I’ve always thought that, although our school system is pretty good comparatively, there’s still massive room for improvement. I think some of the courses I took were utterly and completely wastes of my time. Trigonometry, for example. It has never come up in anything else. When we hit integration of cosine and whatnot in calculus, the professor even joked that it was alright if we didn’t remember the difference between tan, sin, and cos, just that we had to know how to integrate them. And I don’t think trig is a good example of the, “It teaches you how to think” thing, either. It teaches you a set of mathematical skills that don’t come in useful in anything else. This isn’t to say that no one should take trig, just that, after high school, the subject has never come up, and I’d be hard pressed to solve for a hypotenuse. (I guess I remember that much, actually.)
More important, though, are the things I think we can do a much better job of teaching. I took multiple economic classes in college at a prestigious business school, including some that covered things like game theory and way too much detail on product bundling. I took finance courses and learned about TVM and secondary markets and muni bonds and debentures. Compared to the average person, I received way more education on finance and economics. Yet I have only a cursory understanding of the current economic situation in the US. That scares me. We fall down flat with geometry, too. Gym class and computer classes both seem full of potential but often squandered.
So driving home today, with absolutely nothing better to think about, I started wondering about this some more. And I think it helps to stop viewing it as a hypothetical discussion about what an ideal society would teach in schols. I wondered how it would be structured if we started from the ground up.
I think grades 1-5 all teach valuable life skills. But let’s suppose that, after 5th grade, there were only three more years of school. This would be bad, but bear with me. With only three more years of school, what would you teach? Many of the things that come to mind for me are things that aren’t even in school right now, which I think reflects poorly on status quo. Really, though, what would you teach?
Answering my own post.
Geography and a really abbreviated, pragmatic world history. Less on Crete and the pyramids of Egypt (though they all certainly deserve mention), and more on Iraq and the West’s role in restructuring it. We never talked about that until a class in college specifically covering WWI and WWII. Japanese internment camps, maybe. The Cold War. How come I never learned all that much about these things, but I know all about the Magna Carta and learned all sorts of Greek plays in history class?
Economics and finance need to be taught at a youngish age, but focusing on things about how the US economy works, and on personal finance. Personal finance never even came up, and I only got the basics of how our economy works. You can take a couple days on how capitalism is better than socialism and communism, but I feel like that becomes the dominant theme of some economic courses. We get the idea — so teach us how capitalism works. What is the national debt? Not just an academic “what is it,” but a numerical, “what is it.” How much? What does that mean? Who holds it? What, exactly, is going on with our economy right now? This could become a touchy topic, since it’s full of opportunities for the teacher’s political views to get in the way, but that’s better than not covering it at all.
Religion. This will (rightly, IMHO) set off alarm bells in a lot of peoples’ heads. BG had a lot of Catholicism-related courses, but also a “World Religions” course. I think that should be in every school, especially now that different religions are becoming a big deal. What is Islam? Are they all terrorists? Are Hindus the same thing? I say these things tongue-in-cheek, but to a frightening number of people, they’re serious questions. We can also discuss, in an academic matter, what the Constitution actually says about religion: talking about religion is totally legitimate, but promoting one at the exclusion is not. An academic overview of world religions, making no attempt to promote/denigrate any of them, is Constitutionally-protected and, at this time in history, urgently needed. I’m sure this will have activists on both sides fuming (the left worried it’ll force Christianity down everyone’s throats, and the right worried that it’ll promote Islam/atheism). That only goes to show why such a course is important.
Computers. Not everyone needs to learn Perl scripts or to be able to touch-type at 100wpm, but I don’t think many schools do enough. People ought to be able to touch-type, and that can only be taught young. It was probably 2nd grade or so that someone forced me to break whatever I was doing and use the silly “home row” thing. I hated it, until I got the point I’m at now, where I can type faster than I can think. Things like basic productivity tools (Office, but ideally, not just MS Office), and the Internet. I think tremendous progress could be made by focusing a bit on the back end of things. Cover IPs, including the three internal blocks and the 127/8 block. Fix the misconceptions about IPs (I had a teacher–thankfully, not a computer teacher–rant about how you get spam because your computer broadcasts its IP to every other computer on the Internet), but also teach the truth (with your IP, I can tell your ISP, and often, your city). Cover routing: not at the subnet mask/OSPF/BGP4 level, but at the, “You have a vague idea of what a router is and traceroute doesn’t look like black magic” level. DNS, too, right after IPs, maybe. Explain DNS servers and even TTL. Talk about phishing, and actually present true, valid information. Do the same for spam. And viruses, worms, and spyware. Talk a lot about passwords and the real (versus imagined) threats. If I were a computer teacher and worked in a small enough school that I could get away with it, I’d start John the Ripper before class, and then write the passwords it cracked on the board. (Sans usernames.) Then go through each of them and ask the class to explain why it was a bad choice.
