This isn’t even false. I have like 2 good teachers out of 8 right now.
EDIT:
And look at what we have on this page of GD. The smartest kid ever becomes an MD, and the dumbest kid ever shoots himself on a dare.
Isn’t that a contradiction?
This is why America is shit tier in science and math, and its why we are importing scientists from F tier countries.
Exactly these. What made him so different that the university gave him the opportunity, accepting him in at the age of 11 versus someone else?
Through sheer statistics, if every university accepted every bright-eyed young-in, we would have more stories of these “prodigies”. However, the number of “drop-outs” would surely increase as well.
Not gonna lie, I laughed at this because of the stories popping up on the front page for donations that those running evo/srk could spare some pocket change to fly those people out. I can see this becoming a trend then getting us another sticky of, “If you respond with ‘Let’s all donate to send this guy to evo’ you’re getting banned”. A man can dream.
I don’t think that’s the reason. It’s because the government doesn’t care. I know some brilliant people who were born and raised here. Some of them honestly never lived up to their potential because the system didn’t allow them to.
We spend more time teaching kids how to pass the test to make us look intelligent to the rest of the world, but all they do is hold the kids back. I’m not a rocket scientist, I’m only above-average, and not by a lot. Because they don’t teach us what we actually need to know, we don’t get anywhere in life, and we do worse because of it.
Doesn’t matter, it’s not like I could make a decision regarding my entire life at age 9 anyway. No way that would happen. Although, I don’t really know what I truthfully want to do with my life now either. The system would work a little better if high school could better tie in to the collegiate system, and if college became a little more accessible without taking out tons of loans maybe the US would stack up a little better. In the long run, High School is actually pretty worthless in terms of what you do with you life, unless you stack your schedule with AP courses and take a few more exams…
^Yeah that, and we need to truly revamp our pedagogic techniques and how we structure the school day for pre-college education. In addition to that, a community shift for a lot of people to where intellectualism isn’t ridiculed and derided as a joke/“lame”.
Gabrielle Principe actually has a newish book out on this, called Your Brain on Childhood. It focuses moreso on younger children but a lot of the points made could apply to older kids as well…
edit: This is a post by a sherdogger named Chandler-Sama who went more in depth
[quote]
I believe the failure is systematic. At the time the system was made some of the things made sense. Other things they had no evidence for or against, so they just set things up arbitrarily. I’ll give you a few examples, summer vacation, excessive drilling, age/grade levels. At the time it made sense to give students 3 months off to help on the family farm during the summer, however now it’s pointless. Not only is it pointless now, but it also hurts low income students. Studies have shown that their ability regresses over those 3 months. So now because of a tradition we are hurting our kids academically. Excessive drilling is similar. We insist on having kids do the same thing over and over again even though I’m sure most of us hate this and we know how much it kills motivation. This isn’t even the worst part. After drilling and then taking the test, the info/skill is rarely or never used again. How many things have you studied/practiced to death, but have now forgotten? How many things have you only practiced once or twice, but are easily recalled because you use them so frequently? Lastly, why are students grouped together by age? This seems logical, until you really start to think about it. Would it make sense to group children together by height. “Your child can’t start school until he’s 4’3” tall". People would say that’s crazy because a child’s height is only slightly correlated with their mental development. There is no reason to think age is any better, especially when the difference between the oldest and youngest in a class is 1 year.
As for the differences between today and the past, there are certain factors that make our traditional teaching methods less effective.
1). There are more distractions now. Students not only have other children in the class to talk to, but also cellphones. When they go home there is TV, youtube, facebook, etc. In the “Golden era” the distractions were fewer, so the temptations didn’t exist. People don’t realize school is competing with youtube for children’s attention. As a teacher that’s some stiff competition.
2). Because of these things students will stay up later than in years past. This causes a lack of sleep and a lack of sleep hurts brain function. Most teenagers now aren’t at 100% when they’re in class. Some are at 80% some at 75% and I’m sure some are at 50%. Other at at 0% because they’re asleep. Now there are millions of things you can do past 11 o’clock, contrast that with the 1960s.
3). Student willpower has decreased. This might be related to sleep or a lack of development due to instant gratification. Whatever the reason, students can’t pay attention to lectures or sit themselves down to study at night. I’m pretty sure this could be fixed, but at present most people’s view of willpower is completely wrong, so their solutions are likely to fail. Many people still think of willpower as a personality trait when in fact it’s more like a muscle that can be worn out from over use or strengthened with training.
I want to write more, but my willpower is fading and I have a feeling I’m not going to be performing at 100% tomorrow because of a lack of sleep. I’ll finish this later.
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Holy shit, I’ve never thought about that before.
She’s right, it makes no sense.
What the fuck
I think they do it to cut down on bullying. I mean, I’m sure people will always pick on the little kid, or they will make fun of the big kid who is a little slower.
It also probably ties in to the old education system, as education used to be very different in the earlier days. It’s based on tradition.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with summer as it does allow people to pursue other areas of interest, and if you are a collegiate student, you can always enroll in summer classes. I always worked over the summer(Full time) and did something productive with my life. I built up a resume that I probably couldn’t have if I wasn’t given the opportunity.I also took the time to pursue other areas of interest that I didn’t have time to work on during the school year.
Book smarts are great and all, but what really gets the job done is experience and the ability to make decisions. I’ve lived in a college town all my life, and a whole lot of people have to ask mommy and daddy how to solve their problems instead of growing a pair and doing something about their problems. I would never hire somebody who was intelligent if they were not capable of handling real-life scenarios, and that’s a given. Why? You get these people in the workforce that always say “Let me go get my manager…” They need to just make a decision instead of relying on superiors. Sadly, school can’t teach this either, we need to educate parents to make their children more self-dependent.
