I do think that lit courses should spend more time studying essays, articles, and other nonfiction. Most of the ones I've had never touch nonfic.
Basic communication is surprisingly hard for a lot of people, and it's pretty obvious when someone just barely squeaked through high school english classes and were thankful they'd never have to write again.
And then they need to write a cover letter or something.
Disagree -- you can separate composition and literature. You should separate composition and literature. Reading is one thing. Effectively writing is something else entirely.
What part of understanding metaphor or theme in a novel goes into writing effectively? Do you really need to know that Wordsworth and Coleridge launched the Romantic movement in order to write an effective informative essay? Does analyzing the gender roles in Pride and Prejudice really help form an argumentative essay?
They don't. Obviously they overlap a little, as reading good authors can help your own writing, but I expect people to read outside of required coursework (much like I and everyone I know did during college) so there's not too much point in forcing them to take lit courses on top of that. Lit and comp are separate disciplines.
Don't get distracted by wondering what the white whale means in Moby Dick specifically. You're learning how to interpret symbolism and theme as a whole by studying that book, and many others. You're also learning, as ELM said much more eloquently, the basics of narrative and plot and all that.
Knowing these things makes you a better communicator, not just in writing but in your speech. A good vocabulary makes you not look like an idiot and you can't get that without reading.
That's what I mean by "you can't separate them." You can't be a good writer without reading. A lot. Yeah they're going to be taught differently but teaching one without the other just doesn't work.
Everyone has different ideas about what is "required" for a school to teach, it seems. I am of the opinion that students (in general) are served best by challenging them at every turn
Has anyone advocated not challenging children or have they simply advocated not requiring challenging courses Litejedi personally found useful but not so much the vast majority of people?
Fuck that. Basic lit/writing are what high school is for. And I'm not saying colleges shouldn't offer electives, or people shouldn't have an opportunity to take classes outside of their major; quite the opposite, in fact. The less you require people to take as far as general ed goes, the more opportunity they're given for taking things outside their major that they actually want to take.
I'll ardently defend composition courses, even in upper division education, especially since at the moment high school English teachers are expected to teach lit AND comp at the same time, when really the two things are two wholly different disciplines, and in my experience it's generally the composition that gets underserved.
I don't care what your discipline is, you will be served by studying composition. People should not be allowed to get on without a course in it, even if it is simple or remedial for some (and in the end even good writers can always use practice).
Everyone has different ideas about what is "required" for a school to teach, it seems. I am of the opinion that students (in general) are served best by challenging them at every turn, and that most of the knowledge I acquired was useful to me (if not directly then tangentially). So, that's only one person's opinion, but it does not seem we should de-emphasize science and mathematics even more than they already are in this country. I think the lack of emphasis is one reason why, with regards to the lower-grades, that Asia and Europe are crushing us in competitiveness in these areas. Further reducing the emphasis would exacerbate the problem.
That being said, the trade/college track system is a great idea. Realistically assessing someone's potential and having them go on a trade track would likely save a lot of headaches for both the student and the school system.
The reason that Asia and Europe are crushing us in these areas is that they use track systems, and we don't, so it's all of our students versus all of their students who chose to go to science-oriented schools.
Everyone has different ideas about what is "required" for a school to teach, it seems. I am of the opinion that students (in general) are served best by challenging them at every turn, and that most of the knowledge I acquired was useful to me (if not directly then tangentially). So, that's only one person's opinion, but it does not seem we should de-emphasize science and mathematics even more than they already are in this country. I think the lack of emphasis is one reason why, with regards to the lower-grades, that Asia and Europe are crushing us in competitiveness in these areas. Further reducing the emphasis would exacerbate the problem.
That being said, the trade/college track system is a great idea. Realistically assessing someone's potential and having them go on a trade track would likely save a lot of headaches for both the student and the school system.
Here's the thing -- I by no means think I am stupid, but I pretty much suck at the sciences. I get broad topics, but not much beyond that. I did like two years worth of science in high school, then moved on.
In the REQUIRED science course for me as an upper division student, I failed one class (due to me getting sick of trying to wrap my head around shit that was unwelcoming and totally unneeded by me), I slept through a cupcake course for "non-majors" or some shit where we brushed up on stuff you could get from watching twenty minutes of the Discovery channel (yes, even today's Discovery channel), and then I got into another course where you primarily just had to pass three tests, wherein I would sit in lectures and read comic books (because attendance was tracked), then binge study for 7-8 hours before the tests to sneak out of that class with a B-.
I don't remember SHIT from that class, nor do I really care to. My day to day business NEVER really requires an in-depth knowledge of biology or plant-life. Period. Or how cells fucking reproduce or whatever. Yes, I get the BROAD concepts from high school, but there's no point in me specializing, since it's not an area of interest of mine.
As to the "we're losing the testing war with Asia" point -- more specializing would help, because bright math and science students could focus on those studies instead of getting distracted by humanities topics they have no interest (or use) for, and kids like me who just don't jive with science could stop taking the test. Problem solved, the tides of the testing war would be shifting in no time.
Trying to teach everyone, everything, results in lots of people who aren't particularly good at anything (this particularly stands out as a problem with our ridiculous universal education requirements at college -- college! Upper division!).
Yeah, fucking general ed is fucking retarded. My school decided that it was a shitty idea, and more or less put a stop to it. There's no reason for your postsecondary education to be "well-rounded."
Basic lit/writing courses notwithstanding, I agree.
Fuck that. Basic lit/writing are what high school is for. And I'm not saying colleges shouldn't offer electives, or people shouldn't have an opportunity to take classes outside of their major; quite the opposite, in fact. The less you require people to take as far as general ed goes, the more opportunity they're given for taking things outside their major that they actually want to take.
I'd like to stress that saying something like "future physics majors don't need to take lit courses" is utter garbage. The greatest shock to me when I hit university was the sheer number of people who absolutely did not understand how to construct sentences, how to use their tenses and the general meaning of the words they wrote.
Even in my research group, we spend a hell of a lot of time addressing the exact wording of people's presentations, papers and theses because being able to write clearly and understanding the nuance of English fundamentally changes how you are able to present your work to others, not to mention makes it a lot easier to give presentations.
And it's not just that - you also need to have a broader idea about how narratives are built, since whatever you're doing, in many ways it becomes a narrative of some sort and so understanding ideas like framing and flow are equally important.
And this isn't just for academic disciplines - I cannot think of a single job or position you could hold anywhere today where being able to write well and present yourself well (in terms of speaking) is not damn important.
I'm not disagreeing. And if it's important enough that your majors be able to write, it should be incorporated into your major, in a "writing for [insert major here] majors" type of course, instead of "everyone has to take 'Composition and British Literature 101.'"
That wasn't really my point though - my point was that there is no compelling argument to put everyone at the high school level through a minimum level of English courses, and then to try and diversify the texts studied enough that students are likely to find some interest (and you need to study something because you learn these things by observing examples of them in action).
At the college and university level - honestly why waste the time with it as a mandatory thing. As much as I'm willing to say there's a lot of stuff people should learn, there's a great deal more you should be learning on your own if you're going down the academic track by that stage. However understanding literature is a life skill for everyone regardless of what they go on to - hell, don't even study renaissance texts, throw it in with a bunch of media stuff because heaven's knows we'd benefit from addressing the bullshit on TV at the moment.
