One eleven year-old was asked to make a time-line of events in early American history that "showed evidence of a growing nation" - but when I talked to him about it, it was clear the teacher hadn't really discussed what a nation was. Now, this kid is eleven, and just adolescent enough to not be always paying attention, but he's still pretty bright. But looking for "evidence of a growing nation" is the sort of thing I would ask a high school or university student to think about.Oh please. That's not at all too hard a question to ask an eleven [sic]year-old to at least think about. Is it really too hard to write a line apiece about new states joining the union, about railroads, about homesteading, about power struggles in the newly formed branches of government, about the Louisiana Purchase, about Lewis and Clark, about …? I read about all that stuff when I was eleven. I would certainly at least have understood the question.
But at the same time, they have him drawing pictures for assignments, as if he were six, and not writing but making timelines and drawing diagrams. When I was eleven, they had us reading short novels and writing responses in full sentances[sic], and making reports about things like history and science, again with paragraphs of writing.That relates to one of the key examples I refer to when I talk about what I hated about high school. They spent weeks in physics class on having us draw diagrams of collisions on paper, using a protractor, all by rote, and allowing a 15% margin of error. No "this is to give you a feel for what is actually happening" — and it certainly didn't — and I had to use the trig that I already knew to do it right. They finally mentioned sin and cos and such, but in passing, as "here's another way you can do this".
He can write, when he's inspired - he wrote a 2 page story for Halloween that totally gave me shivers with the scary ending. But they aren't making him practice reading and writing - they are making him draw pictures and grading him on his handwriting and neatness (which is pretty bad).I had a biology teacher I hated, also in high school. He would make us look through the microscope and draw what we saw. My drawings were pretty bad, but they captured the general shape, outlines, and colors. He shit on them every time, which infuriated me because it was biology class, not art class. But by the end of the year I was making much more detailed sketches, with shading and so forth. I'm sure by doing so I was noticing more detail in the microscope as well.
College students most significant barrier to overcome is not being able to spell, which is really a boogeyman borne in part of the txtspk/language degradation hysteria and a "good old days" nostalgia for Pre-WWII language arts instruction drills.students'
remove the construct of compulsory attendance.... kids instinctively choose, given full agency and options, places that [are] the best for them.The simple fact is that most children do not have full agency and options, particularly those who have unstable home environments and are in the greatest need of an external education system. It's those kids -- the ones who would be pressed into service as caretakers for younger siblings while the parent takes on another job -- whom the compulsory attendance laws exist to serve.
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posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 5:31 PM on December 1, 2008