What is best for education?

It all boils down to not cutting their funding so that they can actually do their jobs. The republicans should take a hint, but they've got their heads in the clouds so they'll never do that.

As long as the pathway is student-driven, that's acceptable, Fighteer.

Hm. I'm thinking that you should have grades, but you bring back the idea of holding people back, and you introduce the concept that if you demonstrate you know the material, boom, you're in the next grade. Also, I was rejected from vocational school because my GPA was too high. That should not happen.

edited 5th Aug '11 5:37:12 PM by DomaDoma

Fighteer: Not entirely accurate on driven to secondary education. There are plenty of schools in various districts who participate or have in the past, in a School to Work Program. Ie preparing you to go directly to a job in the work force out of school. The West Valley School District in Spokane,WA had that focus. They pushed students to get jobs in the various mills and industrial jobs in the city. They had good shop classes their math courses were good and they had metal shop. The down side their college prep was very week and was at the time a serious complaint from the parents.

Anything resembling an ideal educational institution is going to be large and costly. Your definetly going to run into the problem of trying to educate certain numbers of students.

It sounds like you want the course work for pre-college to be more like well college. Except it doesn't really work well. Your going to get a scatter shot level of achievement. Most school systems already have those requirements built into their classes. Ie take a test here is where you stand. These are the reccomended classes from your advisor/carreer counselor. We reccomend these classes because of a.b.c.

You can only take certain classes if you have passed the others or test into them showing profeciency at that level or above. They even let you pick your own courses in high school. You need these core classes and you have this much available for electives and here is what our school has for electives. (usually decided by funding and available teacher pool)

All these neat ideas already exist in the education system in some form or other.

You really want to fix the education system make it more uniform across the board. Give students some choice but you can not let them always pick on their own otherwise your just going to run in circles.

The absolute most difficult hurdle to overcome is the population of the student body vs the population of the educators. This is ultimately what decides the schools physical size, classroom population size, number of teachers , and various other funding aspects.

Nobody ever complained about the large class size of a college assembly hall, and those explicitly let you play hooky. Class size is a manufactured issue by the time you know to see a counselor about your academic weak points.

I wonder why people who try for education degrees are among the worst in their high school performance? Aspiring librarians don't have that problem, and they earn half what teachers do.

edited 5th Aug '11 6:42:42 PM by DomaDoma

Try again. Class size is an issue. Profs only have so much time to adress so many students leaving some with questions. Same with any teacher. Who has more time for questions a teacher with 20 students or one with 50?

Provent time and again class size is a factor but not a single factor.

edited 5th Aug '11 6:43:41 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Should we discuss core courses?

Fighteer, I don't think we should assign grade levels to the classes. It would be much better to attach the subject.

Courses availalbe in general would be a good place to start. It is shocking the difference in courses availalble from school to school. Even in some cases with schools in the same county.

Not to mention it increases the turnover rate. Fire the guy who would've been about to get a raise and all. Happened to my sister this past spring.

In my entire time at high school, I had about six teachers who gave a rat's ass about how well their students were learning. Three of them were AP, one was the band director, and one was the theater director. Three of the four who weren't arts did the most important parts of their jobs by far with a whiteboard and $20 of dry-erase markers (physics actually needs materials, but hey), and the ones who were arts already had to run an obscene amount of fundraisers to keep from being cut by a greedy football coach.

There are many, many things that can cause poor performance from a school, and from my own experience, I'd be willing to bet that funding is one of the least. Blindly throwing money at schools will only get you a rich (and still mediocre) athletic department.

That said, I don't have an answer, and I wish I did. I really wish it was as easy as getting an inspector to sit in on classes every couple years and analyze their teaching style or something.

The most effective place to start might actually cost approximately $0 (minus the pointless bureaucracy of course). When your kids have to wake up at 5:30 AM to catch a 6:30 bus and show up half asleep and feeling like crap, that's a signal that your classes are starting way too goddamn early and nobody's going to be thinking straight, so what the fuck did you expect their grades to look like?

Erm...they complain when the class is teaching anything remotely difficult. Especially if the only people you're likely to be able to ask questions to are clueless TA's.

I had a lecture hall chem class five years ago, and when I asked one of the TA's to clarify a poorly written question on a test they just said "uh...sorry, I'm not good at chemistry..."

edited 5th Aug '11 9:03:22 PM by Pykrete

Oh, damn, I forgot about that. Yes, by all means start school hours later.

I'd have to attest that small class sizes in university make enormous difference in understanding and learning.

Amen. Here is another reason why school is nearly-universally hated, and breaks oh-so-loved...

Edit: Amusingly enough, those are exactly my hours, too...

edited 5th Aug '11 9:22:46 PM by USAF713

In regards to summer break, my spring term for the last three years in a row has been hellish to the point that my health declined considerably and I needed the first month and a half of break to physically recover. So you'll have a hard time convincing me of cutting it in any way.

There's something very badly wrong if that's the case, Pykrete. With you, with your curriculum, your environment, something.

Back on the grading scale, it's fine if it's by subject — that's actually what I had in mind. And of course you don't need to assign it as a "grade level"; it can be any arbitrary designation as long as it measures the student's progress relative to some established baseline.

For example, an 11 year old should know X and Y about U.S. history. A 12 year old should know X, Y, and Z. A student who knows X and Y but not Z would be scored at an 11 year old level.