Everyone has different ideas about what is "required" for a school to teach, it seems. I am of the opinion that students (in general) are served best by challenging them at every turn
Has anyone advocated not challenging children or have they simply advocated not requiring challenging courses Litejedi personally found useful but not so much the vast majority of people?
Arguably, de-emphasizing certain subjects reduces the challenge of high school does it not? You also take for granted the idea that "the vast majority of people" did not find these things useful. Just because I did, and you didn't, does not extend our feelings on the subject to the population as a whole.
What we need to do is separate college-track kids from non-college-track kids at a much earlier age.
I hear what you're saying but would change it pretty critically. I think there should be options for students who are advanced but to term them "college bound" is wrong and bad policy. For instance, my school had a vocational school that would give students a real shot in getting a slot in a good trade/union, or at least learn a useful skill (like cosmetics or auto repair). We still sent 45+% of our class to college.
Disclaimer : The following has the danger of sounding like dick waving. My intent is not to brag about intelligence, but to illustrate how public schools can fail the "bright" student.
That out of the way, I was recognized fairly early on as "gifted". I was from an early age a voracious reader (and still am, I'm in the books are sacred camp). I read my way through the young adult section in 2nd grade and started churning through fantasy/sci soon after (CS Lewis and Lloyd Alexander and surprisingly not Tolkien were my initial gateway drugs).
The thing is, school is more than getting good grades on tests. Its supposed to teach you to do stupid work even if its useless to you. I was a moron about it and rarely did day-to-day assignments. I'd write papers, but even then I'd often exceed the parameters of the assignment (which usually didn't hurt the grade but still). I was also a terrible student. I got my first C in 6th grade (handwriting) and didn't really care because I knew I could breeze through any course. But there's only so much they can do. I was the annoying kid who always answered the questions in class (and was banned from doing so in 6th and 7th grades) and aced the statewide standardized testing. I taught myself a lot of stuff on the side and my memory is associative, so a question will often trigger information that I couldn't have produced independently so I was a good test taker.
I had a teacher try to keep me out of the advanced track when we hit Jr High but my parents insisted and my testing backed me up. I wasn't the smartest kid in school
(that was a friend who got a perfect SAT score after skipping two grades, went to Harvard, and not only was the top state scorer in Academic Decathlon as a sophomore but routinely corrected imprecise questions on their tests and they accepted his critiques as authoritative)
but I was close enough. But because the coursework - even in Honors classes - wasn't that challenging I still pretty much didn't give a shit and didn't put the work in. My grades ended up being low Bs/high C on average but teachers didn't really entertain the idea of not promoting me to the next advanced group - hell I was tutoring other Honors students in classes where they were getting better grades than me.
By that time it was too late. I got a D- in one course and a teacher failed me because I disagreed fundamentally with his analysis of several core philosophical texts (he didn't know what he was talking about, I owned copies of the books years before I even took the course). It didn't really matter because I knew I could get into a college and figured even if it wasn't Harvard or such it'd be decent. I got a 1440 on my first PSAT when I took it at the end of 8th grade and had a 1500 when I took the real one (with a writing section of SATII I think the new scale it'd be something like 2280). That made it literally impossible by law for UMass to not admit me if I graduated.
So I ended up 105th out of 295 even with grades weighted with Honors and AP courses. My extracurriculars were basically limited to Academic Decathalon where my individual state championship in the C division (and team state championship and division ii national championship) didn't look that great because I was a C student. There was a kid a year ahead of me who got a 1600 on the SATs also was a C student and never went to college because he wasn't challenged. Another friend a year later had a C average but got a 1520 SAT (he did go to college but Hampshire is weird). I got into a few good schools but went to my safety school because the financial aid wasn't good for such a risky student.
I sucked as a college student but excluding a few courses if you don't do the little crap homework you know the material. And its a lot easier to get apathetic and not show up at class and fall behind coursework that does require effort (I'd never felt as lost as when I showed up for my multi-variable calculus course that my adviser insisted I take despite never taking Linear Algebra after I hadn't gone to a class since the third week - I was on my way out of that school). I went from skipping freshman year to transferring and taking almost 6 years to get my BS in Comp Sci (transfer credits suck).
The point of this rambling story? Boring students can F them up as much or more than not accommodating the slower students. Not for everyone - my girlfriend graduated 6th in my HS class (we weren't together at the time) and graduated with honors from Penn in 4 years. She was bored but just did it anyway. I've learned that this is necessary now but it took me way too long.
But if you make someone fight for something instead of keeping everyone at the same level and letting the most talented effortlessly walk through it you don't teach them that they'll eventually have to work for it.
tl;dr - If you don't give young students an appropriate level of difficulty, it makes learning to work hard to learn something difficult. It helped me fuck up my early academic career.
The reason that Asia and Europe are crushing us in these areas is that they use track systems, and we don't, so it's all of our students versus all of their students who chose to go to science-oriented schools.
That's a good point. Our secondary schools are fantastic overall, and we attract researchers from all over the world. Perhaps it has to do with some of the freedom afforded to the students in applying themselves to their own strengths.
Don't get distracted by wondering what the white whale means in Moby Dick specifically. You're learning how to interpret symbolism and theme as a whole by studying that book, and many others. You're also learning, as ELM said much more eloquently, the basics of narrative and plot and all that.
Knowing these things makes you a better communicator, not just in writing but in your speech. A good vocabulary makes you not look like an idiot and you can't get that without reading.
That's what I mean by "you can't separate them." You can't be a good writer without reading. A lot. Yeah they're going to be taught differently but teaching one without the other just doesn't work.
But that's the point, you do get distracted by what the white whale "means" in Moby Dick, and it's useless.
If people want to be super great writers, focus on writing. If you're an electrician, you just need to know how to compose. I don't really care if an electrician can create a pithy metaphor about the state of the wiring in the 1910s house that he's currently working on, or if he can organize the narrative of his work into a way that it teaches a nice, instructive moral at the end. I just want that electrician to be able to meaningfully and successfully communicate that it's in a bad state, and why, so that other electricians can understand without having to tear the house apart themselves. So on and so forth.
Lit and comp are really two separate courses, and like I said -- everyone in a comp course reads something, even if it is just the work of their peers. Reading Literature (with a capital "L") should not be a universal requirement once people begin specializing their field of study.
I do think that lit courses should spend more time studying essays, articles, and other nonfiction. Most of the ones I've had never touch nonfic.
Basic communication is surprisingly hard for a lot of people, and it's pretty obvious when someone just barely squeaked through high school english classes and were thankful they'd never have to write again.
And then they need to write a cover letter or something.
Disagree -- you can separate composition and literature. You should separate composition and literature. Reading is one thing. Effectively writing is something else entirely.
What part of understanding metaphor or theme in a novel goes into writing effectively? Do you really need to know that Wordsworth and Coleridge launched the Romantic movement in order to write an effective informative essay? Does analyzing the gender roles in Pride and Prejudice really help form an argumentative essay?
