Kids Learning Handwriting?... How About Telling Time....

[TSherbs]

I find this a sign that my generation will be the last to appreciate handwriting, be able to read clocks, be able to have life skills that extend outside of boiling water for instant noodles, and appreciating any music that isn't pop...

 

no need to worry

 

these fears will never be born out by reality

[JakobS]

Oh how fear tickles the feet

 

Of those who proclaim societal retreat

 

Though surrounded comfortably in that which they know

 

Albeit, the world around may ebb and flow

 

Yet, those who want, can always find

 

So be content, and leave fear behind

[OMASsimo]

i see the challenge through a different lens. Are we educating our children, or are we teaching them skills? Education is about how to think. Learning skills is the ability to do something you haven't done before.

 

If I saved a nickel (those round metal things with Jefferson on them) for each time one of my kids asked "when am I ever going to use this," their college would be paid for in cash. I often explain that schools need to teach you how to think. The world does not present easy problems waiting for you to use a pre-determined solution. There's no approved solution. That's why everyone takes a range of subjects to sharpen thinking and explore new ways of thought.

 

The danger is learning skills exclusive of learning to think.

 

Buzz

 

I certainly can attest to this. But learning to think and solve problems is also a skill, and certainly one to be taught.

 

Maybe it's not essential to be able to read an analogue clock or write cursive. Fair enough, the necessary skills to survive certainly change upon time. What upset me more when I initially read this news story was the paradigm. "Because the kids can't master a certain skill we need to change the requirement." No, that's not how the world works. I can tell from my everyday experience with my freshmen students. An increasing number fail my exams because they lack the basic skills not taught in school anymore plus lacking the necessary work attitude not enforced in school anymore. I don't think we do our kids justice by reducing requirements in school continuously.

 

And yes, once the cell phone battery dies, the IQ of most people drops by 50% nowadays.

[TSherbs]

 

... I can tell from my everyday experience with my freshmen students. An increasing number fail my exams because they lack the basic skills not taught in school anymore plus lacking the necessary work attitude not enforced in school anymore. I don't think we do our kids justice by reducing requirements in school continuously.

 

Since we have begun discussing reasoning skills, what reasoning skills are you using that lead you to the conclusion that their school experience is the fundamental cause of their "failure" in your course?

[OMASsimo]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to go into a deeper discussion of those issues. But the short answer is, where else would you acquire the basic arithmetic, calculus, and literacy skills where we see increasing deficits with our freshmen of a science faculty? We have mandatory school curricula determined by the government where I live, and of course we know these curricula and how they changed over time. And of course our faculty members have or had kids in school. The kids are as smart as at any time before. What changed is is the school education, at least where I live. In my opinion this is due to a change in societal paradigms. And from countless discussions with other colleagues at international conferences I know that these problems are very similar in many countries.

[TSherbs]

I am a teacher, and every teacher I know who says that student skills and attitudes are in decline then blames the teachers below them (or the parents). And thus the buck gets passed on and on, with no one sharing the burden of doing a better job with what they get. Teachers, I am sorry to say, are good at blaming others for the poor performances in their classrooms or at their school gates. I don't like hearing it, and I usually leave the room when it starts. There are many other contributing causes to the challenges of educating, and pedagogy is notoriously slow to change to the developments of both neuroscience and forward-looking needs. Higher education often cares more about perpetuating its own academic structures and job security than actually adapting to the changing environment and educational truths around them. I have witnessed this, in varying degrees, for my 35 years of teaching. It's a seduction to which I have also fallen prey. We teachers must own more of the responsibility for what is succeeding or not in our classrooms in the present regardless of the past. If the "failures" aren't ours, then neither are the successes.

 

Let me give an example. Let's say that students are coming in with a lesser understanding of calculus and a less pliant attitude. But let us not call that a failure, but rather a sign of something working "right." Now, how might that be? Well, maybe this is one way: some students are no longer accepting the standards of the past at face value or simply because the more educated adult in the room is asking for it. What if the value being demonstrated is a greater independence or even recalcitrance in the face of purposeless rote work? What if what is being demonstrated is the wisdom of recognizing that adult success throughout life is not actually highly correlated with specific achievement in traditional subject areas, but more, rather, with students simply completing a university program and developing resilience and independent thought and then being flexible with skills and training in the workplace? Often traditional academic departments do not do much more than promote the continuance of themselves and not the future adult-life success in any direct way of the bulk of the students who pass through their rooms. Student foot-dragging, seen this way, might actually be a natural and encouraging sign that maybe old-school design is losing its unquestioned efficacy. That we still have the basic academic department structure of the 19th century is an embarrassment to me, and I work in it!

