Serious The Education System

[VKCA]

So I was thinking the other day.

In all of my math classes through high school, we would learn the chapter or whatever in class and then be assigned homework problems.

What if, instead, our homework was to take notes on the chapter, and then when we got to class we did practice problems the whole time? I need the teacher's help with the problems, not with taking the notes.

Just a thought.

Saw a story on the news recently about a teacher in toronto doing exactly that, he was having wonderful results, particularly among boys.

I think taking notes in class is the stupidest shit ever. Apparently some people learn/memorize stuff by writing it down, if you're one of these people please reply because I've never met one in my life, despite various teachers assuring me it's about a third of students (then a third for auditory learning and a third for visual).
In both my final year physics and math courses (well two out of three of my math classes) my teachers didn't make us take notes, they gave us printouts of the lesson with blank spaces for class practice questions, so we just had to pay attention to the teacher and learn the lesson. My results in both classes were very much superior in the final year because of this.

for example, my final exam grades for each hs math
grade 9: 65% or something
grade 10: 45%
grade 11 (functions): 26% (unintentionally just enough to pass the course with a 51)
grade 12 (advanced functions): 78%
grade 12 (calculus): 86%
grade 12 (data management): 12% (incidentally FUCK DATA MANAGEMENT)(and fuck you too ms cheng)

in advanced functions and calculus I had a teacher that didn't teach while making us copy down from the board, therefore allowing me to learn what they're teaching instead of just trying to copy it down fast enough.

admittedly in grades 9 through eleven (and data management), had I gone home and reviewed the notes I took during the day, or done my homework, then I could have easily improved my results.
But I didn't. My notes were messy and hard to read because I was trying to write so fast. Any teacher could easily alleviate this problem by just not making the students take notes.

I personally can not take notes and process what is being said/written down at the same time. I can either listen to the teacher and learn what they're saying, or I can copy what they are saying/writing to paper without taking any of it in.

I do have a 'psyco-motor disfunction' though which is some learning disability that has something to do with mental processing while writing, but I've talked to various people in my classes who complained about the same thing. "I can either take notes and not learn anything in class, or learn the lesson in class and then forget it by the time the test rolls around."
Again obviously if people just studied their notes at home they could learn the day's lesson (unless they had some conceptual issue with it, in which case sucks to be you (BAN ME PLEASE)!! because the teacher's not in your room at night is she?), but what in the ever loving fuck is the point in that? Why the hell should I go to school in the first place if I'm not going to be doing any learning there? Just so I can copy course material?

don't really have anything to add but here is an interesting article i found a few weeks ago: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...-you/201211/us-math-achievement-how-bad-is-it

In an interview one student was asked if he could think of a way to check whether 462+253 = 715. He smartly subtracted 253 from 715 and came out with 462. So far so good. But when he was asked whether he could have subtracted 462 from 715 instead, he said he did not think so. He had been told in school to subtract the second number from the bigger number, not the first. It appears he was just following a memorized script.

holy fuck

 

[Stratos]

@whistle's article goodbye, faith in our generation, you will be missed

 

[Limi]

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
is this how we should do it? (warning: long read, you'll probably want to skip over chunks on it)
the author of course takes an extreme position, but it does show how much better (in his eyes) maths could be taught. i'll just leave that link here for discussion, i don't really want to give an opinion on it.

That's why I think a system like Germany's (where I'm on exchange right know) is much better in principle, if it's specific execution isn't perfect. It's basically a meritocracy, so at the end of their primary school (which goes for 4 years) there is a big test and you then either go to a Gymasium (the best level of school), a Realschule (medium/average level of kids), which is a few years shorter than Gymnasium, or to a Hauptschule, which is like a trade school, so learning physical trades and such. If you perform especially badly/really well you can then be shifted between schools

aye, i need to correct some of this: firstly, at least in my bundesland (NRW), i have never ever heard of such a big test; instead, the teachers just give their evaluation which school would be the most appropiate for the kids. the parents don't actually have to follow that evaluation, it's more of a guideline. of course, you are staying in bavaria, and it might be different there.

secondly, the hauptschule is not a trade school, it's just the lowest in the hierarchy of gymnasium > realschule > hauptschule. the people going there are not stupid, and its populace is mainly composed of either people of lower social background (as you said) or learning deficits (which, i repeat, does not mean "stupid"). needless to say the more liberal parties (once again, at least here in NRW) want to get rid of the realschule/hauptschule distinction because they find it elitist (maybe they've already done that, i don't know).

additionally, there's also the gesamtschule, which is a merge of the three schools (although in reality, parents whose kids are recommended for the gymnasium will obviously send them there instead of here) with the possibility to get your abitur (A level or something in the UK, or was it GCSE? i'm referring to the kind of graduation that qualifies you for unis anyway, haha) just like you could on the gymnasium. those additional years you mentioned (oberstufe) prepare you exactly for that.

note: this post contains observations/facts/corrections, not opinions. i don't like posting about my opinions very much.