They don't. Obviously they overlap a little, as reading good authors can help your own writing, but I expect people to read outside of required coursework (much like I and everyone I know did during college) so there's not too much point in forcing them to take lit courses on top of that. Lit and comp are separate disciplines.
Don't get distracted by wondering what the white whale means in Moby Dick specifically. You're learning how to interpret symbolism and theme as a whole by studying that book, and many others. You're also learning, as ELM said much more eloquently, the basics of narrative and plot and all that.
Knowing these things makes you a better communicator, not just in writing but in your speech. A good vocabulary makes you not look like an idiot and you can't get that without reading.
That's what I mean by "you can't separate them." You can't be a good writer without reading. A lot. Yeah they're going to be taught differently but teaching one without the other just doesn't work.
^ This. Too many people get hung up on the idea that knowing all these things about whatever book they specifically studied was somehow the point of their English courses, which of course it wasn't. The point of the course was to learn how to identify and understand how various parts of the text interact so you can apply that to other areas.
And incidentally, I would go on to add to Green Eye's post that understanding how themes are important to a narrative is important because you do not just put down a stream of consciousness and say done! you go back and edit, and it's damend important to figure out what you're trying to do overall when you get down to doing that. Regardless, I might add, whether it's fiction or non-fiction.
Arguably, de-emphasizing certain subjects reduces the challenge of high school does it not?
You really fail at logic for someone praising the values of higher math. Simply not desiring the requirement of higher math does not include maintaining non challenging courses. It's saying that requiring that particular course is pointless when there are better things that we could be teaching people not interested in it.
You also take for granted the idea that "the vast majority of people" did not find these things useful. Just because I did, and you didn't, does not extend our feelings on the subject to the population as a whole.
Seriously? Do you have any proof anywhere that says Calculus is being used and applied by a number of people greater than 50% in America?
And you haven't explained why it shouldn't be required Latin since it's an excellent course for students to hone memorization, logic, and vocabulary. It's also excellent for later learning a Latin based language. So why not require it for everyone?
I don't remember SHIT from that class, nor do I really care to. My day to day business NEVER really requires an in-depth knowledge of biology or plant-life. Period. Or how cells fucking reproduce or whatever. Yes, I get the BROAD concepts from high school, but there's no point in me specializing, since it's not an area of interest of mine.
As to the "we're losing the testing war with Asia" point -- more specializing would help, because bright math and science students could focus on those studies instead of getting distracted by humanities topics they have no interest (or use) for, and kids like me who just don't jive with science could stop taking the test. Problem solved, the tides of the testing war would be shifting in no time.
My argument is that exposure to information is a good thing. For instance, how would you know that you aren't interested in biology until you take biology? I had no idea that I liked Physics or Civil Engineering until I took classes on each in high school and college respectively. I thought I liked computer programming. I loathe computer programming. My mind isn't wired in such a way that I can code for long periods of time. I would never have found this out if my high school hadn't required that all students take a rudimentary computer programming course. Obviously both of our examples aren't true for each person, but at the lower-echelons of education I would prefer we err on the side of caution. That we provide a comprehensive education for the students who show intelligence and promise. Tracks are a good idea, but you can't convince me that we shouldn't teach things to people just because "they can't be used every day." I don't use knowledge of literature or music or art every day, but my life is enriched by having been taught them. I believe this is the case of many people.
And incidentally, I would go on to add to Green Eye's post that understanding how themes are important to a narrative is important because you do not just put down a stream of consciousness and say done! you go back and edit, and it's damend important to figure out what you're trying to do overall when you get down to doing that. Regardless, I might add, whether it's fiction or non-fiction.
I agree that it's important, but I don't know how your guys' English classes went. When we read Shakespeare, for example, we just analyzed the language, theme, and contextual history. It's extremely useful for a humanities education, but reading Shakespeare sure as shit doesn't teach anyone how to communicate well. Hence, students disinterested in things like Shakespeare still can't write for shit today, because their English course never taught writing by itself.
Similarly, even reading something like Brave New World, our discussion was often, what does this say about the world around us? What does this mean? Never did we discuss things like topic sentence, tense, logical flow of the thoughts in the paragraph, how to organize to help girder your argument, etc. We didn't stop and say, let's look at this paragraph by Mark Twain and see how he works toward the punchline in the last part. We said look how funny he is, let's talk about his representations of slavery and boyhood, etc.
The whole editing, revising, clarity thing is not served by reading a Tell Tale Heart or the Raven. It is served by doing, by writing, then editing, then revising, then sharing it with a group of committed readers to work on clarity, etc., then studying some good old fashion linguistics and stylistics etc. which emphatically is not served by reading Howl, it is not served by reading On the Road, etc. so on and so forth.
Lit and comp are two totally separate fields of study, and should be treated as such.
I don't remember SHIT from that class, nor do I really care to. My day to day business NEVER really requires an in-depth knowledge of biology or plant-life. Period. Or how cells fucking reproduce or whatever. Yes, I get the BROAD concepts from high school, but there's no point in me specializing, since it's not an area of interest of mine.
As to the "we're losing the testing war with Asia" point -- more specializing would help, because bright math and science students could focus on those studies instead of getting distracted by humanities topics they have no interest (or use) for, and kids like me who just don't jive with science could stop taking the test. Problem solved, the tides of the testing war would be shifting in no time.
My argument is that exposure to information is a good thing. For instance, how would you know that you aren't interested in biology until you take biology? I had no idea that I liked Physics or Civil Engineering until I took classes on each in high school and college respectively. I thought I liked computer programming. I loathe computer programming. My mind isn't wired in such a way that I can code for long periods of time. I would never have found this out if my high school hadn't required that all students take a rudimentary computer programming course. Obviously both of our examples aren't true for each person, but at the lower-echelons of education I would prefer we err on the side of caution. That we provide a comprehensive education for the students who show intelligence and promise. Tracks are a good idea, but you can't convince me that we shouldn't teach things to people just because "they can't be used every day." I don't use knowledge of literature or music or art every day, but my life is enriched by having been taught them. I believe this is the case of many people.
I guess at this point the question is whether or not it's reasonable to forcibly enrich people's lives, or give them the choice of whether they want to be enriched and require only the bare minimums necessary to function as a useful member of society.
Which is why, again, I prefer a barebones approach to the required curriculum and then in the extra time they have (which will be ample) they can choose the courses that they feel like taking.
Sure, some kids don't realize they love math or hate coding this way, but oh fucking well. The tradeoff for that is not teaching Quid the quadratic equation, which he will never use and got no value from. Seems fair to me.
EDIT: And my experience was similar to GEM's post above.
I don't remember SHIT from that class, nor do I really care to. My day to day business NEVER really requires an in-depth knowledge of biology or plant-life. Period. Or how cells fucking reproduce or whatever. Yes, I get the BROAD concepts from high school, but there's no point in me specializing, since it's not an area of interest of mine.
As to the "we're losing the testing war with Asia" point -- more specializing would help, because bright math and science students could focus on those studies instead of getting distracted by humanities topics they have no interest (or use) for, and kids like me who just don't jive with science could stop taking the test. Problem solved, the tides of the testing war would be shifting in no time.
