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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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>What is "shop" ?? >How do you think Americans got to be such voracious consumers? We have classes in it! I did wonder ... I think that the same thing here is called Technology. They got rid of the old woodwork, metalwork etc in the early eighties and created CDT (craft, design and technology) which incorporated home economics and computing. The girls grammar school that I attended paid lipservice to teaching home economics and we didn't have any woodwork or metalwork workshops, thankfully that has changed. The website below gives a guide to the history of the subject and what is included: Regarded as largely for pupils who were “dull in all ‘brain work’” 2, handicraft was from the outset bereft of status, view as the black sheep of the British educational system - a position not helped by the 1944 Education Act which effectively relegated workshop skills to the secondary modern sector, thus further reinforcing the established “gentlemanly culture”.
Britain’s post-war economic decline is seen as rooted in this culture: humanistic and aesthetic pursuits being regarded higher than practical and commercial activity, resulting in the more able youngsters being attracted away from careers in business and industry.http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/trinity/ph_hist.html
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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>Such tests given at various grade levels would be controversial
Why? That seems to me to be the main difference. Our externally validated exams are all about grades. I suppose that we accept them because they have always been that way.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Thanks Sparteye and Wordwind
I'm starting to understand.
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#3525
11/06/2001 11:02 AM
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Carpal Tunnel
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#3526
11/06/2001 11:24 AM
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Apparently, pay is good for such positions I guess 'good' is a relative term - in the UK, the second largest (behind the USA) such market in the world, these facilities (originally known as Call Centres, but now corporately rebadged by the loathsome title of Customer Relationship Management Centres!) are increasingly widely recognised for exactly what they are: the sweatshops of our age. Having lead a team involved in 'proving the business case' for one such facility, believe me - I know whereof I speak! To return with a language based remark, the industry has coined a less than delightful word for a less than lovely phenomenon: churn describes the massive turnover of staff endemic in such working hell-holes (frequently over 25% of staff within a 12 month period). That belies the 'wellness' of the pay in relation to the conditions of work, I guess 
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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>Customer Relationship Management Centres
The former "call centres" are burgeoning in Scotland. Apparently Scottish voices sound more professional and reassuring.
Is it so in the valleys boyo?
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Carpal Tunnel
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in the valleysoh yes indeedy - we have in Wales the 3 prime requirements: 1 Well-educated labour force, from a better-than average school system 2 Low levels of alternative employment 3 Atrractive regional dialect (Can't somehow imagine a Brum accent working quite so well for many people, tho personally I love it!) Back to school in the UK as a whole, I see our quaintly named ‘public school’ system continues to encourage initiative and independent learning…. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/scotland/newsid_1642000/1642646.stm With the Robbie Coltrane connection, maybe JK's next might be Harry Potter and the Magic Trip?  
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Sparteyes descriptions was great-- but here is a big note– schooling is local.. each town or school district gets to set a lot of rules, with a state guideline... Like 180 days in the school year is a state minimum, but some school districts (say up Faldages way, or even out by Sparteye,) might schedule 190, or 200 days.. so that they can also have snow emergency closings... NYC usually on has 185 days in its school calendar, since we rarely have enough snow to close down the roads/schools.
and each local school district can choose its own text books -- but must meet a state standard for curriculum but there is a large leeway..
In NYC, there is Local control-- a big political issue.. but there are about 40 local school districts. they each get a share of state/city school funds basis on enrollment.. and they can figure out how they want to spend it. so some local schools have special curriculums.. they might offer journalism classes starting at first grade. or science classes with special labs, or language arts classes..
and these are open city wide.. so if your child has an interest in music, you can enroll them in a school that has a special focus on music.. the district get extra money for each out of district kid that enrolls, so each district tries to have one conveniently located school, that is a Magnet school. (drawing students to the school as a metal filings are drawn to a magnet.)
High schools are often in a separate school district. In NYC all HS are open to every student. some high-school, Stuyvestant, Bronx HS of science, Art and Music, Art and Design, and others have qualifying test to get in.. competition is fierce. as a ratio, its harder to get into Stuyvestant then Harvard.. (ratio of # applicants to # of admits)
my son went to "local HS" -- about 1.5miles from our house. my daughter commuted 15 + miles each day to Manhattan to specialty HS.
In less densely populated areas, several school districts might band together to have 1 large high-school. Jim the Dog has touched upon the problems of small HS districts.. You might only have 90 or so kids on a grade.. And total enrollment of 300 to 400– not enough students to have offer both spanish and french.