 

[billymills]

Saw a story on the news recently about a teacher in toronto doing exactly that, he was having wonderful results, particularly among boys.

I think taking notes in class is the stupidest shit ever. Apparently some people learn/memorize stuff by writing it down, if you're one of these people please reply because I've never met one in my life, despite various teachers assuring me it's about a third of students (then a third for auditory learning and a third for visual).
In both my final year physics and math courses (well two out of three of my math classes) my teachers didn't make us take notes, they gave us printouts of the lesson with blank spaces for class practice questions, so we just had to pay attention to the teacher and learn the lesson. My results in both classes were very much superior in the final year because of this.

I learn nearly everything from following and trying to make sense of it the first time through. I'll take notes if I think I need to remember something very specific (a proof or a formula), which is rare. What some people don't understand is just because people expect you to take notes, it doesn't mean you should. Just because I learn this way doesn't mean most or even a third do. Teachers do it because it is simple and defensible, not because they actively want to reach that 1/3 of students.

I don't particularly like the method that Ray Jay and others have cited because that is not the method that I learn. I prefer to tackle the concept directly than do problems by repetition. I have had a fair number of teachers try this and have been very unsatisfied every time. The problem here is it falls on the textbook or other source to be informational and forces me to waste my time in class (if the textbook does not fully explain the conceptual material and the teacher focuses on the repetition and memorization, the reasoning behind the material is ignored). If students can learn the subject material by themselves, time normally spent teaching or learning is instead spent as a tutorial that is useless for a large portion of the class.

 

[MrIndigo]

The biggest problem with Australia's education system is that it's not funded enough and not funded effectively.

Our top 50 schools are dominated by elite private high schools who have huge tuition bills but also take extraordinarily large amounts of money from the Government: First, they get paid for each student they take on, on the basis that each student out of public education reduces costs for the Government and the kids' parents should be entitled to the benefit of their taxes.

This is a huge double fallacy - the bulk of the cost of schools are fixed-fees. The school saves no money when you take a student out - it keeps the same number of teachers, buildings, resources, etc. So the government saves no money except when they close a school - which disproportionately affects poorer schools. Furthermore, the fact that you pay taxes doesn't mean you get every dollar back if you don't use infrastructure. If I only want to bathe in Evian bottled water, I don't get a tax rebate for not using the mains water. That's not how taxes work.

In addition to the above, private schools also get a lot more of one-off grants from the Government; not much you can do about that, but some have people employed specifically to write professional grant applications etc., whereas the common public schools have barely enough money to keep their air conditioning running.

This funding disparity was recently the principal (lol) finding of a Government review called the Gonski Report, but because the private schools are a big lobby (many backed by mainstream religions like Islam and Catholic Church) and the fact that most politicians have kids in these schools led the government to make a commitment that despite Gonski's findings that private school funding should be frozen at present levels (so inflation would generally reduce it in the future) and all further funding growth directed into the most at-need schools, the Government committed to maintaining current funding against inflation in the future.

My state has been the subject of other reforms recently, marketed as "Giving local control to local schools", but is really just a series of smokescreens to cut funding further to save money. Very sad.

EDIT: I would like to see English Grammar and Formal Logic taught from much earlier ages, like Year 4-6 in Primary School. I think both are really important for the problem solving ability whose lack is lamented throughout this thread.

 

[MrIndigo]

Saw a story on the news recently about a teacher in toronto doing exactly that, he was having wonderful results, particularly among boys.

I think taking notes in class is the stupidest shit ever. Apparently some people learn/memorize stuff by writing it down, if you're one of these people please reply because I've never met one in my life, despite various teachers assuring me it's about a third of students (then a third for auditory learning and a third for visual).
In both my final year physics and math courses (well two out of three of my math classes) my teachers didn't make us take notes, they gave us printouts of the lesson with blank spaces for class practice questions, so we just had to pay attention to the teacher and learn the lesson. My results in both classes were very much superior in the final year because of this.

It absolutely helps me.

I generally have stronger aural recall than anything else, but writing notes basically acts as a trigger to recall what my lecturers were saying, especially through law school. I also don't type my notes - that's a waste of time for me because I can type what I'm hearing without thinking about the content. When I hand-write notes, I have to summarise them immediately to keep up, so the act of writing it down involves trying to understand it and reword it in a way that makes sense to me.

For physics and maths in the latter parts of my science degree, we would also be permitted to hand-write a single A4 page of notes to take in to the exam. Summarising the whole course of equations etc. to fit onto a single A4 page was a great exercise for revision and really helped the material sink in and get processed in my brain. I found it so successful that I ended up using the same technique for my open book exams in law - Rather than digging through textbooks and lecture notes, I had a few A4 pages of one-line summaries of cases and legislation citations, and rarely even needed to refer to it because I'd already learned the cases/legislation by writing them.

I would do this even where the lecture notes, slides, etc. were provided to us.