My students forged the notes. I turned them into a lesson plan.
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To me this is a great example of one of the fundamental problems with so much education: it is full of unchallenging, unrelated-to-life, contrived tasks. When any process (creative writing, math, coding) is harnessed to a fascinating, meaningful-to-students goal... well, of course they're motivated. And creative.
That has always been true of me - when in grammar school, and decades into employment.
How about a kid who's interested only in physics, should we make him read and write poetry?
Even if each class is taught the best it possibly could be, individual interests will outweigh, and the kids will be bored in the alternate classes.
So the options are either 1) uninterested kids, or 2) uneducated kids.
Basically, since interests vary so much, even among middle school aged kids, there's no platonic ideal of a "perfect class that every kid will love".
That's what we should be aiming for.
I remember my high school Algebra II teacher was asked, "Why should we care about what you're saying?" His answer: "You shouldn't care. You're here to get a grade. You'll never use this and it's not fun." This while my English teacher was staying an hour after class to debate Lolita, Ulysses, A Space Odyssey, and a whole ton of other stuff with basically every student willing to talk to him. There were a lot.
Note that the public school approach doesn't work much better for poetry or literature. Precious few high schoolers graduate with a love of reading.
I tried harder that year than ever before, Not just because of the importance of my results, But because I wanted to understand her euphoria at really giving yourself over to the problem.
Unfortunately Teachers who inspire such enthusiasm are a desperately rare breed.
If we focus on educating people as consumers and then gave them discretion on which subjects they are sufficiently interested in to become producers, we might gain more. for example, politicians and marketers abuse statistics on a regular basis, secure in the knowledge that the average person has little statistic knowledge. So we have a small set of people who understand statistics very well, a larger population that are very credulous, and a similarly sized one that think all statistics are BS, an only slightly less ignorant position. You can imagine parallels with rhetorical fallacies or logic and science.
I suggest that students need to be well-rounded enough to assess the quality of information they're likely to encounter or use frequently and then follow their interests from there. So we should probably be teaching financial numeracy, basic statistics and perhaps geometry/trigonometry much earlier, because those are massively important life skills. Algebra, maybe not so much.
When I look at verbal political debates, they seem to me to center around the 8th grade level or even a bit lower. Written debates (eg newspaper editorials) seem to float in the 6th-12th grade level. Then again, I can't help noticing the existence of a TV quiz show called 'Are you smarter than a 5th grader' :-/
So you're left with either forcing them to go, where they at least learn something exists, or letting them do their own things, and never learn anything about math at all.
Many people commenting here have this idealized view of education as "if only... xyz... then every kid would spend 12 hours a day teaching themselves!". That's absurd, and any realistic look at education has to realize that sometimes we need to teach kids skills that are useful, but not interesting.
The attitude also was one of sink or swim, with the idea being a comparatively few "educable" people would become truly learned while the rest would pursue utilitarian goals tied to earning a living.
The classes emphasized formative skills ultimately tied to the idea of learning how to think as opposed to specific instruction that was supposed to instruct in any immediately practical way.
Even the learned professions were regarded as mere utilitarian applications to be pursued only after one had become properly educated.
A very elitist and, one might say, "strongly typed" view of how education should proceed.
It is a modern concept that students should even be able to choose among electives or follow their own inclinations without rigorous guidance from instructors using a strictly prescribed format.
Of course, all this has completely changed today, with the result being an "idealized view of education" (to use your phrase) to the effect that all students are capable of learning, and will learn, if given the freedom and motivation to develop their abilities.
For a fascinating comparison of the old way with the new, read Albert Jay Nock's 1931 assessment (given as part of the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia) of what he considered the utter failure of the modern approach to deliver on its promises of universal education. (http://mises.org/story/2765)
Nock's defense of the old way is undoubtedly narrow, even embittered, but his critique of the new way is often intriguing. At the very least, it makes us examine our assumptions about modern education in ways that we do not often do.
If anyone goes to the link, use the index up front to skip past the preliminaries and get to the substantive parts - otherwise, it is a very long read.
The current system forces people to make choices at a point in their lives when they don't even know who they are yet, let alone what they want to do with their lives. Instead of Google's 20% time, we need 20% education time.
They aren't going to go "ohh boy genetics!", in order to understand what they're voting for when it comes to science positions of political candidates.
Basically, in my view, both society and individuals benefit with a certain base level of knowledge. I also believe that a majority of people would never learn parts of that base level if they had to do self-directed learning. I know that I never would have picked up poetry, or music if I wasn't forced to.
Remember that we are the exception here. We are the cream of the crop in self-educating, self-motivated people. I think it's far too optimistic to say "let people get self motivated", and hope that they learn everything they need.
For me - you could have had project-based courses that combined reading, writing, 'rithmatic and science and I'd have been in heaven.
That might not work for everyone, but it would be great if we could accommodate more than one type of learner.
I wouldn't have been as proficient at arithmetic as I was at age 9, if I hadn't done the same simple "2-digit number times 2-digit number" exercise hundreds of times. You can't possible practice that on 'challenging, related to life' tasks.
Just saying.
Most of these you can do with division instead, and some of them you have to, but it's harder. The competitions are probably the most effective way to motivate some students to be really excellent; I don't know how effective they are at raising the average competence level.
What you really need is some kind of certificate for each parent, allowing you to verify the note really came from the parent. That's why self-signed certificates really aren't worth much -- anyone could have created them.
How many "lessons" (goals) could we tailor to the desires of the "student" (user) as a substitute for enforcement mechanisms? Surely not all, but many more than we're presently doing.
If anyone reading this is teaching such a class to undergrads or lower, please use this as a lecture technique and let us know how it goes. :)
[EDIT] I just wanted to throw in here a hacker angle on unschooling or homeschooling: I would gladly pay for software that teaches math or grammar and is based on cognitive science. Something like SuperMemo http://www.supermemo.com/ profiled in this Wired article http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...
McCourt was teaching a class on Creative Writing - this wasn't in a science or math class. He took what he was supposed to be teaching (how to write stories), and found a theme to write about that his students found interesting.
Those children weren't following their "interests, inclinations and energies" - I find it very hard to believe that every single kid in that class would be doing creative writing if they had the ability to do whatever their interests led them to. They were doing what they were supposed to do in that subject-specific class, and just happened to be led by a very good teacher.
I missed Angela's Ashes, but Teacher Man looks like it would be worth the read. What a great reminder of what a good teacher is capable of.
And the dude was a real hippy, but not in a cool way. All his themes were some sci-fi postapocolyptic drivel. When I brought his name up people knew of him and gave a sad frown like they knew I was suffering. Not just students but teachers and other professors.
For 3 years I was listed as a freshman with over 90 credits because the I refused to take another lit class and the university wouldn't change my status until I did.
BTW, almost 10 years later, it still pisses me off.
- They have nowhere else to go. They have to sit in that class room. More or less, it's their job.
- They are being asked to create something from their own imagination, which is in stark contrast to the usual method of schooling: memorizing established facts from textbooks.
Motivation is a powerful force that schools do not harness enough.
However, large organizations will always be political in nature, so driving behaviour with intrinsic motivation is probably NOT something that will be practiced generally.
It's an article about making up excuses. I was hoping everyone would chime in with their own excuses in the spirit of the article.
But I think you were supposed to come up with a well written creative excuse. A short one-liner is not enough.
Good one !!!!
I was a goof in school, but my teacher kept me from getting out of hand the exact same way. By guiding my exuberance instead of squelching it, we got along great, and I graduated near the top of my class.
+20 to dedicated teachers!