My argument is that exposure to information is a good thing. For instance, how would you know that you aren't interested in biology until you take biology? I had no idea that I liked Physics or Civil Engineering until I took classes on each in high school and college respectively. I thought I liked computer programming. I loathe computer programming. My mind isn't wired in such a way that I can code for long periods of time. I would never have found this out if my high school hadn't required that all students take a rudimentary computer programming course. Obviously both of our examples aren't true for each person, but at the lower-echelons of education I would prefer we err on the side of caution. That we provide a comprehensive education for the students who show intelligence and promise. Tracks are a good idea, but you can't convince me that we shouldn't teach things to people just because "they can't be used every day." I don't use knowledge of literature or music or art every day, but my life is enriched by having been taught them. I believe this is the case of many people.
So, wait, you thought you liked computer programming, but if your school hadn't required a course in computer programming, you wouldn't have taken it...? Why not? I know that I took courses in the things I enjoyed when I was in high school.
My argument is that exposure to information is a good thing. For instance, how would you know that you aren't interested in biology until you take biology? I had no idea that I liked Physics or Civil Engineering until I took classes on each in high school and college respectively. I thought I liked computer programming. I loathe computer programming. My mind isn't wired in such a way that I can code for long periods of time. I would never have found this out if my high school hadn't required that all students take a rudimentary computer programming course. Obviously both of our examples aren't true for each person, but at the lower-echelons of education I would prefer we err on the side of caution. That we provide a comprehensive education for the students who show intelligence and promise. Tracks are a good idea, but you can't convince me that we shouldn't teach things to people just because "they can't be used every day." I don't use knowledge of literature or music or art every day, but my life is enriched by having been taught them. I believe this is the case of many people.
That's why you have a general education until your middle or late teens, when people start getting a sense of what they do and do not like. We're not sayig stop teaching books to everyone who likes TV better. We're saying once an engineering student decides they're an engineering student, there's no point in requiring them to read literature for literature's sake. If they want to, take a course as an elective or read in their free time, but it by no means should be a requirement in their field of study. This reduced emphasis on ancillary fields of study will result in increasing the requirements within their field, thus resulting in a more capable engineer.
Engineers can still read Shakespeare under this model, but it's not required.
I also use algebra an awful lot, and a loose understanding of economics and statistics, as well as a largely self-taught interest in political science, and so on. These are hobbies, though, largely self-taught outside of high school, because the GE college courses I took were basically just rehashing the material I had learned either in public schools or during my own free time.
I'm not advocating against a universal education, I'm simply saying we should de-emphasize its requirement.
So, wait, you thought you liked computer programming, but if your school hadn't required a course in computer programming, you wouldn't have taken it...? Why not? I know that I took courses in the things I enjoyed when I was in high school.
Well, his argument falls apart on the "I wouldn't have known I didn't like X" front, but is still pretty applicable on the "I'd never have known I liked Y" side.
But at that point I guess we have to make everybody take relativistic physics in high school, because you just never know.
But that's the point, you do get distracted by what the white whale "means" in Moby Dick, and it's useless.
Just ask yourself the question you asked before, but without the context of only one single book:
What part of understanding metaphor or theme [...] goes into writing effectively?
One book gets you nowhere. A whole bunch of books helps you understand all kinds of things in writing and how to properly use them. So then when you, say, need to send a tactfully-worded two weeks notice or make your resume sound better than it actually is, you have some tools at your disposal.
I agree that it's important, but I don't know how your guys' English classes went. When we read Shakespeare, for example, we just analyzed the language, theme, and contextual history. It's extremely useful for a humanities education, but reading Shakespeare sure as shit doesn't teach anyone how to communicate well. Hence, students disinterested in things like Shakespeare still can't write for shit today, because their English course never taught writing by itself.
Similarly, even reading something like Brave New World, our discussion was often, what does this say about the world around us? What does this mean? Never did we discuss things like topic sentence, tense, logical flow of the thoughts in the paragraph, how to organize to help girder your argument, etc. We didn't stop and say, let's look at this paragraph by Mark Twain and see how he works toward the punchline in the last part. We said look how funny he is, let's talk about his representations of slavery and boyhood, etc.
The whole editing, revising, clarity thing is not served by reading a Tell Tale Heart or the Raven. It is served by doing, by writing, then editing, then revising, then sharing it with a group of committed readers to work on clarity, etc., then studying some good old fashion linguistics and stylistics etc. which emphatically is not served by reading Howl, it is not served by reading On the Road, etc. so on and so forth.
Lit and comp are two totally separate fields of study, and should be treated as such.
And all the while you were doing this you were learning implicitly how to distinguish a proper sentence from a fragment, which verb tense you need, the meanings and connotations of a shitload of new words, and all the other fundamentals of reading comprehension that are absolutely critical if you want to write coherently.
You missed his point anyway: the more literary, as opposed to technical, aspects of studying literature will still enrich your communication skills. The much-reviled five paragraph essay is what happens when public schools attempt to distill the same thing into a context-devoid situation. There's nothing wrong with the five paragraph essay, it's a good (if basic) framework for structuring your thoughts and doing more than just rambling until you think you're done. But breaking it down so thoroughly is difficult to teach explicitly, and so its the sort of thing learned best by immersion. Not only that but you learn much more effective and subtle ways of structuring arguments, stories, conversations, and interviews by picking them up as you go.
(Jesus this thread moves fast)
I had no idea what i was going to do with myself until I was 21. Assuming that all high school students are going to be able to check a box on a form listing trades a, b, and c and colleges x, y, and z by the time they're fifteen seems a bit naive.
So, wait, you thought you liked computer programming, but if your school hadn't required a course in computer programming, you wouldn't have taken it...? Why not? I know that I took courses in the things I enjoyed when I was in high school.
Well, his argument falls apart on the "I wouldn't have known I didn't like X" front, but is still pretty applicable on the "I'd never have known I liked Y" side.
But at that point I guess we have to make everybody take relativistic physics in high school, because you just never know.
Not to mention, like (I think) you were saying, now we also have to require things like home economics, auto repair, and wood shop, because -- hey -- maybe little Jenny's true calling lies in hand-making balsa hang-gliders covered in a fine chocolate sauce.
I wish I had some language options in high school.
Gym was mandatory for 3 years. What the fuck was that about? Can't they include a theory component? I would be ok with mandatory gym if I actually learned about nutrition or how to work out properly, but it was just fluff. Get really sweaty and go to your next class because the shower areas are not maintained.
Also, I don't understand why I had to take English literature every year, while people can discontinue math after their first year. I'm writing essays about Alias Grace, but I have no space to take politics or computer science courses. My schedule in final year was English Literature, Economics, Finite, Calculus and Algebra and Geometry. The year before that was English Literature, Gym, Finite, Calculus and Algebra and Geometry.
I had no idea what i was going to do with myself until I was 21. Assuming that all high school students are going to be able to check a box on a form listing trades a, b, and c and colleges x, y, and z by the time they're fifteen seems a bit naive.
I went to a track-based high school. We had seven different subdivisions, and it was easy to spot the retention rates because there was no switching between tracks -- if you didn't like your academy, your only option was to drop out. The Academy for Visual and Performing Arts had the worst retention, but it was still something like 90% per annum. Mine -- the Academy for the Advancement of Science and Technology -- had a retention of 99%, with about 100 of the 120 graduating students going into science or tech majors.