[CheapSkate]

I am a teacher, and every teacher I know who says that student skills and attitudes are in decline then blames the teachers below them (or the parents). And thus the buck gets passed on and on, with no one sharing the burden of doing a better job with what they get. Teachers, I am sorry to say, are good at blaming others for the poor performances in their classrooms or at their school gates. I don't like hearing it, and I usually leave the room when it starts. There are many other contributing causes to the challenges of educating, and pedagogy is notoriously slow to change to the developments of both neuroscience and forward-looking needs. Higher education often cares more about perpetuating its own academic structures and job security than actually adapting to the changing environment and educational truths around them. I have witnessed this, in varying degrees, for my 35 years of teaching. It's a seduction to which I have also fallen prey. We teachers must own more of the responsibility for what is succeeding or not in our classrooms in the present regardless of the past. If the "failures" aren't ours, then neither are the successes.

 

Let me give an example. Let's say that students are coming in with a lesser understanding of calculus and a less pliant attitude. But let us not call that a failure, but rather a sign of something working "right." Now, how might that be? Well, maybe this is one way: some students are no longer accepting the standards of the past at face value or simply because the more educated adult in the room is asking for it. What if the value being demonstrated is a greater independence or even recalcitrance in the face of purposeless rote work? What if what is being demonstrated is the wisdom of recognizing that adult success throughout life is not actually highly correlated with specific achievement in traditional subject areas, but more, rather, with students simply completing a university program and developing resilience and independent thought and then being flexible with skills and training in the workplace? Often traditional academic departments do not do much more than promote the continuance of themselves and not the future adult-life success in any direct way of the bulk of the students who pass through their rooms. Student foot-dragging, seen this way, might actually be a natural and encouraging sign that maybe old-school design is losing its unquestioned efficacy. That we still have the basic academic department structure of the 19th century is an embarrassment to me, and I work in it!

In the UK

https://www.gov.uk/know-when-you-can-leave-school

 

The simple reason it MASKS unemployment with youngsters lacking the required life skills.

 

At 9 years old The school had me dosing chlorine in the pool and flushing sand filters untended- I was given a book of instructions and one practical demonstration.

 

At 9 years old I drove a Land Rover round farm feeding animals.

 

At 12 I drove a Case tractor with loader round.

 

At 12 I could weld

 

Can you imagine children of today being able to do this safely?

 

I will be 40 years old this year and my childhood was a different time.

[praxim]

At 9 years old The school had me dosing chlorine in the pool and flushing sand filters untended- I was given a book of instructions and one practical demonstration.

 

At 9 years old I drove a Land Rover round farm feeding animals.

 

At 12 I drove a Case tractor with loader round.

 

At 12 I could weld

 

Can you imagine children of today being able to do this safely?

Should I?

[WarrenB]

Let me give an example. Let's say that students are coming in with a lesser understanding of calculus and a less pliant attitude. But let us not call that a failure, but rather a sign of something working "right." Now, how might that be? Well, maybe this is one way: some students are no longer accepting the standards of the past at face value or simply because the more educated adult in the room is asking for it. What if the value being demonstrated is a greater independence or even recalcitrance in the face of purposeless rote work? What if what is being demonstrated is the wisdom of recognizing that adult success throughout life is not actually highly correlated with specific achievement in traditional subject areas, but more, rather, with students simply completing a university program and developing resilience and independent thought and then being flexible with skills and training in the workplace?

I'm sorry to say, but in my experience this fine speech only seems vaguely connected with what actually happens. I've had more than one job adviser assure me that 'simply completing a university program and developing resilience and independent thought and then being flexible with skills and training in the workplace' is a good thing; but that's not what the recruitment ads ask for first, if at all.

Edited May 31, 2018 by WarrenB

[TSherbs]

I'm sorry to say, but in my experience this fine speech only seems vaguely connected with what actually happens. I've had more than one job adviser assure me that 'simply completing a university program and developing resilience and independent thought and then being flexible with skills and training in the workplace' is a good thing; but that's not what the recruitment ads ask for first, if at all.

 

For how many jobs across Europe and the Americas? Do these recruitment ads inquire into how students did in freshmen physics or sophomore chemistry? How many adults, across the spectrum, derive their success and growth from success in a specific academic subject area?

 

I am trying not to assume that my cohort in education level (masters degree) is anything like the norm. I am trying to discuss the "bulk" of the middle. For example, the median household income in the US for a family of four is around $50,000 (USD). That is total income for family of four. The median. That is not a household with much of a foothold into the professions or higher skilled jobs. So this may not be your job experience (or mine), but I know for sure that I am not among the median cohort in any of these categories.

[JBat]

If children are spared learning archaic skills - like how to read a clock, write like a grown-up or multiply 7*8 without a calculator - I expect the time saved was used teaching them lots of valuable modern skills unknown to coffin-dodgers such as myself

 

Can anyone tell me what these skills might be?

