History connects with the present moment when it reveals more or less how thing got to be the way they are. For the most part, is wasn't taught that way in school, in my individual experience. The college I attended was historically oriented and focused on the evolution of Western thought. We read a sequence of individual books and paper…
History connects with the present moment when it reveals more or less how thing got to be the way they are. For the most part, is wasn't taught that way in school, in my individual experience. The college I attended was historically oriented and focused on the evolution of Western thought. We read a sequence of individual books and papers from the Ancient Greeks to the present. Only scratching the surface, but you could see things taking shape. K-12 was mostly memorizing names and dates.
And K-12 is worse than that now, "teach to the test." And don't teach cursive, we wouldn't want our good little Gammas to actually be able to read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, or Lincoln's Gettyburg Address - or the World War II diaries from their grandfathers that I use in my books - among many others. Nobody under 30 can read or write cursive now.
Recently, my granddaughter watched me write cursive and was so intrigued. She thought it was sort of like magic. No, I said, just practice, practice, practice. How cheated these young critters have been.
Jeri, for the record, there have now been studies suggesting that learning retention is significantly better for notes takien in cursive than (often more copious) typed notes. [Science News, 2/24/2024, p. 12]
I started cobbling simple circuits together before I was 5 and subscribed to Popular Electronics in middle school. I loved following technical innovation, although I feel it is measurably used to control us more in the century than in the last, when each innovation felt like pure empowerment. I think that's more that just me getting old, though I now that the latter is part of it. Anyway, I see more readiness to rush to a technology just because it is new irrespective to weather it is proven to be better. Electronic voting machines is one example. I still fill out my ballot with a pen, and the nice thing about paper is that it leaves a trail, of at least a chain of custody. If a bank gets fiddled by electronic thievery, an audit will show the money is missing. If secret virtual ballots are fiddled, that could be hard to even discover.
The worst educational ideas I’ve seen are teaching to the test while abandoning education on non-tested topics, abandoning cursive education, and the censorship of books and the teaching the true and more unsavory and racist aspects of our history.
I view deliberately teaching lies to kids a criminal, at least for matters that matter. There were things about human behavior that we didn't detail with our daughter till she seemed "ready", but we also tried to not misrepresent. I believe "fortune favors the prepared mind".
I see standardized testing as an administrative convenience. It produces a number for qualities that in reality can be hard to articulately define, so it seem like it gives us a handle to hang on them, but I think that in some ways the number becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, like measuring yardsticks with yardsticks to give congruent results becomes less useful capturing the power of a symphony. As Einstein remarked, “It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.” We can quantify that wave pressure, but what does the number alone leave out?
We treat biodiversity and desperate interests as a bug in our system, when it arguably key to our resilience as a species and our human ability to know and do so, so many things. Yes, we need a common language and a kit of practical skills, but we want to industrialize education when it seems to me that it is best addressed as process of discovery for the pupil and everyone involved, a conversation, not a lecture. Yes, a guided process of discovery, and yes, with the aid of practiced mentors, but I think that if curricula spent as much time encouraging questions as dispensing answers, we would not see nearly as much unhelpful (and sometimes deadly) misinformation circulating in our society.
Kind of like the Catholic Church speaking and writing in Latin. How much of what they we blathering was made up to enrich themselves and keep the peons in line.
I started messing about with computers in the mid 1970's but I still carry a pen. I realize it would be different were I not a retired old misanthrope I would probably feel differently, but I hate carrying a cell phone and rarely take with me when I venture into what passes for reality. To me, a phone seems like a fancy Swiss Army Knife, Just the thing in some situations, but a laptop is more like a well equipped machine shop and I don't have to dink around so much.
Total agreement. I messed with the @#$#@@!! "main frames" and tried to learn FORTRAN in grad school, an experience so terrible it took me six years of the new desktop revolution in the 80s to finally get one. Now that so much is digitized, I'm a happy camper. I started researching "The Frozen Chosen" the year the Marine Corps put every pice of paper from every unit in the Korean War online in a searchable database - hooray! I was also able to go to the People's Republic of China Foreign Ministry Archive and read English translations of the negotiations in the spring of 1950 between Kim Il-Sung, Stalin and Mao (Mao had the most accurate outlook on what was likely to happen) for the invasion of South Korea. Also Navy History and Heritage Command to get the Monthly Reports of every aircraft carrier that was there during the war. When I did "Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club" and "Going Downtown," I could put a old code name in Google and come up with a many-page formerly Top Secret report in PDF about what that was. No more financing a trip to DC for a week in the National Archives pawing through mislabeled boxes to look at documents I couldn't copy.