Our graduation requirements were four years mathematics (calculus for two of them, sophomore and junior), three years each of biology, chemistry, and physics, two years of engineering-design, and then the very meager state requirements for liberal arts stuff. We were also required to take a years' worth of electives for each scientific discipline over our four-year stay.
We also did not have Wednesdays in our senior year, in that every student was required to attend a research project or an internship on that day to build connections and work experience before graduation.
I was one of the 20 or so students who went into a liberal arts major after graduating. I was absolutely not harmed by having checked a box when I was 15 and set myself on a track, and the 100 students who stuck to that track were infinitely-more prepared. It was win-win for everyone. Some fields require, or at least greatly benefit from, increased academic depth. Some fields do not, at least not to the same degree.
There is a much more steady progression in the hard sciences than in the liberal arts and 'general education' stuff. There's just so little reason, in my mind, to require anything, but especially to require the latter. We were given the option of tracks and we were effectively catapulted into the post-high-school environment, immeasurably ahead of our peers, notwithstanding the generally-higher quality of the high school I attended.
And all the while you were doing this you were learning implicitly how to distinguish a proper sentence from a fragment, which verb tense you need, the meanings and connotations of a shitload of new words, and all the other fundamentals of reading comprehension that are absolutely critical if you want to write coherently.
You missed his point anyway: the more literary, as opposed to technical, aspects of studying literature will still enrich your communication skills. The much-reviled five paragraph essay is what happens when public schools attempt to distill the same thing into a context-devoid situation. There's nothing wrong with the five paragraph essay, it's a good (if basic) framework for structuring your thoughts and doing more than just rambling until you think you're done. But breaking it down so thoroughly is difficult to teach explicitly, and so its the sort of thing learned best by immersion. Not only that but you learn much more effective and subtle ways of structuring arguments, stories, conversations, and interviews by picking them up as you go.
But people can read on their own, and will have ostensibly taken literature courses during the generalized, universal section of their education. As specialized, upper-division students, they will also obviously be reading something, just probably not Literature, so they'll have reference points to "good" writing, or a model to critique, copy, or improve upon available to them to work from in comp courses.
When we reach the stage of specialization, electricians really don't need to be required to know who the fuck Lady MacBeth is. Knowing who Lady MacBeth is and what she represents does not help an electrician communicate. They sure as shit don't need to be reading Emily Dickenson and analyzing whether or not she was some sexually repressed dyke who would kill a man with a bare hands were it not for the veil of patriarchy descending all around her.
AND AGAIN
People can (and do! even) read in their own free time. The question is to what extent it should be required. I think no one, once freed from the general, universal portion of their education, should be required to read poetry, because a finer eye for poetry is just about as applicable as a nuanced understanding of calculus, and I sure as shit don't think I should have to take a calculus course if I want an English degree.
I had no idea what i was going to do with myself until I was 21. Assuming that all high school students are going to be able to check a box on a form listing trades a, b, and c and colleges x, y, and z by the time they're fifteen seems a bit naive.
The way we nurture and encourage indecision by not really requiring anyone to specialize until they're 21 (because that's about the time your fucking GEs are wrapping up) plays a part in this as well. And all told, I'd much rather have a specialized degree completed at age 21, with the opportunity to go back for a second should I so choose, than to be dipping into the shallow pool of knowledge in a wide range of topics I then possess in order to choose my future from then on out.
I mean, I got an English degree. My current employment (as with many college students) really has jack shit to do with my degree at this point. I still really wish I had been employed and earning at least a year or two earlier instead of taking biology, and "Intro to Liesure Studies" (an actual GE option), and feminist and gender studies and a bunch of other dumb shit that was irrelevant to linguistics.
I wish I had some language options in high school.
Gym was mandatory for 3 years. What the fuck was that about? Can't they include a theory component? I would be ok with mandatory gym if I actually learned about nutrition or how to work out properly, but it was just fluff. Get really sweaty and go to your next class because the shower areas are not maintained.
Our physical education program was 1/4 physical recreation (sports or belay climbing on the riverside encampment), 1/4 nutrition, 1/4 fitness, and 1/4 health. We were all required to complete the [strike]EMT-Basic training course[/strike] (though we weren't required to claim certification, as there was a filing fee and the school did not supply it, and could not reasonably force us to). Also, you were allowed to do your 1/4 trimesters of fitness education either physically (weight room and aerobics, generally), or by writing a series of essays from an exhaustive list of topics.
In my mind, this was a pretty goddamn ideal program. I'd support expanding it to every high school, to avoid qualms like yours, because your qualm is eminently reasonable.
EDIT: [strikes], because we apparently were just "certified first-respondents." I have no idea what this means. All I know is that I have a laminated card and it means I'm not able to be held liable if I perform CPR and crack ribs.
There's really nothing that can be done to meaningfully fix our school system until we reduce the maximum number of students per classroom to 20 or below.
Not average, maximum. Average should be around 17.
Until we do that, we're rearranging deck chairs.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Arguably, de-emphasizing certain subjects reduces the challenge of high school does it not?
You really fail at logic for someone praising the values of higher math. Simply not desiring the requirement of higher math does not include maintaining non challenging courses. It's saying that requiring that particular course is pointless when there are better things that we could be teaching people not interested in it.
First of all, going after my intelligence isn't very nice. Second of all, I said that "arguably de-emphasizing certain subjects decreases the challenge of high school." Replacing something that they are not good at with something that they are good at, perhaps at a higher level than what they would get normally, may very well keep the "challenge-level" equal. Like letting someone who excels at writing take advanced creative writing courses instead of Calculus. This seems like a good idea, but would be difficult to implement. The school will have to finance classes at the local community college, or if there is a significant enough demand for these advanced classes from a large percentage of the student population and the school is well funded, it can teach the classes itself. It's going to cost a lot of money to make sure that Johnny Calculus gets his super-advanced math courses he wants and Sarah Loveswriting can take all her advanced creative writing courses.
In addition, the argument that these required courses are pointless is somewhat subjective. Many people don't know what value they'll get out of a course until they take it. Furthermore, when you are 16, and you think you hate your biology class or whatever because it's so useless, it isn't necessarily coming from the class itself, it may be coming as a result of exterior factors. Maybe the student isn't applying themselves, or it's hard, or maybe it is boring, or it isn't being taught properly, but something isn't automatically useless to you if you don't like it.
A solution would be to emphasize the creation of "specialized" high schools for the humanities or math/science (which is something I know they have in New York City). The problem is that this model doesn't necessarily work for most schools, who operate on shoestrings and are understaffed as it stands already. These specialized high schools in NYC get less money from the city on average, but a considerable amount of money from Alumni, who donate money to them like they're universities. In many ways they are similar to universities; by the junior year a student's schedule is fairly open and there are many, many electives. They only get money though, because they're good and people leave them with fond memories for the most part. The students also tend towards higher paying jobs and excellent universities. So, I don't know if this works in areas with populations spread out over wide areas, and I don't know if this model would work in a school in NYC that doesn't have the funding to be more creative with student programming.
You also take for granted the idea that "the vast majority of people" did not find these things useful. Just because I did, and you didn't, does not extend our feelings on the subject to the population as a whole.
