What is best for education?

Tom, the problem with summer break is retention. Stuff that was painstakingly crammed in the students' ears flies right out with the warm weather. Ask any teacher and they'll tell you that they waste a good quarter of the year on "refresher" teaching to get the kids back up to the level they ended the last year at. Hell, if you cut out those three months and stuff 'em back into the year, you could complete 12 years of education in 8 and have freaking eons left over to partaaay.

You keep harping on the "school is intolerable" thing; I'm suggesting ways to change that so it isn't so stressful and is more efficient at the same time. Teacher vacations — why not handle that like any other job? They ask for a week off, a sub comes in, voila. As for repairs and maintenance, my company runs all year and they somehow manage to keep the facilities working. I don't buy that argument for a second. And as for the work thing, students could request time exemptions for holding a job. Anyway, if education isn't a forced deal where you MUST KNOW X BY Y, then how long it actually takes you is less critical and there's time for all of this.

On the TA's thing, that's only because you're talking about bored college kids filling time to get their credits in. There's no reason it has to be that way. If the job of educator stops being such a dumping ground and starts being prestigious, then you'll get higher quality people angling for it. Hell, my son's preschool has some of the most loving and dedicated teachers I've ever seen and they all have or are going for various education related degrees. Those are the people I'm talking about.

edited 5th Aug '11 9:56:56 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Do they have to do things like replace plumbing, roofing, asbestos abatement (common since the buildings in the district I work for are old), re-finishing wooden floors that take 5 straight days just to apply the finish and another 3 before it's usable, among other things on a regular basis oftentimes several such projects going at the same time?

All three others stand. We aren't Japanese and obsessed with cram school over here. Your ideas run fundamentally counter to the culture of the region and would be destined to fail worse than the system is already.

edited 5th Aug '11 9:59:36 PM by MajorTom

Days with a substitute teacher were effectively days off. The sub had in most cases never met the kids or teacher before, much less had any idea how either of them thought or interacted with each other. It was lucky if they were even comfortable with the material themselves. To say nothing of the Lowest Common Denominator tradition of screwing with subs at every opportunity.

Oh certainly. I'm just saying seeing the improvement there first is rather critical before I'd do any less than laugh the suggestion out of the room, because right now it'd be like throwing gasoline on the fire.

Fighting ingrained cultures of laziness is hard

edited 5th Aug '11 10:02:08 PM by Pykrete

1. Axe the fed.
2. Vouchers
3. Axe the unions. We want to improve the results for the students, not the teachers.

Tom, I can't help but think that you're engaging in more of your stubborn resistance for the sake of resistance and not even trying to address my actual arguments. Accordingly I won't talk to you unless you actually say something useful. About the only point you made that actually addressed anything was regarding maintenance, and again, you just close that part of the building for the necessary time period. It happens all the time in business; you just have to stop being lazy.

Pykrete, perhaps sub was a poor choice. The way I imagine things, you'd have a pool of teachers available for each subject and you could rotate them around without much loss. Take my science class idea. If the room had 80 students and 5 teachers, then any one of them could take a vacation and there would still be enough to cover.

deuxhero, I also am not going to address obvious absurdities with you. We've already discussed how local control over education turns the system into a clusterfuck and a unified federal education budget solves the problem of a poor neighborhood having a tenth the per-capita funding of a rich one. Vouchers are just a way for people to stiff the public school system because they're too elite to let their precious little babies play with the poor folks.

edited 5th Aug '11 10:06:43 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

As a kid in high school who sees it all the time, first-hand, I feel uniquely qualified to remind you, in case you forgot from your days: we don't respect subs. Sure, it's terrible, but we're used to the teacher that's normally there. Perhaps we don't like them, either, but a teacher is, fundamentally, in a position where strong social connections are required. Bring in someone else—someone who, by definition, does not have those connections—and we can't take them seriously. They are replacements, and we know it.

It's like saying parents could just take days off. It isn't going to work.

