Changing Education

[Christopher]

Interesting video.

[Brian]

Very interesting.

I went to a Brittish school for three years (my Dad was Army and stationed on a Brittish base in GE). I went through 1st, 2nd and 3rd form. I did terrible all three years. Moved back to the States and I started the 9th grade. Through 4 years of high school I made mostly A's (and a few B's) without putting forth much effort. I've always held that as a testament as to how much better the Brittish schools were.

[Uma]

I couldn't agree more with his presentation. (awesome presentation btw!).

A lot of kids are accused of having a "Too short of attention span" when in fact, it's too LONG of an attention span. The kid is being forced to pay attention to the problem on the board, but has a difficult time removing his/her attention from something previous... like a good xbox game or the art project...

Beef up the teaching... train the teachers to be more creative, more entertaining in their presentations... and VOILA! The kids are all ears.

This is proven via the teachers who carry that knack with them throughout the years. Kids adore those teachers and learn so much! Then the next thing they know they're stuck with someone who can't reach out creativly and the schoolwork suffers tremendously.

Some teachers explode and say "I'm not here to entertain! I'm here to teach!".

That's the first clue that your kid's brain is napping in class and dreaming of Halo Wars.

That same kid can name every alien and battalion in halo wars, yet can't remember what the teacher just said a minute ago.

Maybe some day some teacher will make a teaching game based on characters even more fabulous than halo wars. Now that would be a great class to attend!

[mastiffmom]

My mother is a retired teacher, she calls that cookie-cutter education. We tend to look at one model of IQ but in reality there are several types and several types of learning styles. The key to education is finding the IQ type and learning style of each child and using it to help them learn. But we don't do that. If your learning style is different or or IQ is different ie not reading and then testing, you end up in special classrooms,which is not to say specially designed for you, but lumped with other kids who may or may not have the same learning styles or type of IQ. Add to that choatic mix ADHD drugs which dull these kids down and you have accomplished nothing but singling out these kids as different, not as smart. Kids who have ADHD are as smart as everyone else but most kids treated are not really ADHD, they are bright curious vibrant kids who may be miles beyond their "smarter" classmates. I watched 1 child excel in school and the other fail miserably. Is she brighter than him? No he has an almost uncanny ability to figure out things that we can only scratch our heads at. She has a creativity that is amazing to me. In the same way if you were to look at them and pick the athlete you would pick him. Tall, lean, strong, her tiny, almost fragile looking yet she is the athlete. She has figure skated most of her life and at age 31 can still land huge double jumps. Him give him something with a motor and he can perform miracles or drive like a demon. What did school give them? She's smart and she knows it but he who is really the smarter one felt just getting out of high school was the hardest thing he'd ever done. There are millions of kids like that today. We need to treat each child as an individual and find what they need to learn rather than what we think they should learn. Some love and thrive on classic lit others wither that is the child who may well be the best and the brightest but we have cut them off at the root. We have cut them down without a hope of succeeding, and most will follow this pattern throughout their entire life. Very sad.

[Uma]

haha, love the part (point) about how it gets worse the closer we get to Washington DC...