation, and I spent my last two summer vacations of high school working retail full time. That gave me a lot of people skills, and a lot of business skills. I got a job in October of my junior year, and worked until 5 days before I left for college.

I'm not sure about where you guys are from, but from where I am, the majority of the kids who aren't completely spoiled brats get a summer job. When they come back in the Fall, they're a lot more motivated. They see what happens to the college dropouts - retail and food service. They pick up some cash so they're not as much of a drain on their parents, and they learn a little about dealing with managers and coworkers and being a reliable employee.

Colleges realized that on-site job experience is a good thing, and that's why they developed the Co-Op program.
I know people with a 3.5+ GPA who have never had a job... they're upset and apprehensive about graduation, and most of them want to go to grad school, because they're so caught up in academia that they don't ever want to leave and get a real job. I think making year-round school would only exacerbate that. If you're 22, and have never had a job, and have never had an experience outside of a classroom, you're not going to be very confident walking into a job interview or something similar.

 

[taylor]

Computerpro3, +1 on high school being a waste of time.

They don't make provisions for people who are really smart. I could have walked out of that place halfway through my Junior year and never looked back.

I've been an avid reader since about age 8, so I could barely get through my English classes, because the stuffy old "classics" they taught were terrible. There were only a handful of novels I actually enjoyed that I was forced to read in high school. Unless the teacher picked a good selection of books, I did poorly in it.

I slept and/or played calculator games through every single math class. I was able to consistently score >90% on tests, then get a B- because I didn't do any homework.

Science class? Introductory Chemistry and Physics just 'clicked' for me. The teacher explained something, and I was like okay, I get it. Now give me the test. I don't want to do a homework on it, or sit through three classes worth of example problems.

That's why I liked standardized tests. I was one of the really smart kids, languishing in "advanced" high school classes well below my intelligence level. I had decent grades, because I beat down every test, but I never did homework, so I never got an A. If you looked at GPA, I was ~250th out of a class of 550, barely top 50%. Dumber kids had to work a lot harder to learn what I did. They did that by completing homework, participating in class, meeting with the teachers, the kind of stuff that boosts your grade. When it came to SATs, I scored in the highest 5% of high school students.

 

[Computerpro3]

Yeah I agree. I think standardized tests are useless, but I love them because I always got close to a perfect score without studying for them. My GPA was 3.016 on a 4.5 scale in high school, but only 4 people in the school got a higher SAT than I did.

 

[Kirosia]

Quote:

My father has been stuck with the "behind" kids, and they've been stressing him out more than I remember when he worked at schools in gang areas. They simply don't want to learn, and only want to be defiant or make up their own fun by any means. Before I left for college, he was having parents calling him and scheduling parent-teacher conferences because of the homework he was giving the students. And the homework is really modest already, like fill-in-the blank (some student still managed to switch around the male and female parts of a flower though).

Hehe, I guess I qualified as one of those kids. (Though my teachers liked me for the most part) It's true that we don't want to learn, but we honestly don't care. School is like a prison, the administration are COs and the other students are just potential threats. I would get hassled by staff just for being the wrong color, and (often times) for being just too damn ugly. I've been physically assaulted almost every year of lower education, even in front of teachers and parents. (They'd just act like it didn't happen, or somehow blame me) Kids I went to school with were joining/forming gangs at like 11-12 just to protect themselves. And as we all know, gangs eventually become machines of hate and violence.

That said, I won't lie, we usually are stupid and/or lazy. It's.. a lack of motivation. These kids don't see a "future", at least not one involving academia. People go to school to better themselves, to be able to get that cushy job, nice place in the hills, eat at the fancy restaurants etc. I remember my cousin would take me to some relatively nice places to eat, and we'd get treated badly because of how we looked. We'd go to a high-end shopping center, and we'd get accused of stealing for no reason. You drive a nice car? You stole it. Nice house? Drug money. Good college? Affirmative action. Not to mention how other people acted towards us. Stuff like this takes away what little motivation we have. Combined with an earned disrespect for authority figures and society in general, these kids just stop giving a damn.

And some of us are just ***holes.

 

[Calexico]

Quote:

Originally Posted by taylor /img/forum/go_quote.gif Computerpro3, +1 on high school being a waste of time. They don't make provisions for people who are really smart. I could have walked out of that place halfway through my Junior year and never looked back. I've been an avid reader since about age 8, so I could barely get through my English classes, because the stuffy old "classics" they taught were terrible. There were only a handful of novels I actually enjoyed that I was forced to read in high school. Unless the teacher picked a good selection of books, I did poorly in it. I slept and/or played calculator games through every single math class. I was able to consistently score >90% on tests, then get a B- because I didn't do any homework. Science class? Introductory Chemistry and Physics just 'clicked' for me. The teacher explained something, and I was like okay, I get it. Now give me the test. I don't want to do a homework on it, or sit through three classes worth of example problems. That's why I liked standardized tests. I was one of the really smart kids, languishing in "advanced" high school classes well below my intelligence level. I had decent grades, because I beat down every test, but I never did homework, so I never got an A. If you looked at GPA, I was ~250th out of a class of 550, barely top 50%. Dumber kids had to work a lot harder to learn what I did. They did that by completing homework, participating in class, meeting with the teachers, the kind of stuff that boosts your grade. When it came to SATs, I scored in the highest 5% of high school students.

