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A new school curriculum

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Re: A new school curriculum

#41

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

ThePadawan wrote: post #2

Cynical opinion: School is first and foremost a place where kids are kept so they're busy. Much like compulsory military service is a place where young adults are kept so they're busy. The answer to "Why aren't schools as good as they could be?" is mostly "Because they are as good as they need to be."

I'm a K-12 school admin and I think the dirty secret of our profession is that there's more truth to what you're saying than we'd all like to admit. To be sure, there are basic skills we do teach, and some kids do require interventions that school specialists can provide in a way that can meaningfully impact that child's life. But that's not the bulk of what "schooling" is. A nontrivial part of the job is simply daycare. I've had the benefit of working at very different schools in different continents, but had a control in the sense that they served very similar families. I often think about how much passion and energy were devoted to certain policies/programs/issues and how the schools land on the opposite side of them in a lot of them yet how little that seems to affect the student outcomes we observe.

Re: A new school curriculum

#42

Post by luizfzs »

whatshisface wrote: post #3

> there are mental techniques, such as the memory palace, which enhance your ability to store and remember knowledge by 10x (not an exaggeration!). how did we miss that in school? Memorizing is pretty useless for doing anything except for passing highschool tests, and it can stop you from learning for real because it replaces understanding and independent derivation with recall. Of all the people I remember passing c…

Memorizing is not useless at all. Here is a few examples:

In order to sing a song, you need to memorize it.

If you play poker, you can memorize useful probabilities, because you don't want to perform calculations all the time.

As a sys admin, you need to memorize commands and their syntax.

The list is endless.

Re: A new school curriculum

#43

Post by SolaceQuantum »

tboyd47 wrote: post #26
pavel_lishin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "How to be a friendly, well-liked person" is not a "social skill." Why not?

Being "friendly" and "well-liked" sound like the kinds of goals children would come up with on their own because they crave attention and positive reinforcement, not what adults should be teaching them.

The specific instruction is "how" to accomplish that goal, not that the goal exists- obviously, the goal exists for the reasons you specify. The difficulty is how to get there, which is extremely hard, doubly so for a brain that doesn't necessarily have the archiecture required for fully understanding the restraint, thoughtfullness, empathy, etc. of being friendly/well-liked.

Re: A new school curriculum

#44

Post by zerobits »

whatshisface wrote: post #3

> there are mental techniques, such as the memory palace, which enhance your ability to store and remember knowledge by 10x (not an exaggeration!). how did we miss that in school? Memorizing is pretty useless for doing anything except for passing highschool tests, and it can stop you from learning for real because it replaces understanding and independent derivation with recall. Of all the people I remember passing c…

I agree with you -- we need to find better ways to teach deeper understanding rather than rote memorization.

at a minimum, it would've been nice to spend less time on brain-numbing repetitive tasks and test preparation.

there is value in memorization as a precursor to true understanding, you can't have understanding without association

examples:

- math: memorization of single digit addition/multiplication makes higher digit arithmetic easier, and comes in handy in higher-level math

- music: memorization of scales unlocks better ability to play & improvise songs (before deeper knowledge of how it relates to other notes/scales/modes, how this connects to dividing the frequencies of air waves, etc.)

Re: A new school curriculum

#45

Post by rbavocadotree »

I learned most of this in school. Did everyone else not?

My partner is a grade 2 teacher, and she covers a lot of this. Everything in learning skills, individual skills, social skills, and most of our world.

You probably just don't recognize it when it's taught at a level understandable to six year olds, or 14 year old. Before writing posts like this it's a good idea to go look at a your school board's curriculum. You'll likely be surprised how closely it matches this.

Re: A new school curriculum

#46

Post by cdirkx »

wdevanny wrote: post #20

This is a common complaint that confounds me. Did other people go to schools with radically different curricula? I had multiple teachers discuss note taking habits, using a planner, how to approach reading a book, using mnemonics, and using the internet for research projects. I had a health class that discussed good eating and exercise habits. I remember being encouraged to find an after school club/activity and a da…

> Did other people go to schools with radically different curricula?

