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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Bear with me if I jump around. I have just read the entire thread in one go and a few comments come to mind.
1)Japanese children are still being pushed to learn things The Japanese system may have gone too far in the direction of rote learning of facts. Yes the three R's are important but learning how to learn, learning to use what you know creatively is also important. Like most things it has to be in balance.
2)Too often teachers are expected not to teach children but to raise them. A grade one teacher I know recieved a complaint from a parent that in 6 months her son had not been taught to "do as he was told" and still talked back to his mother. Small wonder that it is difficult to find time to teach.
3)Don't you have to come up before you can come down? I hadn't thought of it before but is our language declining or decreasing or mearly changing from the literary to the technical?
and finally 4)Scrabble/literati I can't help thinking that Scrabble is a much better name than Literati. The latter implies educated in the older sense of the word, well- read, well-spoken and knowledgable. Merely learning lists of correctly arranged groups of letters is like the rote learning of any other list of facts. A feat of memory but with a very limited usefulness without the ability to understand and use them creatively.
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Jackie, I think there are a lot of different disabilities with which a person can be afflicted. I've long maintained that among the worst is having idiots for parents. I think there are some really crappy teachers out there. But I don't think they're the worst problem - namely because I don't think there are that many who are utterly incompetent. In most cases, I think it's the kids themselves and their parents who share the bulk of the responsibility for academic failure. This is justified (by some) by saying that they're not entertained enough or they're lacking in self-esteem.
Zed, reference the disjunction between the connotation of the names vs. the abilities required to play those games, I agree with your comments, though I hadn't thought about it before.
I heard of a book a while back (the title eludes me for the moment) that purported that school systems were actually doing very well and that complaints against "the school system" were calculated and very politically motivated lies from conservatives. There may be something to this as our school systems are handling more people and many more people are college bound. OTOH, look at most colleges and a huge proportion of their beginning courses are actually remedial. LOTS of people are learning in college what they ought to have learned in high school. This is particularly true of community colleges (at least the ones with which I'm familiar), but in that case it's PARTIALLY mitigated (IMO) if a higher percentage of the students are older students returning after a long absence.
On the flip side, it's possible to survive by being more stupid. One doesn't need to be educated to get a job and make babies. It may not be a great job, but it'll get you by. One may not be able to prepare those babies to be learners, but that doesn't make one a bad parent. Look at "technical skills." People are learning a lot of those these days, but the vast majority of technical skill (or what falls under that umbrage) is very trivial. You need to know very little about theory to fix a computer these days. In some cases, it's an impediment. You don't need to know a lot about networks to be a network engineer. Of course, this doesn't mean that all people who fix computers or build and maintain networks are stupid. It means that one can find a job in those fields without having an immense amount of understanding of the subject. In this case, people can learn specific roles, but they don't have to understand the larger landscape. Parochialism makes for an easy life in many cases. If the world were a static place, this might even be sufficient. The problem comes that economies change, populations migrate, jobs move, skills required to function change.
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Bobyoungbalt, I could comment on several parts of your message, but I'll stick with one for now - the standardized test.
I'm a very strong proponent of standardized tests. I've said this on several fora, but I don't recall whether I've mentioned it here. The problem with the tests is that the tend to get too difficult and too specialized.
There are different types of standardized test. There is the test whose purpose is to test specialized knowledge - surely those CAN and OUGHT TO BE specialized. There is the college entry test, those can justifiably have some specialized requirements, but on the whole should be general.
Then there is the Standards of Learning (SOL) type test in places like VA. These OUGHT TO BE very simple tests and should test extremely general knowledge. (Actually, I have a vague memory of saying this on here once before.) Example of a bad question: "Tobacco was brought to VA in what year?"
and possible answers were 2 years apart. This is a fundamentally stupid question to ask on such a test. (If the person who put this question on that test is still employed in the field, that alone would be sufficient to demonstrate incompetence of the current system in general.)
The fact, however, that some few of the questions on the test are stupid, doesn't change the fact that the teachers are using it as an excuse for incompetent teaching. If a student is learning what he's supposed to be learning, then he ought not to have to study to the test. Any punishment that gets meted out to the schools though should be shared by the parents. Parents whose kids do especially poorly should be required to pay higher taxes.
