Looks expensive, too! But it’s what’s inside that counts.
Do you ever get the feeling, sometimes, that teachers’ unions don’t much like our country?
Oh–only on days that end with “y”. Here’s a flagrant example from a few years ago, courtesy of the San Francisco school board.
For cryin’ out loud, if you hate it so much, please move! There must be some country, somewhere, that you’ll like. North Korea. Iran. Venezuela. China. Pick one and skedaddle.
Tell me how this story has a happy ending.
I agree. If they think it’s bad here, they will get a life lesson in some of the places you suggest.
A table, some time, and a few books, are all you need to school your children. And I didn’t even have a name for my home school.
Did you have a football team?
And almost certainly a better education. What I hated about school was how much time was wasted. A lot of time went into behavioral issues and classroom discipline. Then, the entire class might be at a standstill because one kid couldn’t keep up, so the rest of us twiddled our thumbs while all of the teacher’s attention was focused on that one kid.
If I could have done my assignments and then be free to pursue learning my interests, I would have done much better. When you learn something that is actually useful, and put that to use, that spurs even more learning, and makes it interesting.
I heard about a program in Brazil, where they taught kids to make a bicycle. The trick was, they had to do the applied math required to calculate the cuts required to assemble the tubing. All of a sudden, the value of Pi and some basic geometry became much more interesting. Beyond that, it taught them how to accomplish something from start to finish, and taught them the value of the labor they put into the project. When it was all over, they got to keep the bike that they had built. I’d wager that more than a few kids went on to become engineers, after that course.
I studied dinosaurs on my own, starting in kindergarten, and by first grade they had me visiting other classrooms to teach those kids about dinosaurs.
All without a minute spent in class to study the subject.
When I was about 7 years old, my uncle flew into town and took my mother, my sister and myself back to where he lived, roughly 220 miles away. I read everything I could get my hands on about light aircraft and actually understood some of the flight instruments. I promise you, Mrs. Kennedy, my teacher that year, hadn’t covered any of this in her class. It would be an exaggeration to state that I fully understood everything involved, but it opened my eyes to all sorts of possibilities and was a pivotal learning experience which shaped my life.
I can draw a very direct line from that early experience to learning to fly and becoming licensed, to becoming licensed to work on aircraft, to studying electronics, to making my income in aviation, and to branching out into computer technology and network engineering. It all started with a two hour flight and my taking an interest in how airplanes flew. Aviation and music are the chief secular interests of my life and most of this was entirely self motivated. I couldn’t wait to learn more about these subjects.
The last useful class I had in high school was a Private Pilot’s Ground School course, where we used the FAA’s requirements and had a classroom full of high school aged boys working through college level material, and actually learning it. There were some smart kids in that class. When I got my pilot’s license, I didn’t need Ground School, because I already had learned that information. I read a book to brush up, and took the written exam, with ease.
Youngsters need more than just sitting at a desk all day, having scant little information dribbled at them. They need to be able to actually apply and to have the ability to reach beyond the syllabus. They need to be able to test out of subjects they have easily mastered, and to be free to go further into subjects they find interesting.
Most importantly, they need not to be hindered by areas in which they will never excel. My handwriting is poor, and always will be, but certain STEM subjects are easy for me to master. I will never score well in graphics-related areas, but that shouldn’t hold me back. FWIW, I did improve upon my weaker areas, but it took time, maturity and a lot of patience, for some things. I’ll never be a calligrapher.
I had huge problems with arithmetic, but my father straightened most of it out.
High school chemistry was a complete waste of my time, and theirs. What was I going to do with chemistry? But it was Required! Do Not Pass Go without it.
I can understand exposing students to a variety of materials, but it’s unrealistic to expect that every student will do well in all of these subjects and for their grades to be negatively impacted by a subject that has no relevance to their lives.
Arithmetic is relevant; but our teacher didn’t know how to teach it to me.
But chemistry was a total waste.
The way algebra is taught is very poor. The only word I can think of is ill-conceived. It’s designed to get some tiny amount of algebraic information across to as many students as possible, propping up the statistics, but does little to actually equip students to develop understanding of applied algebra.
I’ve had a tiny bit of use for chemistry, but only to the extent that it applies for the chemistry of electrical conductors, semiconductors and dielectrics. It’s not as if any of us are hands on with this chemistry, but believe it or not, your computer’s microprocessor is a miracle of chemical engineering.
Algebra was a total washout for me.
I hated it, because they didn’t really explain the point of it all.
No football teams here is the Philippines, but Sam learned information about the Philippines, and much about the US at our kitchen table. Sam learned, in order all the names of the Presidents of the USA, names of the seven continents, the names of all fifty states, their capitals and when they became states, we read and studied the Constitution of the US, the 5 Great Lakes, at age three he could recite the names of the 66 books of the Bible, had many whole chapters of the Bible set to memory and so much more, and all it took was 3 or 4 hours in the morning and an hour or two in the afternoons. I used Action Reading course for reading and a lot of Arithmetic problems I put together. Oh, before he was twelve, I had already read the whole Bible to him, every word, at least three times.
Wow.