Typing.

[JBat]

Outsi

 

I'm a technology geek (BS MIT, MS CU) and enjoy computers and most things digital. Had one of the first hand held cell phone in the mid-1980's (cost $3,000 and air time was $1.00/minute). Spreadsheets have replaced my slide rule and calculator. My Luddite side, however, prefers some old school technology over today's:

 

Fountain pens

Hand written journals and letters

Double edge safety razors

Mechanical watches

Cars with manual transmissions and rear wheel drive

Custom made clothes

Outside of the custom made clothes, I'm with you on every one of those things. I think it's pretty common for people who like fountain pens to like those other things as well.

[JBat]

I am a teacher, and every teacher I know who says that student skills and attitudes are in decline then blames the teachers below them (or the parents). And thus the buck gets passed on and on, with no one sharing the burden of doing a better job with what they get. Teachers, I am sorry to say, are good at blaming others for the poor performances in their classrooms or at their school gates. I don't like hearing it, and I usually leave the room when it starts. There are many other contributing causes to the challenges of educating, and pedagogy is notoriously slow to change to the developments of both neuroscience and forward-looking needs. Higher education often cares more about perpetuating its own academic structures and job security than actually adapting to the changing environment and educational truths around them. I have witnessed this, in varying degrees, for my 35 years of teaching. It's a seduction to which I have also fallen prey. We teachers must own more of the responsibility for what is succeeding or not in our classrooms in the present regardless of the past. If the "failures" aren't ours, then neither are the successes.

 

Let me give an example. Let's say that students are coming in with a lesser understanding of calculus and a less pliant attitude. But let us not call that a failure, but rather a sign of something working "right." Now, how might that be? Well, maybe this is one way: some students are no longer accepting the standards of the past at face value or simply because the more educated adult in the room is asking for it. What if the value being demonstrated is a greater independence or even recalcitrance in the face of purposeless rote work? What if what is being demonstrated is the wisdom of recognizing that adult success throughout life is not actually highly correlated with specific achievement in traditional subject areas, but more, rather, with students simply completing a university program and developing resilience and independent thought and then being flexible with skills and training in the workplace? Often traditional academic departments do not do much more than promote the continuance of themselves and not the future adult-life success in any direct way of the bulk of the students who pass through their rooms. Student foot-dragging, seen this way, might actually be a natural and encouraging sign that maybe old-school design is losing its unquestioned efficacy. That we still have the basic academic department structure of the 19th century is an embarrassment to me, and I work in it!

Get rid of the unions and make all teaching positions merit-based. The quality of education in this country would skyrocket in short order.

[ReadyFireAim]

Get rid of the unions and make all teaching positions merit-based. The quality of education in this country would skyrocket in short order.

 

Private schools around here are becoming very popular.

 

It used to be because parents had religious convictions but that is changing.

My friend is an atheist and sends his children to a Catholic school.

 

Education has little to do with religion or political affiliation so that is not what I'm saying.

There is a district about an hour away that is consistantly top 5 in Pa. and it is a public school but the people in that zip code are all super wealthy.

 

Home schooling is also becoming a popular alternative.

 

Transferable vouchers for private schools will end public education as it exists now.

Edited May 31, 2018 by Nail-Bender

[dcwaites]

It's quite the opposite here in NSW. There is a marked exodus from the private school system to the public system, causing problems at both ends.

The private schools are losing income and the public schools are becoming overcrowded.

[TSherbs]

Get rid of the unions and make all teaching positions merit-based. The quality of education in this country would skyrocket in short order.

 

Both of these are already basically true in my state. This is not a "solution" because the challenges are much more complex, and this "solution" leaves out the community and parents and the cultural context entirely. This suggests, too, that our education would have been "sky-high" before the advent of unions. This was obviously not the case.

[inkstainedruth]

I think that phones should all be connected via a wire, and should have a rotary dial on the front.

All clocks should have roman numerals (and should randomly strike XIII).

 

Well, I'm all for the first part. Because around here (at least) the original phone lines were installed with tax dollars, which the phone company doesn't want to maintain any more. But I've just spent nearly 40 minutes on the phone with Verizon complaining about a robocaller that traces back to a number they issued trying to explain that no, we CAN'T follow the directions for blocking numbers because it's not VoIP. And I'm still waiting to talk to a supervisor (the first person I talked to kept calling me "sweetheart" and the second one didn't seem to understand English very well, and HER supervisor is "on another call").

And the reason we wanted to keep the old POTS line? Crappy cell service (I spent half the afternoon with the cell phone provider saying "You LIED to us about the service, and if you can't provide us with the promised microcell unit -- basically a booster to the signal -- you had better find me someone who CAN...." But of course if the power goes out the microcell does too. Which is why we need to keep the landline, and why we need to keep it as a POTS line.