Elementary School and HIgh School was boring and did not teach to think for ourselves, just memorize the facts. I remember we had to draw maps of the U.S. and other countries and my geography is lousy!
Fortunately, Mr. Field had us play "the map game" in sixth grade - one kid on either side of the map and he would say a country or a place and the first one to get it was the winner, and got to keep going till someone beat them (I was never beaten). Kids spent all kinds of extra time learning the map. He was the only one I could remember from 12 years of public school, and fortunately we got to be friends the past ten years before he died last summer at 99.
I also played a version of this game in Mr. Delponte's 6th grade class. Can't say I was never beaten, but it did turn me into a sort of map freak, with a concomitant interest in world affairs.
Teachers like that made all the difference back then. I had a 7th grade teacher, Mr. MacAleney, who paid for each of us to have the newspaper every day in class and every day we would all do the crossword puzzle together. I ran into him many years later and thanked him and told him he was the best teacher I ever had. I thought he was going to cry. I wonder if teachers are "allowed" to do things like that anymore.
My Mom had the dubious "honor" of being assigned to teach the "Package Nine" English class her second year of teaching. That was also known as "last chance English" and was packed with seniors who needed to pass the class in order to graduate. Mom taught them to read Middle English, and read Chaucer in the original. They ate it up, and for the first time in the history of "Package Nine" ALL of the seniors passed and graduated.
Those kids came to visit her after she quit teaching for 20 years (before moving out of the Rogue Valley). Two of them came to her memorial service 30 years after she quit.
Elementary School was mostly a bust for me, though I did pick up the "3Rs". Much of the history I was taught was just plain wrong, or so further studies seemed to indicate.
Fortunately my two grandmothers, both teachers, taught me phonics at age 4. My first grade class was the last class in the Denver public schools to get phonics before everything turned to "word (non) recognition" and the long slow decline in literacy created by all the edumacashunil refirmers began. The Ed.D. is a degree that should go in the garbage heap with the MBA.
I was reading before kindergarten and public school used ITA (Pitman) alphabet and spelling. I was excused from class then and allowed to read books without Pitman/ITA. For me, ITA was like having to learn s different alphabet. In Catholic school, we learned phonics, which in my view works best. I will say however, that students with reading disabilities, such as dyslexia, might require extra help to leam, and they may need tutoring to enable them to learn to read well.
I grew up in a Omaha. Our neighborhood had about 5,000 people in it and about half were Catholic. There Catholic Church had a K-8 school but most of the parents sent their kids to the public school. I'm not sure why but I do know that corporal punishment occurred in the Catholic school.
When I was in 9th grade the Catholic high schools in Omaha had a math tournament for all of the Catholic schools and one public school. Our math team from the public school won every trophy. My partner was Jewish and he proudly took the trophy home which had a statuette of Mother Mary on it and put it on their mantle. It was years later before I understood the irony of the situation.
TC, I don't know what they system is called, but I learned to read from a book called "Nose is not Toes" where one word was read and the other green. I think I was in my 5th year when my Mom (a writer, a poet, and eventually and briefly a high school English teacher before settling in as an adjunct reader and sometimes instructor at our local college) taught me to read.
I was thrilled to go to school and read, and was sorely dismayed when the only "reading" on our first day involved me being able to read an illustration sign that said "Lemonade, 5 (abbreviation of cents with the c and a line drawn through it)".
Not me. My catholic grade school the Sisters of Mercy taught us to use our reasoning and logic as our guides in life and I eventually reasoned that there wasn’t a God. They found a way to expel me before graduating. I’m eternally grateful for them. Wish I could give them a big hug.
History connects with the present moment when it reveals more or less how thing got to be the way they are. For the most part, is wasn't taught that way in school, in my individual experience. The college I attended was historically oriented and focused on the evolution of Western thought. We read a sequence of individual books and papers from the Ancient Greeks to the present. Only scratching the surface, but you could see things taking shape. K-12 was mostly memorizing names and dates.