This removes the pressure of having to get "A's" and instead lets each student grow organically, at his or her own pace. You might be behind in geometry but ahead in algebra; behind in writing but ahead in reading comprehension. They let you know where you need to focus on.

Sure, there will be invidious comparisons. But I'm convinced that half of what makes the school system so unhealthy is the emphasis on grades above all else. Adding standardized testing to the mix only makes it worse. We have to break up the cycle of mandated learning targets and move onto a program where everyone learns at their own pace.

edited 5th Aug '11 9:28:54 PM by Fighteer

Environment was a good part of it when I was in Eugene — I had to walk ten blocks through cottonwoods that I was deathly allergic to and lost a lot of sleep due to my eyes being on fire all the time.

Since I moved out of there it's all been course load though. CS pro-school likes to drop project-heavy classes on you all at once in the last term, and since everything is sequential you can't afford to take a lighter load.

edited 5th Aug '11 9:28:46 PM by Pykrete

Sounds like you're just plain doing too much. Where's all the pressure coming from? The drive to overachieve can be as destructive in the long run as a lack of achievement.

Part of the problem here is that you have to account for social concerns, as well. On paper, it looks good, but if what if getting that grade is the equivalent of getting held back. There is a lot of social stigma with the whole "held back" thing, and there's the fact that you won't be in the same classes as any of your friends anymore. Thus necessitating serious reworking of the whole system, if you want to do it—which you seem to grasp—but reworking such an old and important system is hard as hell.

I can second that early to rise crap is a pain. Start school at 10 am let out when it is done.

edited 5th Aug '11 9:35:11 PM by TuefelHundenIV

The pressure came from an intense major with absolutely no room for error unless you felt like paying for another year of college thanks to almost every critical class being offered once a year.

And Operating Systems II explicitly tries to break you. I might actually be able to find the email the prof sent out explaining that he positioned the midterm the day before the Engineering Expo and a project due the day after on purpose.

Having been through 3 different college level schools each with a different approach. Class size is a serious issue.

The private school Baylor U in Texas. Max class sizes topped off at about 20, 20+ for anything that was not a entry level course.

The state school try a class of 120+ UNO Omaha Specialized classes were a bit better but not by much.

The community college which kept class size to about 15-20 tops. Was honestly the best. Our classes were two hours long and we had lots of time to cover more materials and disccuss stuff.

@USAF: Yes, that is the point. It would require uprooting a hugely entrenched culture. The "grade level" thing is actually why I want to split things up in the way that I do. These days we have the tools to greatly automate the learning process, so splitting up a class isn't even necessary.

Take this hypothetical scenario. Your school science program is conducted in a single main classroom with a number of labs. There's one head instructor and a number of assistants. Each student has access to an electronic teaching aid of some sort - a tablet or a laptop or something like that, which knows their equivalency level and assigns them a learning program with the instructor's guidance. At any given point you can be attending a lecture on the subject that you're studying (at your particular level), working with your TA and/or learning device, or assigned to a lab station. You are periodically tested on your knowledge (or the testing is organic to the teaching) and those results determine how fast you move up the scale. You are encouraged to work in groups but not required, save for some labs.

Your peer group may all be there or they may be somewhere else, but that's why part of the day is assigned to "home room" studies where you get to hang out, socialize on break time, and/or study by yourself or in groups.

Class times would also be longer, and instead of each class each day you'd rotate.

@Pykrete: I'm not actually talking about collegiate courses here; I'm talking about primary education. College is a whole other deal and you need to manage things like internships, work study programs, time off with family, that kind of stuff. I'm not addressing college directly with my proposals.

edited 5th Aug '11 9:45:54 PM by Fighteer

I'm less attached to hard grades than I could be due to homeschooling being where I really took off.

That said, it's hard enough for a decent teacher to get into the heads of 70+ students across all their classes — having said students not even moving at the same pace would just be a clusterfuck.

Granted, I can't say a whole lot about the workload at my high school since so much of it was a royal waste of time altogether. Still, a few months to cool off seemed to do more good for me than bad — there wasn't much to forget.

edited 5th Aug '11 9:47:17 PM by Pykrete

It would be the TAs' job to monitor individual students; the instructor would be in charge of the overall lesson plan. Any student could of course ask for individual help at any given point. You could maintain a good ratio of teachers to students this way at a reasonable cost, if TAs are paid less than the instructor.

edited 5th Aug '11 9:47:42 PM by Fighteer

Hell no. Do you know what summer break is used for? A lot of things actually.

• Kids get much needed time off. I can tell you first hand, school is intolerable if you are there for more than 36 weeks a year.
• Teachers get a much needed vacation. I know of a couple of times where when I was in school the teachers and us were about to go to blows because we both wanted a break.
• Schools get much needed repairs and maintenance during the summer. Those shiny newly waxed floors, re-finished gyms, cleaned carpets and new roofing? All happens in the summer.
• At older levels, students rely on the summer to get jobs to earn money. I had a summer job in high school.

I could barely trust TA's to grade a 10-question multiple choice quiz within two weeks. My hopes aren't high for them effectively being the teachers.

edited 5th Aug '11 9:49:43 PM by Pykrete

Indeed. We would need professional TA's. But, hey, another job in the sector so you can break into the field, right?

Also, @Major Tom, yes, those are also good points in favor of summer vacation, especially the maintenance and job ideas.