Seriously? Do you have any proof anywhere that says Calculus is being used and applied by a number of people greater than 50% in America?
And you haven't explained why it shouldn't be required Latin since it's an excellent course for students to hone memorization, logic, and vocabulary. It's also excellent for later learning a Latin based language. So why not require it for everyone?
In the statement you quoted, I indicated that both of our personal experiences should not be used as the yardstick that we apply to everyone else's experience is all. I could easily ask you to provide proof that of the people who took Calculus, less than 50% of them found no value in it. This argument will go nowhere though, since neither of us have any proof and by our nature we view the issue through a biased lens.
Many schools used to require Latin, and many still do to this day (mostly private schools). I mentioned earlier that I thought that foreign language teaching should be required as well, at least to some extent, though not necessarily Latin. Learning another language has been shown to help people learn other things. Again, it may not provide direct benefit to a student, but learning some other language provides many indirect benefits. The whole basis of my arguments is that higher mathematics also provides indirect benefits.
So, wait, you thought you liked computer programming, but if your school hadn't required a course in computer programming, you wouldn't have taken it...? Why not? I know that I took courses in the things I enjoyed when I was in high school.
Well, there was basically intro to comp sci which was required (as far as I recollect), and AP comp sci offered in my Jr. year. You didn't have to take intro if you took the AP one. Had I taken the AP course, I would have done poorly and it would have affected my grades negatively. As it stood, I was able to get away with a moderate grade (because of persistent work and help from my friends in the AP course) in the introduction course and found out that I didn't care for it (re: was terrible at it).
Edit: I can see how this same issue could apply to people who suck at higher math. THAT BEING SAID. I think there is more value to higher math than many people give it credit for. It's not just something to take so that you can find out if you're good at it. I think it's something to take to make a better learner and more intelligent.
And incidentally, I would go on to add to Green Eye's post that understanding how themes are important to a narrative is important because you do not just put down a stream of consciousness and say done! you go back and edit, and it's damend important to figure out what you're trying to do overall when you get down to doing that. Regardless, I might add, whether it's fiction or non-fiction.
I agree that it's important, but I don't know how your guys' English classes went. When we read Shakespeare, for example, we just analyzed the language, theme, and contextual history. It's extremely useful for a humanities education, but reading Shakespeare sure as shit doesn't teach anyone how to communicate well. Hence, students disinterested in things like Shakespeare still can't write for shit today, because their English course never taught writing by itself.
Similarly, even reading something like Brave New World, our discussion was often, what does this say about the world around us? What does this mean? Never did we discuss things like topic sentence, tense, logical flow of the thoughts in the paragraph, how to organize to help girder your argument, etc. We didn't stop and say, let's look at this paragraph by Mark Twain and see how he works toward the punchline in the last part. We said look how funny he is, let's talk about his representations of slavery and boyhood, etc.
The whole editing, revising, clarity thing is not served by reading a Tell Tale Heart or the Raven. It is served by doing, by writing, then editing, then revising, then sharing it with a group of committed readers to work on clarity, etc., then studying some good old fashion linguistics and stylistics etc. which emphatically is not served by reading Howl, it is not served by reading On the Road, etc. so on and so forth.
Lit and comp are two totally separate fields of study, and should be treated as such.
This I can agree with, though I suppose there is the fact that I have viewed a lot of what I've done in my education in perhaps a different light to others anyway (and did read Brave New World, felt the course missed the point of that book but then again did I really suffer from coming to that conclusion?)
However I still think arguing that because you were talking about a specific example did not teach the overall ideas is well, incorrect. There's room, certainly, to talk more specifically about the general ideas of writing however the point in many cases is that if you're picking apart a novel then you will much more effectively learn the general ideas.
First of all, going after my intelligence isn't very nice. Second of all, I said that "arguably de-emphasizing certain subjects decreases the challenge of high school." Replacing something that they are not good at with something that they are good at, perhaps at a higher level than what they would get normally, may very well keep the "challenge-level" equal. Like letting someone who excels at writing take advanced creative writing courses instead of Calculus. This seems like a good idea, but would be difficult to implement. The school will have to finance classes at the local community college, or if there is a significant enough demand for these advanced classes from a large percentage of the student population and the school is well funded, it can teach the classes itself. It's going to cost a lot of money to make sure that Johnny Calculus gets his super-advanced math courses he wants and Sarah Loveswriting can take all her advanced creative writing courses.
In addition, the argument that these required courses are pointless is somewhat subjective. Many people don't know what value they'll get out of a course until they take it. Furthermore, when you are 16, and you think you hate your biology class or whatever because it's so useless, it isn't necessarily coming from the class itself, it may be coming as a result of exterior factors. Maybe the student isn't applying themselves, or it's hard, or maybe it is boring, or it isn't being taught properly, but something isn't automatically useless to you if you don't like it.
A solution would be to emphasize the creation of "specialized" high schools for the humanities or math/science (which is something I know they have in New York City). The problem is that this model doesn't necessarily work for most schools, who operate on shoestrings and are understaffed as it stands already. These specialized high schools in NYC get less money from the city on average, but a considerable amount of money from Alumni, who donate money to them like they're universities. In many ways they are similar to universities; by the junior year a student's schedule is fairly open and there are many, many electives. They only get money though, because they're good and people leave them with fond memories for the most part. The students also tend towards higher paying jobs and excellent universities. So, I don't know if this works in areas with populations spread out over wide areas, and I don't know if this model would work in a school in NYC that doesn't have the funding to be more creative with student programming.
Spoilered due to size.
I'll just say that you do have a point here, that solutions that may be easy to implement in suburban or urban high schools with large and diverse (interest-wise) populations but much harder to implement in smaller rural high schools. The breadth of classes you can reasonably offer to a student body of 400 is a lot different than what you can offer to a student body of 2,800 (I attended high schools of both sizes).
Many schools used to require Latin, and many still do to this day (mostly private schools). I mentioned earlier that I thought that foreign language teaching should be required as well, at least to some extent, though not necessarily Latin. Learning another language has been shown to help people learn other things. Again, it may not provide direct benefit to a student, but learning some other language provides many indirect benefits. The whole basis of my arguments is that higher mathematics also provides indirect benefits.
What are you counting as "higher mathematics?" Algebra? Calculus? If the latter, you will have to consider that by requiring all students to take it you're basically going to require teaching two separate courses...one for students who are actually interested in going beyond basic Calc and one for students who are just there because they're required to be. As it is, almost half the students who chose to take Calculus in my college courses either dropped or failed. There's a reason engineering is referred to as a "pre-business" major. Unless you're looking to throw a lot of F's on a lot of high-school kids' transcripts, this means you're going to have to give a "Higher Math for Dummies" course.
Unless you've just failed to consider that not everybody has the aptitude for math that you do.
So, wait, you thought you liked computer programming, but if your school hadn't required a course in computer programming, you wouldn't have taken it...? Why not? I know that I took courses in the things I enjoyed when I was in high school.
Well, there was basically intro to comp sci which was required (as far as I recollect), and AP comp sci offered in my Jr. year. You didn't have to take intro if you took the AP one. Had I taken the AP course, I would have done poorly and it would have affected my grades negatively. As it stood, I was able to get away with a moderate grade (because of persistent work and help from my friends in the AP course) in the introduction course and found out that I didn't care for it (re: was terrible at it).