And K-12 is worse than that now, "teach to the test." And don't teach cursive, we wouldn't want our good little Gammas to actually be able to read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, or Lincoln's Gettyburg Address - or the World War II diaries from their grandfathers that I use in my books - among many others. Nobody under 30 can read or write cursive now.
Recently, my granddaughter watched me write cursive and was so intrigued. She thought it was sort of like magic. No, I said, just practice, practice, practice. How cheated these young critters have been.
Jeri, for the record, there have now been studies suggesting that learning retention is significantly better for notes takien in cursive than (often more copious) typed notes. [Science News, 2/24/2024, p. 12]
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/handwriting-brain-connections-learning
"A groundbreaking study shows kids learn better on paper, not screens. Now what?" https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/17/kids-reading-better-paper-vs-screen
I started cobbling simple circuits together before I was 5 and subscribed to Popular Electronics in middle school. I loved following technical innovation, although I feel it is measurably used to control us more in the century than in the last, when each innovation felt like pure empowerment. I think that's more that just me getting old, though I now that the latter is part of it. Anyway, I see more readiness to rush to a technology just because it is new irrespective to weather it is proven to be better. Electronic voting machines is one example. I still fill out my ballot with a pen, and the nice thing about paper is that it leaves a trail, of at least a chain of custody. If a bank gets fiddled by electronic thievery, an audit will show the money is missing. If secret virtual ballots are fiddled, that could be hard to even discover.
I believe that, just from my efforts, if I reread them before too much time passes
The worst educational ideas I’ve seen are teaching to the test while abandoning education on non-tested topics, abandoning cursive education, and the censorship of books and the teaching the true and more unsavory and racist aspects of our history.
I view deliberately teaching lies to kids a criminal, at least for matters that matter. There were things about human behavior that we didn't detail with our daughter till she seemed "ready", but we also tried to not misrepresent. I believe "fortune favors the prepared mind".
I see standardized testing as an administrative convenience. It produces a number for qualities that in reality can be hard to articulately define, so it seem like it gives us a handle to hang on them, but I think that in some ways the number becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, like measuring yardsticks with yardsticks to give congruent results becomes less useful capturing the power of a symphony. As Einstein remarked, “It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.” We can quantify that wave pressure, but what does the number alone leave out?
We treat biodiversity and desperate interests as a bug in our system, when it arguably key to our resilience as a species and our human ability to know and do so, so many things. Yes, we need a common language and a kit of practical skills, but we want to industrialize education when it seems to me that it is best addressed as process of discovery for the pupil and everyone involved, a conversation, not a lecture. Yes, a guided process of discovery, and yes, with the aid of practiced mentors, but I think that if curricula spent as much time encouraging questions as dispensing answers, we would not see nearly as much unhelpful (and sometimes deadly) misinformation circulating in our society.
I think you are correct.
Kind of like the Catholic Church speaking and writing in Latin. How much of what they we blathering was made up to enrich themselves and keep the peons in line.
I started messing about with computers in the mid 1970's but I still carry a pen. I realize it would be different were I not a retired old misanthrope I would probably feel differently, but I hate carrying a cell phone and rarely take with me when I venture into what passes for reality. To me, a phone seems like a fancy Swiss Army Knife, Just the thing in some situations, but a laptop is more like a well equipped machine shop and I don't have to dink around so much.
Total agreement. I messed with the @#$#@@!! "main frames" and tried to learn FORTRAN in grad school, an experience so terrible it took me six years of the new desktop revolution in the 80s to finally get one. Now that so much is digitized, I'm a happy camper. I started researching "The Frozen Chosen" the year the Marine Corps put every pice of paper from every unit in the Korean War online in a searchable database - hooray! I was also able to go to the People's Republic of China Foreign Ministry Archive and read English translations of the negotiations in the spring of 1950 between Kim Il-Sung, Stalin and Mao (Mao had the most accurate outlook on what was likely to happen) for the invasion of South Korea. Also Navy History and Heritage Command to get the Monthly Reports of every aircraft carrier that was there during the war. When I did "Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club" and "Going Downtown," I could put a old code name in Google and come up with a many-page formerly Top Secret report in PDF about what that was. No more financing a trip to DC for a week in the National Archives pawing through mislabeled boxes to look at documents I couldn't copy.