That just means they reward work ethic. Work ethic is important to success in life. As important as intelligence? I don't think so, but whatever.

 

[DLeeWebb]

Quote:

Originally Posted by roadtonowhere08 /img/forum/go_quote.gif THIS IS NOT A POLITICAL THREAD. THIS IS MEANT TO DISCUSS EDUCATION AND ITS FUTURE IN AMERICA. Taken from CNN Education chief favors longer school year - CNN.com # Story Highlights # Education secretary: U.S. students at "competitive disadvantage" with other countries # Longer school year among options considered to boost student performance # "We can't afford to get worse now," Secretary Arne Duncan says # Stimulus money will help schools keep teachers in jobs, Duncan says Let me start with saying that I am a high school science teacher where I live. I teach students that, for the majority of them, a UC school will not be in their future. Obviously there is nothing wrong with that; I love each and every day that I am their teacher, but the classes that I teach are not IB/AP cutthroat classes. I think the idea of lengthening the school year for the sake of "being more competitive" academically with the rest of the world is a simplified, naive, and idealistic viewpoint. In my class, I cover all of the state standards in the allotted time, I include hands-on labs, and I make lectures and discussions as interesting as possible. Do I feel the pace is sometimes faster than I would like? Sure, but that is the case will all teachers at least part of the time. Would stretching the school year into the summer make one bit of difference with my class? I do not think so. In fact, I think it would discourage some students to be more apathetic about school than than they already are. I talk to the science teachers who teach IB/AP classes, and even though they have a blistering pace, a healthy number of students each year go on to enroll in UC and Ivy League universities. Of those students, many of them lead very productive lives in our society. What about those that when to a CSU school instead? I am one of those people, and I think my job is a worthwhile and meaningful one. I attended school 181 (or so) days a year, I set a vocational goal for myself, and I achieved it. What does this mean regarding this idea of extending the school year? Education is there for the taking. Those who are driven will take advantage of it, and those who are not will not. No amount of impedance into the summer vacation will change that. My students will achieve what they want to. The ones that go to a high end university will do so because they want to, not because the extra schooling allowed them to. One thing often not mentioned in this quest for global academic competitiveness is that in countries such as China and India, only the brightest students go to school. All we hear in the United States is how those countries are leaving us in the dust, but in reality all they are doing is skimming off the cream and leaving the rest (the vast majority) to toil away their lives agriculturally or industrially. Of course the United States cannot compete when total enrolled student academic achievement is compared. It is a total apples to oranges comparison. Where I think the United States educational model fails (as optimistic as it is) is that it attempts to prepare all students for college. I will be the first to say this: not all people should go to college. Some people are best served going straight into a trade school to be trained to be plumbers, electricians, etc. These are the people that are driven to work with their hands to make an honest living. For those college is a waste of time. Their energy should be spent improving their skills. Hopefully one day those students who might fail out of college would be diverted into trade schools earlier to let them get started on their career path earlier. The one size fits all model does not work. Despite the flaws of the United States educational system, this purposed solution is counterproductive. If we really want to become fully competitive with countries with cherry-picked academic domination, we have to, as a nation, change our cultural values regarding education. Parents have to place an emphasis on education above all else. Students have to know that education is delayed gratification, and in this "charge now, pay later" society, a college degree will pay dividends later on when it counts. I am a firm believer in the idea of getting out of life what you want. If a student succeeds academically, it will be because they want to, not because an extra few weeks of school made the difference. What do you guys think?

Amen!

 

[taylor]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Calexico /img/forum/go_quote.gif That just means they reward work ethic. Work ethic is important to success in life. As important as intelligence? I don't think so, but whatever.

There's a difference between rewarding work ethic, and rewarding taking a long time to do something.

The teachers said homework and other assignments were to help me learn the material. If I know the material without having to waste my time studying or practicing problems, I was punished for it.

They're saying that it's not the results that matter, it's the effort required to get them.

Then that leads into hourly wages... where you are punished for being efficient. If I can go into work, and finish up everything I need to in 6 hours, while the guy sitting next to me takes 8 hours to do the same amount of work, why should I get paid less?

I would walk into my job, and spend 6 hours hustling around, loading TVs into cars, driving the forklift, selling ipods, all sorts of stuff. And I got paid the same as the lady who wandered from aisle to aisle, talking on the store phone with her husband whenever a manager wasn't looking.

It seemed to me, in my recent experience in the US public school system, that it was catered more for the dumb kids, and a lot of very smart people were completely fed up with it. In my high school, if you failed a test, you could go to your teacher, and they were required to let you re-take it, and they completely threw out the old test. There were people who seriously used it for every test.