Edit: I can see how this same issue could apply to people who suck at higher math. THAT BEING SAID. I think there is more value to higher math than many people give it credit for. It's not just something to take so that you can find out if you're good at it. I think it's something to take to make a better learner and more intelligent.
You can say this regarding almost literally every single subject. If this is our criteria for what should be required, then we just need one class, and we call it "everything."
this means you're going to have to give a "Higher Math for Dummies" course.
This is an excellent idea, though perhaps it would be better named "an Introduction to topics in Calculus." I don't want the school system to throw out the concepts behind higher math being required simply because some people don't get the minutia. If you test out of this class you could simply take regular calculus, etc.
If people want to be super great writers, focus on writing. If you're an electrician, you just need to know how to compose. I don't really care if an electrician can create a pithy metaphor about the state of the wiring in the 1910s house that he's currently working on, or if he can organize the narrative of his work into a way that it teaches a nice, instructive moral at the end. I just want that electrician to be able to meaningfully and successfully communicate that it's in a bad state, and why, so that other electricians can understand without having to tear the house apart themselves. So on and so forth.
This bothers me. People are never just electricians, nor doctors, nor scientists, nor plumbers, nor writers. We rant about specialization as enabling society but that is only at a very broad level - I don't have to butcher my own cattle, for example. We expect people to know and do a very diverse range of things, especially in a democracy.
People are not only going to be doing electrical work for the rest of their lives. They might switch careers. And at minimum, we expect them to be able to understand the politics of their country to some level. Every person, no matter what in America (and well, my country too - perhaps more so because of mandatory voting and not selling our democracy to voting machine vendors) has the ability to effect their nations course even if only in infinitesimal detail and it's fallacious, I would say, if we discount this given that every second post in the American Politics thread is ruing the problems of uninformed voters and the slow but gradual decline in the political discourse of America that that's had.
electricitylikesme on
0
Options
Dr Mario KartGames DealerAustin, TXRegistered Userregular
edited October 2008
While learning and regurgitating facts has its uses, I'm more concerned about a curriculum that is going to develop critical thinking in a more general sense. Heavy on the logic and math, but in an applied way, using situations you might encounter. Those written paragraph questions where solving an equation isnt necessarily the problem, but coming up with the right equation(s) to use.
There was a real progressive elective class in Jr High called 'Future Problem Solving'. It was something of a structured creative writing class. Excellent for critical thinking development.
So, wait, you thought you liked computer programming, but if your school hadn't required a course in computer programming, you wouldn't have taken it...? Why not? I know that I took courses in the things I enjoyed when I was in high school.
Well, there was basically intro to comp sci which was required (as far as I recollect), and AP comp sci offered in my Jr. year. You didn't have to take intro if you took the AP one. Had I taken the AP course, I would have done poorly and it would have affected my grades negatively. As it stood, I was able to get away with a moderate grade (because of persistent work and help from my friends in the AP course) in the introduction course and found out that I didn't care for it (re: was terrible at it).
So, were you planning on majoring in Comp Sci in college, and just decided you didn't want the AP course or something? Or are you just saying that you discovered you didn't actually like something that you thought one day you might get into as a hobby?
Also I'm really not opposed to the offering of introductory classes in a metric fuckload of subjects. I mean if I could've done basic metalworking in high school that would've been fantastic.
You can say this regarding almost literally every single subject.
Well, the concepts behind higher math are, I think, more applicable to different areas of life than most other subjects. Please keep in mind that I agree with you on the trade/college track thing and that this isn't necessarily applicable to trade students. To college students, it definitely should be though.
this means you're going to have to give a "Higher Math for Dummies" course.
This is an excellent idea, though perhaps it would be better named "an Introduction to topics in Calculus." I don't want the school system to throw out the concepts behind higher math being required simply because some people don't get the minutia. If you test out of this class you could simply take regular calculus, etc.
But then at the same time this applies to pretty much every subject, at which point a theoretical student's schedule would rapidly fill up...goodbye electives, I guess.
This bothers me. People are never just electricians, nor doctors, nor scientists, nor plumbers, nor writers. We rant about specialization as enabling society but that is only at a very broad level - I don't have to butcher my own cattle, for example. We expect people to know and do a very diverse range of things, especially in a democracy.
People are not only going to be doing electrical work for the rest of their lives. They might switch careers. And at minimum, we expect them to be able to understand the politics of their country to some level. Every person, no matter what in America (and well, my country too - perhaps more so because of mandatory voting and not selling our democracy to voting machine vendors) has the ability to effect their nations course even if only in infinitesimal detail and it's fallacious, I would say, if we discount this given that every second post in the American Politics thread is ruing the problems of uninformed voters and the slow but gradual decline in the political discourse of America that that's had.
Well yeah, that's why I suggested that a requirement of four years of history/civics/economics (and maybe even more than four years...double up one year or something) is reasonable. And I also suggested the idea of substituting a basic logic class for a higher math class, for those not actually interested in Calculus. As well as a few other "basic" classes that anybody casting a vote should have to take.
Logic and rhetoric should be a mandatory high school course. Cover logical fallacies, the conclusions-and-premises model, and common forms like modus ponens. Use current news stories or other completely fresh copy as your source materials, and structure your projects very open-endedly.
Well, the comment was aimed at GEM's statement but yes, that sort of idea I agree with.
In fact I'm starting to think there's not a hell of a lot of actual debate between this threads participants, just semantics - I mean any system where people can choose a trade/college track rather lends itself to not excluding specific classes but taking some which give them an idea of how other areas work and/or some important learning and reasoning skills.
People are not only going to be doing electrical work for the rest of their lives. They might switch careers. And at minimum, we expect them to be able to understand the politics of their country to some level. Every person, no matter what in America (and well, my country too - perhaps more so because of mandatory voting and not selling our democracy to voting machine vendors) has the ability to effect their nations course even if only in infinitesimal detail and it's fallacious, I would say, if we discount this given that every second post in the American Politics thread is ruing the problems of uninformed voters and the slow but gradual decline in the political discourse of America that that's had.
Agreed on all this. That's why we have a generalized education as a foundation, then specialize on top of that.
Currently -- we have lots of interdisciplinary requirements even when people are studying their specializations. I want to reduce that. I'm saying the one interdisciplinary requirement that I think every single last person should be required to study until the day they leave school is composition.
I expect electricians to read, take electives, be informed, be able to make sense of the newspaper, etc. so on and so forth. I've never taken a single economics course besides the one in high school (which was one of the most useless exercises of my life taught by one of the most talentless teachers I ever encountered), but I still regularly read the business section of the paper and can make more sense of this financial news than (a little appallingly) many people in my office. I did this by teaching myself what I know in my own time. I would not have benefited from an increase in the economics requirement of my education.
Posts
Don't get distracted by wondering what the white whale means in Moby Dick specifically. You're learning how to interpret symbolism and theme as a whole by studying that book, and many others. You're also learning, as ELM said much more eloquently, the basics of narrative and plot and all that.