Then we have kids who are "done" with schools at somewhere around 14—when they sure as hell aren't ready for social responsibilities. Would you have them run rampant for four years?

I am now known as Flyboy.

If we had 5 actual honest-to-God teachers for 80 students, we would be in a totally different scenario.

One where the union is the only thing keeping the school from laying off half of them

edited 5th Aug '11 10:07:34 PM by Pykrete

Nah, that's when you start vocational electives. Also, what teacher wouldn't want a few extra months with their kids to cram the basics into them?

Yes, a sane educational system. The money is a red herring. It's there; we just choose not to spend it on these things. You know, our kids? Our future?

edited 5th Aug '11 10:09:29 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Really, if our education system were "sane" as it were, we'd probably be done with high school curriculum by 14 and be able to keep summer break. Fall refreshers were the least of the wasted time in middle and high school.

Hell, even the first couple years of college.

edited 5th Aug '11 10:12:59 PM by Pykrete

USAF: Additional schooling. Start low end jobs. Maybe they can start some sort of college course work. They could start in on those specialized courses they may not have gotten a chance to get to. Hell let them try and improve various areas they were lagging in.

Who watches the watchmen?

Well, yeah, we might get so much efficiency out of this system that primary and secondary education is done by 18 (I count trade schools as secondary for this purpose). OMG, what would we do with all the suddenly productive young adults?

edited 5th Aug '11 10:19:15 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I ain't being stubborn for the sake of stubbornness.

You can't do many of those tasks during the school year, closed section or not. Much of the country has this thing called winter and you can't do roofing or asbestos abatement in -12C weather. (Wax and gym finish harden much much slower in the cold and you can't simply throw heaters at them and expect good results.) Likewise same deal with plumbing. A common problem in Rocky Mountain and Great Plains schools from October to April is pipes bursting from freezing. Those shut the schools down entirely. Replacing entire sections of water piping (worse if they are asbestos piping) is impractical during the school year so the busted mains get repaired and the system then gets looked at for replacement in the summer when everyone is gone. Can't shut off a gymnasium to re-finish it because it takes so long to do and you have school sports and PE classes during the year.

Private industry doesn't have many of the things a school does for maintenance work on a regular basis unless they are built with that particular business model in mind (e.g. a workout center).

This is not even going into the fact that schools are not small buildings.

Tom, to me this sounds like poor architecture or a lack of well-designed infrastructure. My company's office building is as big as any school in terms of total square footage and we don't have pipes bursting every winter. Heck, part of the investment should be a massive school reconstruction project. That's direct stimulus and an extremely useful kind to boot.

Anyway, these problems are solvable because they've been solved. If private industry had to shut down their facilities for three months per annum to fix broken shit, there would be hell to pay. The only reason we suck so badly at it is that nobody's bothered to try.

Edit: going to bed now. It's way too late for me and I need sleep to continue the debate.

edited 5th Aug '11 10:29:12 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

...this surprises you???

@Pykrete:

Hear, hear! Children used to start school at 5, learn to read and write English, start to grammar school at 7, and after 7 more years, those who were qualified applied to college.

“Love is the eternal law whereby the universe was created and is ruled.” — St. Bernard

"Lockharts Lament" beautifully sums up everything that I and so many others see as fundamentally wrong in the mathematics curriculum. The hypothetical art and music courses he formulates are spine-chilling.

I think that perhaps not having 3 months of summer might be a good idea in the US. I mean a few more breaks rather than 1 ridiculously huge one might be of more practical good.

That and having higher standards for teachers. I'd have killed to have a decent language teacher when I was at school, I might be able to speak french right now.