I'll never understand why they stopped teaching cursive writing. Whose bright idea was that? Do these kids really not know how to sign their own name?
Will they ever be able to write postcards?
Elementary School and HIgh School was boring and did not teach to think for ourselves, just memorize the facts. I remember we had to draw maps of the U.S. and other countries and my geography is lousy!
Fortunately, Mr. Field had us play "the map game" in sixth grade - one kid on either side of the map and he would say a country or a place and the first one to get it was the winner, and got to keep going till someone beat them (I was never beaten). Kids spent all kinds of extra time learning the map. He was the only one I could remember from 12 years of public school, and fortunately we got to be friends the past ten years before he died last summer at 99.
I also played a version of this game in Mr. Delponte's 6th grade class. Can't say I was never beaten, but it did turn me into a sort of map freak, with a concomitant interest in world affairs.
A legacy that lives on, past his passing.
Teachers like that made all the difference back then. I had a 7th grade teacher, Mr. MacAleney, who paid for each of us to have the newspaper every day in class and every day we would all do the crossword puzzle together. I ran into him many years later and thanked him and told him he was the best teacher I ever had. I thought he was going to cry. I wonder if teachers are "allowed" to do things like that anymore.
My Mom had the dubious "honor" of being assigned to teach the "Package Nine" English class her second year of teaching. That was also known as "last chance English" and was packed with seniors who needed to pass the class in order to graduate. Mom taught them to read Middle English, and read Chaucer in the original. They ate it up, and for the first time in the history of "Package Nine" ALL of the seniors passed and graduated.
Those kids came to visit her after she quit teaching for 20 years (before moving out of the Rogue Valley). Two of them came to her memorial service 30 years after she quit.
TC, how did you do with African countries?
Elementary School was mostly a bust for me, though I did pick up the "3Rs". Much of the history I was taught was just plain wrong, or so further studies seemed to indicate.
Fortunately my two grandmothers, both teachers, taught me phonics at age 4. My first grade class was the last class in the Denver public schools to get phonics before everything turned to "word (non) recognition" and the long slow decline in literacy created by all the edumacashunil refirmers began. The Ed.D. is a degree that should go in the garbage heap with the MBA.
I was reading before kindergarten and public school used ITA (Pitman) alphabet and spelling. I was excused from class then and allowed to read books without Pitman/ITA. For me, ITA was like having to learn s different alphabet. In Catholic school, we learned phonics, which in my view works best. I will say however, that students with reading disabilities, such as dyslexia, might require extra help to leam, and they may need tutoring to enable them to learn to read well.
I grew up in a Omaha. Our neighborhood had about 5,000 people in it and about half were Catholic. There Catholic Church had a K-8 school but most of the parents sent their kids to the public school. I'm not sure why but I do know that corporal punishment occurred in the Catholic school.
When I was in 9th grade the Catholic high schools in Omaha had a math tournament for all of the Catholic schools and one public school. Our math team from the public school won every trophy. My partner was Jewish and he proudly took the trophy home which had a statuette of Mother Mary on it and put it on their mantle. It was years later before I understood the irony of the situation.
TC, I don't know what they system is called, but I learned to read from a book called "Nose is not Toes" where one word was read and the other green. I think I was in my 5th year when my Mom (a writer, a poet, and eventually and briefly a high school English teacher before settling in as an adjunct reader and sometimes instructor at our local college) taught me to read.
I was thrilled to go to school and read, and was sorely dismayed when the only "reading" on our first day involved me being able to read an illustration sign that said "Lemonade, 5 (abbreviation of cents with the c and a line drawn through it)".
My grandmother taught me with "A boy's History of U.S. Grant" published in 1871 - with all the words broken out in syllables.
Remembering that, I think I realize how it was I got into History early on.
Not me. My catholic grade school the Sisters of Mercy taught us to use our reasoning and logic as our guides in life and I eventually reasoned that there wasn’t a God. They found a way to expel me before graduating. I’m eternally grateful for them. Wish I could give them a big hug.