If there are a few items on the test that have not been covered, that's okay, as missing a few questions won't affect one disastrously. It's far better to have a penetrating insight into a small amount of material than to have no insight at all into any of it.
On numerous occasions while I was a tutor, I tried to take some effort to teach students - actually help them understand a few things instead of memorizing - and was (not rebuked, but asked not to) by the teacher. It's staggering really. (There are precious few things that actually have to be memorized in a geometry class. If you're memorizing a bunch of stuff, you're missing something.)
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Carpal Tunnel
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Dear FF: the question about the year tobacco was brought to Virginia seems to be really stupid. The English first encountered tobacco in Virginia. I see no way achaeologists could tell when the natives first acquired it, if it were not indigeous there.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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If a student is learning what he's supposed to be learning, then he ought not to have to study to the test. Amen.
Parents whose kids do especially poorly should be required to pay higher taxes. Well now--there's an idea!
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FF, I wasn't inveighing against standardized tests per se; my wrath was directed at the practice of teaching to the test. I agree that the various tests used have their uses. Obviously, colleges need (or so they used to think) a strainer, as it were, to sift out the applicants they want to consider. It is also a good thing, I think, to monitor the efficacy of the education kids are getting at various levels, say 4th grade, 8th and maybe 11th or more frequently, not only as a meter of how well they are doing and how the instruction needs to be improved, but also so that remediation can be made available where needed. But teaching to the test must skew the results. Obviously kids will do better if they are coached all year long on the test, but are they getting the learning that they should? I greatly doubt it.
As to memorization, I agree completely with you. I had to do a lot of it and I'm convinced I'm greatly better off for it. Aside from the information it tucks away in the corners of your mind, the discipline which comes with it has, I'm convinced, a most salutary effect on learning ability. Of course, learning anything by rote is taboo anymore. I doubt if kids even have to learn the multiplication tables any more. Why should they? There are pocket calculators. God forbid they should be stuck somewhere where there's no calculator or palm pilot available. What will they do then? I go and buy produce from a farm truck. The vendors are not young. They add up your purchases and figure your change all in their head; they don't even write anything down. But the young clerks at the drugstore or the convenience stores are completely helpless, even as to making change, if the cash register isn't working or if someone else is using it.
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Bob,
I was about to say that we disagree about rote, but read further, and I think we're not too far apart.
I think memorization is a good thing. I think students should be required to memorize some things. I have an extremely poor memory. It's a long-running joke among my friends and family. Still, it's an important thing.
My point about geometry (and algebra) is that in some cases I've witnessed the teachers attempt to cram too much into the kids' heads by memories. The reason they have to memorize so much is because they don't understand the material. If they actually understood the stuff, they wouldn't need to memorize anywhere near the amount they do. And any standardized tests should be geared towards comprehension, not memorization of minutiae. It's difficult, I know, but not impossible. This is much more true of mathematics than it is for language skills, but I do suspect it's true for language as well.
Your point about the calculators and palm pilots is well-taken, BUT here's an emphasisis by counter-point even to that:
My employer buys me a fairly nice calculator. I use it at least weekly and often numerous times throughout the day. It's a nice scientific calculator, slightly programmable, with a few memories. It was under $60. They've bought me several others (which I've lost or broken) over the years. It varies over time, but I use (at a far stretch) maybe 50% of the functionality of my calculator at the current time. When I was going to tutor these students, they had $150 - $200 calculators. I wondered - what the heck could they possibly be doing that required them to use these things? There would be some trivial problem - by which I mean one could easily solve the entire thing mentally in less than 5 seconds - the kids would whip out these calculators and, after 30-90 seconds of button pushing return a completely ridiculous answer. (They didn't learn to check their answers for reasonableness either.) These same kids were complaining about the incompetence of their geometry teacher, "Why, I got straight As in algebra!" They got straight As in algebra and they don't know how to subtract a negative number? I'm sure they were thrilled with the easy algebra teacher who didn't require them to actually learn the subject. Ninety percent of the time, the problem was not a failure to understand geometry, but a failure to be able to reason algebraically.)