(Not US, but I think still applicable)

In general: yes.

I myself also recognized a lot on this list; my school spent a lot of effort on extracurricular activities, personal development and responsibility, mentoring etc. However, I just looked up the national statistics, and my school was ranked among the top 10 public schools in the country, awarded a "predicate of excellence" by the education inspection.

I can totally see how not every school has access to this level of education, as technically it is all outside of the base mandatory national curriculum and likely the first thing to get cut when funding is difficult.

Making the skills mentioned in the post a part of the base curriculum, like traditional subjects as English and biology are, might give them a more even footing.

Re: A new school curriculum

#47

Post by DataWorker »

japhyr wrote: post #21

I would argue that a well-run school addresses many of the items on this short list. I learned most of these in my schooling, and I saw most of these things being taught in the reasonably-run schools I have been a part of in 25 years of teaching middle school and high school in the US. That said, I also know there are many schools that are so poorly run that very little of this comes up. So the larger, and much harde…

You ignore the problem of inputs. What if the unfortunate truth is that educational outcomes are mostly determined by the native capacities and attributes of the students. If the input determines the output and school or teacher level effects merely mediate some of that, then isn’t it all just a cruel charade designed to give the illusion that we live in a meritocracy. It seems like students and our society are the ultimate victims If that were true.

Re: A new school curriculum

#48

Post by linuxftw »

Public schools are representative of politics: it's all about special interests. People have deeply held-beliefs that their special interests are more important than someone else's.

In my state, we had state history class, I believe this to be utterly unimportant to be a functioning human. How do I know this? Literally every other place on the planet doesn't teach the history of my particular state and gets along just fine.

Same with Literature, it's culturally focused, and seems to be self-perpetuating. Why don't we spend as much time focusing on, say, Japanese culture as we do on Shakespeare? Well, that's because some self-entitled, rich rulers of ours decided we should learn about Shakespeare.

I think it's a perfectly suitable system to maintain the status quo of the world. Public education's format is believed in so dogmatically that the only choice is to defect and choose home school or private school.

Re: A new school curriculum

#49

Post by mywittyname »

whatshisface wrote: post #29
mywittyname wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realized the importance of memorization in math during college calculus. In high school, exam integrations were easy, so long as you knew the material covered over the past few weeks. In college though, exam integration questions were brutal, unless you remembered all of the trig identities and formulae. Our textbook had a list of 180 or so equations that were required knowledge to complete the sample questions at…

Bear in mind that memorizing trig identities was something you had to do for exams . If you want to get any use out of trig identities in "real life" you will need the kind of understanding that comes with being able to do the derivations yourself. In the time before computers there was a lot of value in being able to do the mechanistic kind of problem solving you're describing, but now that we have Mathematica, the…

I had a professor that loved to make simple substitutions to values in questions, where the original question would be incredibly difficult, but if you spotted the substitution, the amount of work you had to do was dramatically reduced. Think something like integrate cos x + i sin x dx, if you spot that cos x + i sin x = e^(ix), and perform substitution, the problem becomes trivial.

Deriving information from facts is a vital skill. But recalling facts is also incredibly important as well. Having knowledge immediately available for use allows a person to apply that knowledge in real-time, which is important for problem solving and thinking on your feet.

Re: A new school curriculum

#50

Post by hmwhy »

wdevanny wrote: post #20

This is a common complaint that confounds me. Did other people go to schools with radically different curricula? I had multiple teachers discuss note taking habits, using a planner, how to approach reading a book, using mnemonics, and using the internet for research projects. I had a health class that discussed good eating and exercise habits. I remember being encouraged to find an after school club/activity and a da…

A lot of the things on the list confound me, too, but I suppose we should use caution and not be too quick to judge. It is possible that schools are really that different in some countries; the author never had the opportunity to go through normal schooling due to illness; family issues; drugs; and, well, the list goes on.

What confounds me more is how the list got onto the front page of Hacker News to begin with (not being flippant). They are basically assertions with no references, there is little to learn from it, and there doesn't appear to be a lot of context/background on the author that hint to why this may get upvoted so much.

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