Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Oh come on now, Valedictorian, you can find plenty of important life skills to be learned in school if you only look hard enough:

  kindergarden    - learn how to play nicely together
  first grade     - learn how to read and write
  second grade    - learn how to add, subtract, multiply, & divide
  third grade     - learn how to spell
  fourth grade    - learn how to play a musical instrument
  fifth grade     - learn how to appreciate great literature
  sixth grade     - learn how we got where we are
  seventh grade   - learn a foreign language
  eighth grade    - learn how to type and use a computer
  ninth grade     - learn how the world is put together
  tenth grade     - learn about other people in the world
  eleventh grade  - learn how to balance a job and school
  twelveth grade  - learn how to plan for and dream about the future
  freshman year   - learn how many other kinds of people are out there
  sophomore year  - learn how to chug a beer, fill a bong, and get laid
  junior year     - learn how to stand upon the shoulders of giants
  senior year     - learn how to find your place in the world
  graduate school - learn how to play nicely together, all over again

If someone starts learning a foreign language at 7th grade something is wrong I think.

Question: Is this the general case for US Education?

Depends on the school. One that I went to in AZ had a Spanish class in 7th grade, which many people took, whereas another on in IN did not have foreign language classes. High schools usually do.

I went to a public elementary school in Sacramento, CA, and in 2nd grade we began basic spanish.

US education in regards to foreign language varies widely. I was not presented with the opportunity to take a foreign language until 9th grade (~14 years old), while the district I currently live in offers Spanish education to children age 7.

Edit: This is in Illinois. According to Wikipedia, we have the 7th largest Spanish speaking population in comparison with other states. In my experience, Spanish is the most widely offered secondary language, followed by French. More uncommonly taught languages include Italian and German, and rarer still are Eastern languages such as Japanese. Latin may still be offered in select places, but has been largely phased out.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_in_the_United_States#Cu...

Just adding that I also wasn't exposed to foreign languages in school until the 9th grade. This was in a private school in Chicago, Illinois.

Meant to upvote this. Started learning German in 2nd grade, but that's only because my dad was in the US Army and we were stationed in Germany at the time. Learning a language at that age (and younger) should always be an option for kids as their minds are like sponges at that point. That early exposure always kept me interested in foreign cultures and their languages, too: Japanese, French, and of course, German.

EDIT: Use of simile vs. metaphor for describing the kid brain when it comes to foreign languages. Semantics...

if your mind was literally a sponge, I think you would cease to live.

...it's a fitting metaphor. Meh.

then it's not literal.

I have an idea for a website.

literalpolice.com (I've already bought the domain name)

A community of people who care about preserving the power of the word "literally."

The site maintains a list of websites and people from the community who are assigned to them. When you are assigned to a website, your task is to have an account with as close to a variant as "LiteralPolice" as possible. You simply read the website as you normally do, and whenever someone abuses the word "literally," troll them for it.

With enough community members, we could have literal police on every website!

What do you think?

Check out the literal web log:

http://literally.barelyfitz.com/

Sadly, it seems to be dormant.

I think it's more fun to make emphatic use of "figuratively." As in, "wow, we FIGURATIVELY kicked their butts!"

@AndyKelley - literally the worst idea since bagpipes.

8th grade for me in the 80s, and it was quite possible to go through HS without a foreign language at all.

During the 70's/80's in my home state, 7th grade would be about normal to start learning a foreign language if you were seen as college bound. Otherwise, you had to wait until 9th grade. In my area of the US, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian are the predominant languages taught. The choice of languages goes strictly according to the immigration patterns.

Maybe you were in a public school. Because I was in private schools, I had French in kindergarten and first grade, and then Spanish in fourth and fifth grade. (In between, I was in public schools, you see.) After that, I took French in 7th grade, Spanish in 8th grade, Japanese and French in 9th grade, and then Latin and Classical Greek in what would have been 12th grade, except that I had dropped out in order to go to college.

This was in Texas and then in New Mexico, which has one of the two or three worst public school systems in the US.

This might sound like a "nyah nyah my family is so rich" except that in fourth and fifth grade I was living with my dad in a converted school bus parked on a friend's lawn, while he was fixing cars at the garage on the outskirts of a small town, and then later we upgraded to a trailer in a trailer park. Obviously we weren't the poorest of the poor, since we did have enough money for housing and to send me to a private school, but we were far from rich in US terms.

"Maybe you were in a public school." Through 8th grade I was. For high school I went to a private school with religious affiliations. I'd qualify the private school as antiquated at the time, so my education was better in the public system.

The private schools you attended sound above average. Friends of mine in private schools through elementary (grades K-6) took French - no other options were available.

Out of curiosity, do you still speak any of the languages?

