{"id":1671,"date":"2009-03-16T19:32:30","date_gmt":"2009-03-16T23:32:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/?p=1671"},"modified":"2009-03-16T19:32:30","modified_gmt":"2009-03-16T23:32:30","slug":"rethinking-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2009\/03\/16\/rethinking-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em> 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<\/em> come up, and I’d be hard pressed to solve for a hypotenuse. (I guess I remember that much, actually.)<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> teach?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1671\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}