I now And now have a callback scheduled with a manager as to why Verizon no longer has call blocking service.... And why they are unwilling or unable to deal with a customer of THEIRS making robocalls.....

Of course it's probably a spoofed name and number. The next time, I may stay on the line long enough to get actual contact info so I can report them....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[inkstainedruth]

 

For how many jobs across Europe and the Americas? Do these recruitment ads inquire into how students did in freshmen physics or sophomore chemistry? How many adults, across the spectrum, derive their success and growth from success in a specific academic subject area?

My husband has a degree in Applied Mathematics/Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon. Which is a very high ranking school for tech-related stuff. His current job is as a contract engineer for a company which is a military contractor. He learned building blocks for software design (and he's not sure that he would have even gotten the same grounding at someplace like MIT). But the company he's contracting for will not hire him for full time because he didn't have a high-enough GPA. In spite of a degree from CMU *and* over 30 years experience writing software and debugging code.

He took a year off after his freshman year (partly for financial reasons, and partly because of what is known as taking a "dean's vacation" -- aka poor grades the second half of his freshman year). The company who he worked for during that year found that he had better skills than full-time, long-term employees *just* because of his freshman year work.

At one point a number of years ago we saw an ad in the Sunday paper for a job opening at the University of Pittsburgh. He was still working at CMU at that point, IIRC (having gotten a job working on various research projects), and may have been partway through a masters degree (using the staff "back door"). The job requirements listed for the job at Pitt included proficiency/expertise in a variety of computer languages and a minimum of a master's degree. And paid (and this would have been in the late 1980s) $25K US -- way less than he was making at CMU. His conclusion? That Pitt probably wanted to bring in someone on a work visa and made the pay so crappy that no American with even a fraction of the required skills would touch it with a ten foot pole, and they could then go to INS and say "See -- we can't get any Americans who are qualified" (whereas, depending on where the person they wanted was coming from, that may have been a significant bump in salary...). And Pittsburgh is a relatively cheap place to live, compared to some parts of the country.

But I was a junior in high school before I got taught anything faintly resembling critical thinking (God BLESS Mrs. Weyant forcing the Junior Enrichment Reading class to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- in spite of us all going "But we've read it!"). And that was in NYS, which has statewide exams in various subjects at the end of the year: if you're taking the Regents exam for Geometry, you are taking it at the same time as every other kid in the entire state of New York (say, Wed. Jun 20 at 9 AM). But I remember in some cases having extra classes where we were taught HOW to take the test (all the stuff that wasn't ACTUALLY covered in class, even if it was a "Regents" level class). And this was in an upper-middle-class school district in the suburbs in the 1970s.

A year or two ago, a friend of mine was trying to explain facts and science to some dweeb on FB who believed every conspiracy he ever heard. She was a lot more patient than I would have been (apparently he'd heard that the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 was an "inside job" and was too stupid to actually think what would have been involved, which was vast amounts of carefully placed explosives in a building where thousands of people work every day -- and done in such a way that none of those thousands of people would NOTICE...). And another person's response was priceless! She said "I work in an office with 500 years worth of combined engineering skills and education. But I'm going to believe Brandon because 'he has a feeling'...." (I said "PLEASE tell me that was sarcasm..." and my friend assured me that it was.)

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[dcwaites]

I am puzzled why conspiracy theories are so contagious.

Once upon a time, if a person said something that was outside the mainstream of current thought, they had to prove what they were saying beyond a reasonable doubt. Just think Galileo, Wegener (Continental drift) and the like.

These days, if I get up on FB* and claim that the earth is an oblate spheroid, I'll have a dozen believers within minutes.

 

 

 

* Not that I ever would. As far as I'm concerned, the whole FB thing is a conspiracy. There can't possibly be billions of people viewing and typing stuff into the same servers at the same time. The wires would melt. It's obvious.

 

** See, there's already three of you who believe me, and this is only FPN...

Edited June 1, 2018 by dcwaites

[TSherbs]

I am puzzled why conspiracy theories are so contagious.

Once upon a time, if a person said something that was outside the mainstream of current thought, they had to prove what they were saying beyond a reasonable doubt. Just think Galileo, Wegener (Continental drift) and the like.

These days, if I get up on FB* and claim that the earth is an oblate spheroid, I'll have a dozen believers within minutes.

 

 

 

* Not that I ever would. As far as I'm concerned, the whole FB thing is a conspiracy. There can't possibly be billions of people viewing and typing stuff into the same servers at the same time. The wires would melt. It's obvious.

 

** See, there's already three of you who believe me, and this is only FPN...

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