American children continue to fall behind in education

[jasper-isis]

I don't know, there is a reverse side to that - often being able to choose wrong in high school saves one headache in college.

Exactly. That's why we need all those required classes.

[Otohiko]

I don't know, there is a reverse side to that - often being able to choose wrong in high school saves one headache in college.

Exactly. That's why we need all those required classes.

I don't really see that to be honest. Choosing classes probably lets students get a more direct idea of whether their choices are right or wrong. More mandatory classes, on the other hand, may expose them to subjects they'd never consider. Which I think is very good at an early stage, but not towards the end of HS.

[jasper-isis]

I don't really have an opinion on whether there should be less required classes towards the end of high school. From what I know, most high schools are like that now anyway.

[krzT]

The way I figure it, those courses aren't really there to drill knowledge into your brain for future use so much as test and strain your mental capabilities. A physicist doesn't give a crap about cellular respiration, but being forced to learn it helps you to figure out the underlying process beneath each step, which could ultimately be more helpful when trying to figure out friction or whatever it is those people do. And of course nobody actually cares about the green light in The Great Gatsby, but writing an essay on it helps you learn how to read between the lines of a literary work beyond "society sux lol".

That's more of what I was getting at. I hardly remember anything about specific complex biological systems or exact calculus applications used in physics, but there ARE useful things you learn in each class, whether they be study habits or the general understanding of systems. You don't have to be 100% knowledgeable of the properties of friction to start a conversation with someone, but not being totally ignorant of some basic physics properties will probably help you in the longrun.

Meh.

At my high school, we have the horrible class choices. We have four required classes. Math, science, history and english. WE have a choice between the grade level class or the AP version of that class. We also have 5 classes that are required to take before we can graduate. These are: PE, Art, Health, Driver's Education, and Speech.

We have 7 classes per day, with strict guidelines on what we can take and where we can take it.

So that leaves three classes open for us to choose. But, one-two of those have to be one of those five required classes each year.

So that's left me the honor of taking a digital media class for my 7th class each year, and this year taking yearbook/journalism, as I've already gotten my five required out of hte way.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is generally the requirements set for a lot of high schools. This is pretty much what we had to do as well, with maybe a couple tweaks. I know I had to take 2 years of summer school just to finish all of my requirements if I even wanted to consider taking a language all four years. Oh well...extracurricular 8th pd ftw.

As for the college is for career, high school prepares you for it.. . I think that's ridiculous.

i don't know about you guys, but my middle school expierence was AWFUL. We learned absolutely nothing new. That's four wasted years. Why not turn those into the technical "high school" years, teaching students how to learn.

I personally believe that student would do much better. This way, they can work towards their carreer, or take classes that would teach them work-environment techniques if they don't plan on attending college.

Maybe I'm just not completely understanding your reasoning for wanting to make high school more career/vocation friendly, but all I can tell is that students who lack the basic training to study and learn even the most basic lessons to begin with will generally be no more successful attempting to learn more about a career they're interested in. School is still school, and motivation is still motivation (or lack thereof). Not only that, (and I understand this is a hypothetical idea) but there is no way a normal public high school would have the resources to support a system for students to begin studying for their careers. A lot of universities even lack those resources (and by resources I mean advisors/counselors, courses, people trained to educate in a particular work field, time). Of course I don't mean for students to never think about what they might want to do in the future, but there are technical/vocational schools and colleges to help students really prepare themselves.

Ah well...
I think I am thinking too much for winter break. I LOVE month long breaks!

btw Code...have you thought about where you're going to school yet?

[Otohiko]

Haha, can anyone explain exactly what happens in middle school in North America (I presume Canada would be similar to US?)

My own clue as to how much it sucked and how poorly it prepared people for HS came from my grade 9 English class - I got the 2nd highest final grade in a class of 27 people. To put in perspective why that's unusual - at that point I had only been speaking English for less than a year - and everyone else in the class was raised in Canada.

[inthesto]

US middle schools are pretty much just a transition between elementary school and high school. At least in my school system, it's the first time they formally divide classes into periods (rather than just having morning/afternoon divided by recess), and they shuffle you between teachers who teach different subjects. They also give you real report cards (in other schools, my middle school still babysat us on that account), assign homework that somewhat resembles stuff in high school, and so forth.