Now back to language. We agree reading is a good habit for kids (and adults). They need to be reading a lot of different things. Classics are very good, but I don't think they're sufficient. They need to see language used correctly and well. I don't know that I agree that Huck Finn is such a great choice. It's not a bad book, but there are better ones I think. I guess I'm opposed to controversy - not to be wishy-washy, but simply to get on with the business of learning. Tom Sawyer has the word nigger "maybe" a dozen times in the entire book. Huck Finn has it numerous times on nearly every page - hundreds, perhaps so many as a thousand references. I can undertand how some people would get irritated at this. OTOH, if people get irritated by Harry Potter in school, I think they should find another book. Get over it, get on with it, and don't get distracted from the primary purpose. The best solution is to find something innocuous for general discussion and then let students find their own books for most of their reading. They should be reading 6 to 9 books per year, every year.
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Carpal Tunnel
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For the record:
I'll be a rookie in an English department here in Chesterfield County, Virginia. In providing me with materials to study over the summer, our department head gave me books, manuals, sources of study. She gave me nothing that would allow me to 'teach to the test' that my ninth graders will have to take late spring. She also provided a teacher with whom I have met and worked this summer to help my transition from elementary music to ninth grade English. That teacher has walked me through the year in terms of curriculum--and she has never once alluded to 'teaching to the test.' We've talked about specific units of study, such as Homer and the Odyssey, Elizabethan England, Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet, and Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird. We've discussed approaches to presenting grammar and ways to get kids writing. I would be surprised--and shocked, quite frankly--if any teacher in that department approached me with ways of 'teaching to the test.'
Nearly all of my time this summer has been focused on preparing for the school year. Yes, we will have that test in the spring, and, yes, it will be based on the Virginia Standards of Learning. But the standards simply provide the framework. I understand that if my students cover the material on which the standards are based, they will have a high chance of succeeding on the test.
Let me give you one specific skill out of many addressed by the standards. Students are to write their essays with variety of sentence stucture, a mark of accomplished writing. One simple skill for helping students develop variety in composing sentences is to have them review an essay, for instance, and count the number of sentences that begin with 'The.' For weaker writers, this procedure provides a red flag that alerts them to restructure sentences that often begin with the definite article.
I do not see teaching students strategies for improving their writing as 'teaching to the test' when the point is to help students develop their writing skills. If an outcome of helping students achieve more variety in their sentence structure is that they get a higher score on the writing part of the test, terrific. Two birds killed with one stone.
As I wrote, the example of sentence variety is just one writing skill of many in the Virginia Standards. Not to teach the standards would be not to do the job for which I was hired. But there is a big difference between teaching the standards the state expects each teacher to address and 'teaching to the test.' I hope that difference is evident.
I rarely hear about some teacher somewhere in our county who is suspected of 'teaching to the test.' It greatly disturbs me that any teacher would do so. But I would hope that all of our teachers in Chesterfield meet and surpass the standards Virginia has set for us.
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I'm not familiar with your county. I understand the distinction you draw, believe it sensible, and also believe that that is the clear intent of having an SOL in the first place.
As I said previously, I'm aware there are crappy teachers out there. I had enough when I was student and I'm aware of a very few in current school systems. I also said previously that I think teacher incompetence is not significant problem - at least I don't think it's a significant problem in most school systems. By far the most serious problem, I suspect, is failure of parents and students to accept any significant responsibility for their own educations.
As for teaching to the test, I've heard a number of teachers explain to me that they had to have students memorize certain things and that the SOL forced them to teach to the test. If this is not the case in your county, I'm elated to hear it. (I suspect it's not the prevailing view even here in Fairfax.)
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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memorization...(has) a most salutary effect on learning ability
Like Bob I don't think memorization is bad, but it shouldn't be used to replaceunderstanding or creativity. They need to balance.
I saw a documentary of preshcool education in China. Four-year old children were painting beautiful, accurate paintings of flowers. But every painting was identical, in fact every brushstroke was identical. No blue horses or purple frogs.
You can't get anywhere without the basic memorizable knowledge. But without understanding and creativity you can't get anywhere new.
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