51–60 of 88 posts
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.
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. Yo…
Example: how interest is calculated. It's been part of algebra for a while now and most states require algebra to graduate. Thus, if you graduated high school, someone taught you about interest rates. You just forgot.
I'm guilty of this too. I don't remember much of what I learned in grammar school. I went back to research the parts of sentences and found that it's a topic taught in the third grade.
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…
> I had multiple teachers discuss note taking habits...
I had similar, but it wasn't part of the official curriculum, so didn't get the amount of focus it might have required to get students to take it seriously. Now that I'm an experienced adult, I know that I had a way of learning that worked for me, and having a teacher who A) knew what good note taking looked like and B) could identify my own peculiarities and help me adapt the techniques for me would have helped tremendously.
> encouraged to find an after school club/activity ...
More time at school? Ugh... didn't want that. Offer me a "job" doing something I enjoyed? OK, I'm there - I need the money.
> ... career counselors ...
These people talked like my extended family - "Why would you want to do that? Clearly you're more qualified to swing a hammer..." uh, no thanks. I recall one specific instance where a supposed mentor replied to one of my stated career goals with "do you think you're smart enough for that?"
> ... English course where we covered professional skills ...
I think I got a total of two weeks of that in four years of high school. At least this was part of the official curriculum, but there just wasn't an actual focus on it.
> ... evolution and the cell
Only AP classes for us. Elective AP classes, which personally I did choose. (By 'elective' I mean students had to choose these classes - there were required science credits, and these fulfilled the requirements, but why choose the harder classes when the easier one will suffice? I was interested, most other students were not.)
I guess my point is that although you might have had access in your public school education to these things, they're just not as ubiquitous as the need to be.
IMO, the entire problem with the US education that I experienced is the insistence on a bullet pointed list of things to cover, a minimum grade on how well the students retained that specific knowledge until the test, rather than gauging students' understanding and ability to learn and adapt.
Ctrl-f taxes: 0 This might be under "how the world works" but I think there should be a separate "how to be a reasonable citizen" like how to deal with taxes, voting, civics in general, that kinda stuff. It has a pretty big impact on day-to-day life.
https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/resources-subject-area...
There are requirements for social studies, civics, economics, geography, and world history.
> 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…
Memorization sure looks incredibly important to, say, mathematics, a topic in which practitioners often push back against memorization-based learning yet certainly appears to be pretty damn memorization-heavy. I know they're not deriving every theorem from first principles every time they apply it, nor starting from scratch every time they recognize a pattern that allows for a leap toward a solution, and discussion o…
> 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…
Disagree strongly here. Memorization is a workout for the brain. Being able to recall the exact words of, e.g. poetry or prose, admits them to reflection at any time, not just when notes are available. There is no substitute for knowing something without reference; it then becomes part of consciousness, not another book on the shelf that yeah, could be opened at some point, but in practice. Your brain is weaker and e…
> absolute pitch, the rare ability to identify a musical note like F# just by hearing it, can be a massive benefit to a musician. you can learn the skill in a matter of weeks, but it can only be acquired before the age of 7. only 0.01% of people end up learning it in time! I find it dubious that you can only learn this by age 7 - although I'm sure it's easier if you're younger. Is there science behind this claim? I a…
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…
My point isn't about crossing these items off a checklist, but re-balancing the effort we put towards these core skills, instead of memorizing arcane trivia about U.S. history, literary figures, and some impractical Math/English skills that seem to be more of the focus.
I went to a "good" school, whatever that means, but I've found myself and many of my peers lacked many of the skills and deeper understanding of these topics even during/after university.
I still meet many people who don't quite understand what a stock is, and most people seem surprised to hear Wi-Fi is a type of invisible light. Many people seem to be pretty bad at communication. About 1/3 of the US seems to not be convinced we are actually apes.
> 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…
Minor exception: Language. Memorization is extremely important in developing language- you're sure as hell not going to derive Chinese from academic linguistics first principles!
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…
I'm in the southeast US. Have been my whole life. Went to public schools in populated wealthy counties, and in a sparse, poorer county. > I had multiple teachers discuss note taking habits... I had similar, but it wasn't part of the official curriculum, so didn't get the amount of focus it might have required to get students to take it seriously. Now that I'm an experienced adult, I know that I had a way of learning…
I 100% agree and I think the educators I've spoken to (several friends are teachers) would also broadly agree, but that's not what the post advocates.
My understanding of your reply is that your school had many of these elements, but they weren't quality or weren't emphasized appropriately to students which is fundamentally different from the post's view that these things didn't occur.