NY HS offer spanish, french, latin, german and russian..and maybe others... (or maybe different choices now.. But usually a very large assortment. But each HS usually only offers two.. If you want german, there might only be 5 schools in all of NYC that offer german. –
and about university/college levels most states offer at least some very inexpensive Jr colleges, (Community Colleges) 2 year programs.. These will sometimes feed into State colleges.. State colleges have varying fees, (cheaper for in state students than out of state) Until 20 years ago, CUNY– City University of NY was total free.. Its not now, but it is still very inexpensive. CUNY alumni include many Nobel prize winners, and pulitzer prize winners , etc. .
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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>Back to school in the UK as a whole, I see our quaintly named ‘public school’ system continues to encourage initiative and independent learning…. Yes, you get a better class of "prank", the more you pay. You have to note their innovation and the fact that they only put themselves at risk . The kids from the local comp on the other hand failed to burn down their own school down last week (it was too busy on the designated evening) so they burned down the neighbouring primary instead, it just took a couple of petrol bombs. Only a few thousands of pounds and zillions of hours of work.  Who'd be a teacher (or a parent)?
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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It's Technology at our school, too. It's fun, because we've got the coolest teacher in the world for it. In 7th grade, I remember, at the beginning he was pretending to be a caveman to illustrate why we started using tools. I'm laughing just remembering it. The only homework we had, ever, was to go home, take the top of the toilet, and flush it.
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stranger
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Roibin, I have to say that I understand where you are coming from, but do not totally agree with you. I am a 22 year old graduate student and a substitute teacher who, hopefully one day, will be a "real" teacher. I've learned so much in the past 5 months that I have been a substitute. (1) Teachers who do their job on a regular basis often forget what it is like for those just starting out. I have had teachers who leave no lesson plans and then complain that I didn't follow the lesson plans that they didn't leave. (2) Teachers may deserve the summer off, but so do many other working class people who make a whole lot less than teachers. (3) Society, not only teachers, blame children for their short comings. Well guess what, most of the kids that are labeled "bad" or "unmotivated" or whatever label is given them have had horrible childhoods. They've either been abused or neglected in some way, probably since they were born. How can we as a society expect children to grow up to be "normal," healthy, productive citizens when many of them can't recall a single happy moment from their childhood? Society spends much of its anger and disallusionment about education blaming the kids. They're disrespectful, arrogant, rude, have no motivation, no respect for others, etc. Stop blaming the kids and look at what they come from, who their parents are, who their grandparents are. Somewhere along the line, long before now, parenting dissolved into the job of the public school system which is poorly equipped to deal with such monumental frustrations. I've seen parents who seem to not only expect their children to fail but to want them to do so. For the past week I've been substituting in a special program called TLC, Theraputic Learning Center. Now I have to say that little about the program is theraputic and even less about learning. These kids, and their teachers, are literally put in a corner and forgotten about. They have no money for supplies and very few textbooks. But if you spend any quality time with any one child, you can easily see that they want to be "normal." They will work if you praise them, something they get so rarely, even for participating. Deep down these kids are severely psychologically wounded and maybe learning all the U.S. Presidents and what kind of food rabbits eat is not the most important thing.
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#3535
01/22/2002 10:44 AM
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Carpal Tunnel
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welcome to the board, aphi.
good points and lucidly expressed. I particularly agree with your thesis about the foundations of learning depending on emotional stability.
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#3537
01/22/2002 10:18 PM
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Declining standards:where does one's own responsibility for one's actions begin? At what point does one's ability to point the finger of causation at someone or something else cease?
Max, would those questions, asked of ourselves, have relevance to the discussion in Jackie's Sadness thread?
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#3538
01/22/2002 11:12 PM
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Welcome to the madhouse, Aphi.
If it's any consolation at all, teaching in a polytechnic showed me that a lot of people whom the school system failed in one way or another realise their lack of success later in life and will go to considerable effort to catch up. Not all, of course, and perhaps not even a particularly high percentage. But a significant number.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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#3540
01/23/2002 12:40 PM
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Max, I entirely agree with you as so often!
It's always tough to draw that line between cause and mere influence - but I would guess we can all recognise the effects of severely disturbed young people bringing their problems into school. This highlights the importance of a degree of emotional stability in inter-generational relationships, as a foundation on which other learning and personal development can take place.
But if you were to say "yeahbut®
take 2 kids with the same emotional problems and see them perform in different ways ~ this is evidence of our own requirement to take ultimate responsibility for our actions", well, I would just have to agree with you again! But spit those words out and make your own for me - il migliore fabro - in honour of the week!
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So, Mav and Max (sounds a bit like Dad and Dave, down in Snake Gully ). Which is it? Does ontongeny recapitulate phylogeny in schools? Or is phylogeny an independent variable? Hmmm?
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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