No she’s not?
And how are they going to get that experience if many of them are functionally illiterate? And how do you expect them to have the ability to make decisions when most schools focus on teaching kids WHAT to think, instead of HOW to think, so that they can regurgitate information on the standardized tests? It’s a multi-faceted issue, not just the parents, the teachers, the kids, or the unions.
edit@Vulpes:
[media=youtube]YirU025Dm3Q[/media]
http://www.internationalschool.info/the-importance-of-mixed-age-grouping-in-montessori/
The thing is, if everyone that is “slower” is in the same class and the “quicker” kids are in a different class, then who is going to get made fun of? It’s like they’re going to see each other.
They could advance the kids that are smarter than most on a more regular basis.
Besides, would you make fun of a younger or older person in a community college class?
I see people of all groups at community college, they are just as apt to get good or bad grades as everyone else.
BEWD has convinced me the standards are moot.
There’s also the trouble that the average kid (especially teenager) has a very different sleep clock from what the school day demands of them. A kid’s brain is not at its most active, focused, and creative until much later in the day. Forcing kids to get up at 6am only ensures that they’ll be zombies for the first class period or two.
The issue with the great “Mixed Age Grouping” is that it doesn’t work within the classic school system.
- You can let younglings into elementary school earlier if they’re gifted (starting school age 4 or 5 instead of 6/7), this is already done.
- You can let gifted kids skip a year to hop further, this is pretty ugh to do since usually consecutive years build onto each other so whoever skipped a year has to keep up with the new tutor groups (which supposedly are at his level) plus learn the stuff he missed by skipping - eg I skipped two years in elementary school which meant that in math the addition/subtraction-exercises were at my level, but I had to work out how to do multiplications and divisions pretty much by myself (everyone else learned that a year before) and also had to take freetime off to learn how to do cursive handwriting (which everyone else learned two years before). This was still elementary school. The further it gets, the more stuff happens in a single school year, the more you have to revise while also keeping up with the current stuff. Still: This is already done.
- You can force worse kids to repeat a year which is very meh because it oftentimes forces people to repeat stuff they understood for 80% of the school year before they actually get to the things they didn’t get, plus it forces them to repeat entire courses which they did well in the year before because that’s how school works. Still, this is actually done.
Other options? None, really.
The only way to make Mixed Grouping work properly is having it run like in university - rather than classes you have individual courses, you can choose what you want to take, if you fail a course you only have to repeat just that, etc.
But university is a highly specialized field and I doubt it would work half as well for all-around-education as a school provides it, plus there sticks the question whether one actually wants to let children who can’t know what they’re going to want for later on decide that for themselves - freedom is great, but dangerous. Heck, 20+ year olds in university often enough drown in the freedom it provides.
The general concept of classes isn’t bad. It’s more like… everything else is.
^Interesting response Vulpes, I’ll get back to you in more detail later.
One quick thing though, with college though that’s the price of freedom, and it’s in college where you should be self-reliant, and really have to get into the grind, if you drown in the freedom that’s your own fault.
Another thing is that our classic school system IS the problem, it was set up to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution, and is also based on the Prussian educational system. Our methods, and system at large haven’t been restructured to meet the new needs of this age.
edit:
[media=youtube]zDZFcDGpL4U[/media]
I don’t agree with every single thing in the vid, but he makes many great points.
That is correct, and that is why the Montessori elementary school classrooms, scheduling, etc. are completely different. They don’t have rows of one-person tables with fixed chairs that are all facing forward, and they don’t have rigidly fixed daily course schedules (though the teachers do schedule blocks of time and have plans for every day). It’s not uncommon for teachers to teach to small groups of students with material suitable for their level, then send them off to work on problems, then teach another small group of students. In a sense, it is university-like in that students have significant time throughout the day to just do stuff without a teacher talking at them. Heck, teachers also have to balance every PE activity since kids 2 years older are a lot bigger than the younger kids at that age. Being a good Montessori teacher requires more skills than what’s required of one-subject lecturers, and there are plenty of lecturers who would not be effective Montessori school teachers. Having an entire class of highly unmotivated kids is a problem as well given the freedom that the program gives the kids, but one that becomes less of a problem when kids are brought up through this environment at an early age. It’s also not a unique problem to the Montessori program.
There are also all the caveats mentioned on those links, and that’s not even a comprehensive list. But I think that when it is done well, there is currently no better education system for children than the Montessori one.
^Excellent summary Karnov, I’m also a big fan of the Waldorf system if you’re familiar with it, but I highly disagree with the type of evolution they teach(which borders on the lines of some crackpot religious teachings) as well as their teachings of Atlantis and Old Testament stories. X_X
Schools aren’t even the problem. Its the parents’ Its no coincidence that his sister is also a prodigy. Their parents actually teach them shit. Parents usually let school do 100% of the teaching, which is why so many of them are failures. They can’t even count by the time they get to pre-K. And by the time they are in 1st-second grade addition is a mystery to them. I am an eye witness of this shit.
Schools ARE part of the problem. There’s also parents who don’t want to parent, crummy teachers, overbearing unions in some states, government idiocy, and just an overall OUTDATED foundation.
edit: And you also have kids who either just don’t want to learn, or would rather ruin the experience for everyone else, which can directly be tied to parents who don’t want to parent. You can’t single out any group as the only cause however. “Perfect Parents” still won’t get over an outdated educational paradigm. And being able to regurgitate things on a standardized test does not make you smart, or mean you fully comprehend the material and its application to your life, you’re just a good test taker.
asian kid is really smart, news at 11 
brb going to kill myself