Gym! Rather than running a lap around the gym and then playing badminton and ping-pong, I’d cover stuff that really matters.
Like why the heck there’s an “n” in the middle of a word that sounds like “bad mitten.Talk about fitness, a tiny bit on diet, and teach a lot of practical exercises. Nutrition and whatnot would enter in, too.I’d aggressively go after student feedback, too. In school, my opinions of the “bad teachers” versus the “good teachers” always matched everyone else’s. I checked out ratemyteacher.com a while ago, and the bad teachers I had in middle school still had bad reviews, and the great high school teachers still got glowing reviews. Being well-liked by the kids shouldn’t be a teacher’s #1 priority, but it should be a priority. If a teacher just drums up contempt from students year after year, something needs to change. Many of the teachers I despised were also the teachers who gave awful, unclear, irrelevant lectures, while many of the teachers who I loved were the ones who constantly challenged me, yet also made me feel like it was something within my reach. I think “well-liked teacher” and “good teacher” go hand-in-hand. I’d also want a lot of feedback on what classes students liked and didn’t like. It would have to be weighed against a school administrator’s professional judgment, of course, but I think it’s a halfway-decent barometer. At the very least, if most kids taking the quarter’s survey single out a specific class as seeming most pointless, it’d be a great opportunity to focus on addressing why it seems pointless and working on how it can be made to seem more relevant. And at best, a course would either be eliminated or administrators would realize, “We should really teach this course 4 years later in the curriculum, when it’d be much more timely.”
Oh, and another thing. From 4th grade on or so, we’d gradually increase the “responsibility” required for work. Pretty much through high school, we had reminders every single day about the quiz coming up in six weeks, along with days of preparation before hand. Homework was collected and checked every day, and failing to do it was a big deal. And then you hit college and the professor completely forgets to mention the midterm, but it’s on the syllabus so half the class studies and the other class has no clue it’s coming. And no one checks homework, so a few students fail classes first semester not realizing that it’s actually still important to due. Make the transition a little more subtle, so that by freshman year of high school, students are keeping a calendar of everything. Don’t have “Calendar Time” for 15 minutes, and for the love of God, don’t go around and check that people wrote things in their calendar. You’ll only get there by slowly upping the responsibility.
Of course, the teacher still has some responsibility. In many college classes someone would ask a question like, “Professor, it says on the syllabus that we have a midterm next week. Is that date still accurate?” And I’ve heard two types of answers, both of which I hated:
– “What does it say on the syllabus?” (We just told you what it says on the syllabus! Would it kill you to say, “Yes it is” instead of being condescending? Or better yet, would it have killed you to have at least mentioned it in passing in class once or twice?)
– “It says we have a midterm? I haven’t thought about what to put on it. It won’t be anytime soon. If I ever make one at all.”
Phew, that was long. Oh, but wait, there’s more!
– Public speaking. I’m convinced that if, for years, there was a course that required people to give speeches in front of the class (starting off super-short, and gradually building to longer, persuasive essays, and maybe a bit of extemporaneous speaking), most people would cease to be afraid of public speaking. Or, if they didn’t, they’d at least cease to be so paralyzed by fear that they gave an incomprehensible, “So, like, umm, I forgot my notecards. Greece was, umm, like, an, umm, country with, like, a thing and stuff” speech.
I’d do the same for writing.
How about teaching kids the presidents in order via song? Although maybe it isn’t all that useful it does breed a love of history. I know some high schoolers that didn’t know that Millard Fillmore was a president. My first graders do. Your father didn’t know that Alexander Hamiliton wasn’t a president. My first graders do.
I do think we need more or at least better history education. I’d like to see more of how the rest of the world views some of it as well. I bought a book some time ago that includes chapters from history books around the world and was amazed at how different things looked from the other side. South America and the US for example. Wow! It just makes understanding things in current events much easier to understand.
The math question is harder because you really don’t know who is going to need what and waiting to teach Trig to someone who is going to need it until college seems problematic to me. And honestly some things I never expected to need from high school I wound up needing later on – if nothing else for understanding of other things.
The public speaking and writing is an other piece that people do not seem to understand the importance of. I think that some schools (BG for example) do a fairly good job of teaching writing but very few seem to do much with speaking. I had a whole semester required course on it in high school and took a second honors semester. That has been a huge help to me in the long run.