I'd like to raise two points:

1. Bring back students tutoring students, as per the old schoolhouse model. As soon as third grade, you start tutoring kids two years below you in the subjects you're strongest at. Allows us to take pressure off the teacher, allows students to get special attention from individual tutors, creates a bigger body of potential skilled teachers since more people will be familiar with pedagogy from a young age, and helps kids actually learn because we listen to our peers more than we listen to authority figures we see as oppressive or demanding.
2. Don't rely TOO much on what worked more than 20 years ago. The amount of raw information kids need to become functional members of modern society has increased exponentially and is still increasing. Not to say we can't learn from the past, but recognize that we are trying to hit a moving target here.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

To be fair, most of the pipes that burst aren't in the buildings themselves. (Usually in the street. Blame the city if you have to.)

Yes, but here's one big obstacle. Most state governments (you know the ones with the actual pursestrings on education) are more concerned with inefficient and mismanaged welfare programs like WIC than doing anything like that.

Yes, in the eyes of many statehouses, ignorant idiots on welfare are more important than generating intelligent/productive students out of the schools.

True, but allow me to retort one thing. The thought of "just close that section down" fails when you account for school operations. You can't just tell say the 5th Grade that they have next Thursday off because their hallway is getting waxed. You'd have to shut down all classes to do that. (In Colorado, there are legal barriers preventing the shutdown of only one grade level in a public school.)

I personally prefer the Japanese style school year as an idea.

IE, 3 month studying periods, followed by a one month break, followed by another 1 month break. etc.

Breaks are a good idea. 3 months however, simply assures you forget half the shit by the next time you see a textbook.

So, wait, Tom... we're too busy with welfare handouts to put money into infrastructure projects? I suppose you don't care that the kids who are attending these schools actually have food to eat, clothes to wear, beds to sleep in. You know, stuff that directly impacts their ability to learn and therefore exit the cycle of poverty?

Also, those pools of money are not mutually exclusive. There is more than enough to accomplish all of this stuff; it's just not being utilized efficiently, sitting as it is in the hands of wealthy individuals/companies. There's enough money in these places to repay the U.S. debt five times over, never mind fix the schools.

With respect to closing sections of schools for maintenance, modular classes would help with that — if you need to shut down the science wing; you just move the students that would have attended those classes into other groups for the week or something. If laws get in the way of this, change the laws. We're talking about abolishing grade levels anyway, so that law you mention would be irrelevant.

I refuse to accept the excuse that "our infrastructure is too broken to support these changes". We can fix infrastructure; in fact, we ought to do this anyway regardless of any other reform efforts. There is no reason other than laziness and indifference why our kids need to attend school in conditions that would shame any business.

edited 6th Aug '11 7:21:20 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I agree with pretty much all of Fighteer's initial list, though I'd make summer break shorter rather than cut it entirely.

Now, as has been mentioned, a lot of these changes would cost mucho bucks. So where do we get them?

Cut sports.

Not entirely, but as has been mentioned earlier in this thread, throwing money at schools almost always only helps the sports department. Make them rely more on fund-raisers, students buying their own equipment, etc. Get rid of in-school pep rallies that only take away from learning time.

Somehow you know that the time is right.

Under your model, students would still get months or weeks off for a break right Fighteer? That's plenty of time to let students/faculty rest and fix up the building.

Honestly I do think summer break should be done away with, mostly for the retention thing but also as a preparatory thing. Unless you manage to get a job at a school immediately after graduating high school/college, it is highly unlikely you will have a three month break every year. Best to get people used to the concept of working year round with small breaks spread out.

A shorter summer holiday seems like a good idea. Here in the UK — and forgive me for this, Tom, I know you aren't the biggest fan of "Europe did it, so we have to do the same!" — there's a six-week summer holiday, with half-terms holidays (lasting a week) and full-term holidays (lasting two) spread out throughout the year.

Talking to friends in America, most of them say that they'd prefer a model like this, even if most of them like their three-month summer holiday too... sorry, anecdote.

Complete separation of education and state! or vouchers for a more Chicago School approach. Here!

edited 6th Aug '11 9:41:54 AM by secretist

TU NE CEDE MALIS CLASS OF 1971