Honestly, it's not much of a learning period. I recall most of the stuff I retained in middle school (particularly about English grammar) was gone over again in high school, with most of my peers acting like it was the first time they went over the stuff. I'm amused with what CodeChrono said based on my experience, because I might as well have learned nothing, but it really was the prep for high school life we needed. It really wasn't about the information I learned (since the only class where I was learning really new material was the same class taught by the bitch who called my parents for skipping a single homework assignment) but adjusting to a slightly more rigorous and independent lifestyle.

[godix]

I think sto and krzT are on to something here. High school should teach you how to think not prepare you for a career or 'real life'. Lets face it, grade school covers all the basic facts you need for general life. If you get past 8th grade and you can't do enough math to balance your checkbook, don't understand english well enough to write a letter, or don't know enough about science to realize why sticking a screwdriver in the power outlet is bad then your grade school failed you.

OTOH you have high school type assignments. The point of doing an experiment in chemistry class and graphing the results isn't so you know how much light sodium puts out when tossed into a toilet. It's to teach you how to intelligently format questions, search for the answers, and interpret your results. As sto mentioned you don't do a report on the green light in Great Gatsby because knowing about that light will help in life, you do it to learn how to understand allusions, read subtext, and in general how to think about what you're reading. Similar the pythagorean theorem is pretty fucking useless for most people but learning about it should teach you how to understand the underlying rules of numbers beyond 1+1=2. I could go on with other subjects but you get my drift, the point of a lot of what HS does is to teach you generalized concepts of how to think but showing you how those concepts work in specific cases.

The problem is a lot of teachers don't realize that's what they should be teaching. So instead of a history teacher explaining how and why nations go to war you get teachers who think knowing what year the Civil War started and ended is the entire point of the class. The focus on test results with No Child Left Behind and comparisons of different nations students just makes thing worse. Test results can't tell how well a child actually thinks and focusing on testing just brings more of the 'memorize this and fuck the reasoning behind it' attitude that's all too common already.

As for HS focusing on careers, I would hope that knowing how to think would help in whatever career you go to.

[jasper-isis]

In other worlds, hooray for liberal arts?

Unfortunately, the liberal arts focused institution is being valued less and less these days. TJHSST being at the top of that list is proof. Obviously the school still strives to do a good job with its humanities courses, but the hyperfocus on the sciences is undeniable. It's TJHS for Science and Technology, after all.

[BasharOfTheAges]

Testing isn't really about anything other than holding people accountable (either the student or the teacher) for what it is believed they should know. Good tests, ones that force people to analyze and think, exist, but it's impossible to do them on a national scale unless there are literally tens of thousands of people grading complex answers in the exact same way and the money to pay those people. This is a pipe dream. I'm sure the people that organize and run these things realize this perfectly, but they're more concerned about looking like they're doing something than actually doing something that works.

[inthesto]

The problem is a lot of teachers don't realize that's what they should be teaching.

Sadly enough, when I think about it in retrospect, I had a lot of teachers who did understand this. (Dickhead biology teacher was one of them, but fuck him still). The problem was that I just wasn't getting the message. It seems like all pressure to get into the best school you can forces you to memorize the what, when, where, how, and why without ever thinking about the actual "?". (On the other end of the spectrum, we have students who just say fuck it all and throw everything to the dogs). No matter how much the teachers tried to tell us the grades are secondary to the learning (of a type we never understood), the fact still stood that a big fat D on our final was going to stick out a hell of a lot more than whether or not that final told us how to finally read a book.

EDIT: I forgot to put in a side comment about how NCLB only exacerbates this problem, but I'm sure you can fill in the gaps yourself. Although that introduces yet another discussion about how standardized testing is actually better for bringing those behind the curve up to speed, and whether or not rote memorization is an acceptable substitute if the resources aren't available for a "proper" (as me, godix, and krZT have been kind of defining it) education. Which also brings up the discussion of whether or not making that sort of thing available to everyone is realistic or even worth our time, since it's going to be wasted on a percentage of students anyway. God dammit, I hate being a thinker.

The only reason I pick up on this now is because of my first meeting with a real college professor, who didn't hesitate to tell me how I still didn't know how to read after eighteen years of my life.