Oops, I lost my longer answer in a power outage. The short answer is that I only speak English and Spanish fluently, and Spanish only because I've been living in Argentina since 2006. I can get by in Portuguese and French under some circumstances, and my Japanese is sufficient to make Japanese people giggle before they talk to me in English.

Far better than I. I can read French and German but my speaking French makes native speakers cringe. German is easier for me but I've lost too much vocabulary to hold a long conversation.

Tolerant native speakers make a huge difference. Backpackers and people from Couchsurfing are great for this. (Also it helps if you can tolerate people cringing when you talk, some.)

I started to learn my second foreign language in 7th grade, I started to learn the first in 4th grade.

To this day, I cannot play a musical instrument.

And where do they learn the "why" of all this?

They don't. That's the problem with the school system. Likewise, you seem to be so focused on skills that you can't even question anymore why those skills are necessary, or even worthwhile.

Man, sophomore is a doozy. Are you sure kids can handle all that at once?

I read all the boring comments and this is the only one I liked. Learning is hard, caring about stuff that has no relevance to food or sex is hard. School is not about helping the rug rats but getting them out of the adults hair until they can kill their own horse for supper. Edumacation is about following rules. Follow pointless rules in a chain for 200 hours straight and maybe you'll discover something that actually helps the human race. Otherwise its all masturbation. If the kid is stupid, I want the kid beaten into submition. If the kid is smart, he can do the assignments trivially and get an A. I see no need to change the way babysitting kids works. Creativity is not the same as rule following skills. If she really wanted to educate herself she would have realized that she should have been skipping class, reading more sci fi and masturbating harder. She was probably just unhappy from being russian.

I disagree on the current purpose of school (which really came to be in the late 19th century). School is there to train people to 1) tolerate being bored eight hours a day and 2) do what the authority figures say.

These two items were critical for training a workforce who would sit in a factory screwing the lid onto the tube of toothpaste.

Unfortunately, today's jobs are all about creativity. Knowledge workers increase value through their creativity, which is all but stamped out of them in school.

At that time, the majority of the workforce was involved in agriculture. Toothpaste was nowhere in it...

At the time, the industrial revolution was rapidly pulling people from the agrarian life to the factory life. Factory owners knew they'd need more and more people who could sit around, day after day, expressing no individuality. Politicians recognized the economic benefits the factories were providing. Together, the current US school system was born.

Here are the real questions: Current industry leaders recognize the education system is not training knowledge workers they way it could be. Do politicians recognize the economic value of the knowledge economy and will current politicians and business leaders come together to build a new education system that meets those needs? Of course, 125 years ago, there wasn't an existing bureaucracy that needed to be torn down first...

The first country to get that right is going to thrive. A country like Costa Rica could do amazing things.

Our kid is now 2 and a half, and I'm puzzled - there is Regio Emilia, then Waldorf, Montessori - geeezus!

I'm not sure where is going to be best for him. I mean his just a small child :) - Just playing should be enough for him...

Er, if you can't read before you get to kindergarten your parents are fucking up.

Either that or they're recognizing and embracing the uniqueness of your passion to not read.

Are you talking about the kind of Kindergarten that starts at the age of 3?

(In Germany it would probably not be a good idea to teach your kids how to read before they go to enter school (at age 6 or 7). Schooling is mandatory in Germany, and elementary school is boring enough if you don't already know the stuff they are trying to teach you. If you have more choice for your kids, then reading earlier may or may not be a good idea.)

I don't see why it would be a bad idea, many kids seem to fail to learn to read well if the task of teaching it is left to the school.

FWIW, I could read when I started school (at 6, in Austria [1]), as well as do simple maths; I was bored pretty much throughout my education, but at least I did well. Bored & lagging behind surely must be worse.

[1] homeschooling is permitted here but it's extremely rare as far as I know.

Yes, the best solution is getting better (un-)schooling, instead of having to work around and against the education system.

I could not read before kindergarten and, given that they later home-schooled me, I would not say my parents were "fucking up".

You need to read that post using my over-the-top ranting voice. No offence to your parents.

You might just have a mental disability of some kind, such as dyslexia, or a physical one, such as blindness. I know at least one person who I'm pretty confident would have been able to read by kindergarten (knowing his parents) but for his lack of mental capacity.

For 90% of the population I agree.

Computers are all the way up at eighth grade? Egads.

I started in 5th grade in the late 70's. We learned binary arithmetic and punched cards to program the school system's only computer. Learning computers varies in the US. As I understand it, high schools today in the US teach basic computer skills like using a word processor, spreadsheet, browser, etc. to the general populace and may have more advanced classes for people identified as having more ability.

Not everyone has the benefit of schools with computers. Getting kids in many districts to comprehend basic math or science first would be nice.

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