Knowing these things makes you a better communicator, not just in writing but in your speech. A good vocabulary makes you not look like an idiot and you can't get that without reading.
That's what I mean by "you can't separate them." You can't be a good writer without reading. A lot. Yeah they're going to be taught differently but teaching one without the other just doesn't work.
In the REQUIRED science course for me as an upper division student, I failed one class (due to me getting sick of trying to wrap my head around shit that was unwelcoming and totally unneeded by me), I slept through a cupcake course for "non-majors" or some shit where we brushed up on stuff you could get from watching twenty minutes of the Discovery channel (yes, even today's Discovery channel), and then I got into another course where you primarily just had to pass three tests, wherein I would sit in lectures and read comic books (because attendance was tracked), then binge study for 7-8 hours before the tests to sneak out of that class with a B-.
I don't remember SHIT from that class, nor do I really care to. My day to day business NEVER really requires an in-depth knowledge of biology or plant-life. Period. Or how cells fucking reproduce or whatever. Yes, I get the BROAD concepts from high school, but there's no point in me specializing, since it's not an area of interest of mine.
As to the "we're losing the testing war with Asia" point -- more specializing would help, because bright math and science students could focus on those studies instead of getting distracted by humanities topics they have no interest (or use) for, and kids like me who just don't jive with science could stop taking the test. Problem solved, the tides of the testing war would be shifting in no time.
At the college and university level - honestly why waste the time with it as a mandatory thing. As much as I'm willing to say there's a lot of stuff people should learn, there's a great deal more you should be learning on your own if you're going down the academic track by that stage. However understanding literature is a life skill for everyone regardless of what they go on to - hell, don't even study renaissance texts, throw it in with a bunch of media stuff because heaven's knows we'd benefit from addressing the bullshit on TV at the moment.
Arguably, de-emphasizing certain subjects reduces the challenge of high school does it not? You also take for granted the idea that "the vast majority of people" did not find these things useful. Just because I did, and you didn't, does not extend our feelings on the subject to the population as a whole.
I hear what you're saying but would change it pretty critically. I think there should be options for students who are advanced but to term them "college bound" is wrong and bad policy. For instance, my school had a vocational school that would give students a real shot in getting a slot in a good trade/union, or at least learn a useful skill (like cosmetics or auto repair). We still sent 45+% of our class to college.
Disclaimer : The following has the danger of sounding like dick waving. My intent is not to brag about intelligence, but to illustrate how public schools can fail the "bright" student.
That out of the way, I was recognized fairly early on as "gifted". I was from an early age a voracious reader (and still am, I'm in the books are sacred camp). I read my way through the young adult section in 2nd grade and started churning through fantasy/sci soon after (CS Lewis and Lloyd Alexander and surprisingly not Tolkien were my initial gateway drugs).
The thing is, school is more than getting good grades on tests. Its supposed to teach you to do stupid work even if its useless to you. I was a moron about it and rarely did day-to-day assignments. I'd write papers, but even then I'd often exceed the parameters of the assignment (which usually didn't hurt the grade but still). I was also a terrible student. I got my first C in 6th grade (handwriting) and didn't really care because I knew I could breeze through any course. But there's only so much they can do. I was the annoying kid who always answered the questions in class (and was banned from doing so in 6th and 7th grades) and aced the statewide standardized testing. I taught myself a lot of stuff on the side and my memory is associative, so a question will often trigger information that I couldn't have produced independently so I was a good test taker.
I had a teacher try to keep me out of the advanced track when we hit Jr High but my parents insisted and my testing backed me up. I wasn't the smartest kid in school
By that time it was too late. I got a D- in one course and a teacher failed me because I disagreed fundamentally with his analysis of several core philosophical texts (he didn't know what he was talking about, I owned copies of the books years before I even took the course). It didn't really matter because I knew I could get into a college and figured even if it wasn't Harvard or such it'd be decent. I got a 1440 on my first PSAT when I took it at the end of 8th grade and had a 1500 when I took the real one (with a writing section of SATII I think the new scale it'd be something like 2280). That made it literally impossible by law for UMass to not admit me if I graduated.
So I ended up 105th out of 295 even with grades weighted with Honors and AP courses. My extracurriculars were basically limited to Academic Decathalon where my individual state championship in the C division (and team state championship and division ii national championship) didn't look that great because I was a C student. There was a kid a year ahead of me who got a 1600 on the SATs also was a C student and never went to college because he wasn't challenged. Another friend a year later had a C average but got a 1520 SAT (he did go to college but Hampshire is weird). I got into a few good schools but went to my safety school because the financial aid wasn't good for such a risky student.
I sucked as a college student but excluding a few courses if you don't do the little crap homework you know the material. And its a lot easier to get apathetic and not show up at class and fall behind coursework that does require effort (I'd never felt as lost as when I showed up for my multi-variable calculus course that my adviser insisted I take despite never taking Linear Algebra after I hadn't gone to a class since the third week - I was on my way out of that school). I went from skipping freshman year to transferring and taking almost 6 years to get my BS in Comp Sci (transfer credits suck).
The point of this rambling story? Boring students can F them up as much or more than not accommodating the slower students. Not for everyone - my girlfriend graduated 6th in my HS class (we weren't together at the time) and graduated with honors from Penn in 4 years. She was bored but just did it anyway. I've learned that this is necessary now but it took me way too long.
But if you make someone fight for something instead of keeping everyone at the same level and letting the most talented effortlessly walk through it you don't teach them that they'll eventually have to work for it.
tl;dr - If you don't give young students an appropriate level of difficulty, it makes learning to work hard to learn something difficult. It helped me fuck up my early academic career.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
That's a good point. Our secondary schools are fantastic overall, and we attract researchers from all over the world. Perhaps it has to do with some of the freedom afforded to the students in applying themselves to their own strengths.
If people want to be super great writers, focus on writing. If you're an electrician, you just need to know how to compose. I don't really care if an electrician can create a pithy metaphor about the state of the wiring in the 1910s house that he's currently working on, or if he can organize the narrative of his work into a way that it teaches a nice, instructive moral at the end. I just want that electrician to be able to meaningfully and successfully communicate that it's in a bad state, and why, so that other electricians can understand without having to tear the house apart themselves. So on and so forth.
Lit and comp are really two separate courses, and like I said -- everyone in a comp course reads something, even if it is just the work of their peers. Reading Literature (with a capital "L") should not be a universal requirement once people begin specializing their field of study.
And incidentally, I would go on to add to Green Eye's post that understanding how themes are important to a narrative is important because you do not just put down a stream of consciousness and say done! you go back and edit, and it's damend important to figure out what you're trying to do overall when you get down to doing that. Regardless, I might add, whether it's fiction or non-fiction.
Seriously? Do you have any proof anywhere that says Calculus is being used and applied by a number of people greater than 50% in America?
And you haven't explained why it shouldn't be required Latin since it's an excellent course for students to hone memorization, logic, and vocabulary. It's also excellent for later learning a Latin based language. So why not require it for everyone?
My argument is that exposure to information is a good thing. For instance, how would you know that you aren't interested in biology until you take biology? I had no idea that I liked Physics or Civil Engineering until I took classes on each in high school and college respectively. I thought I liked computer programming. I loathe computer programming. My mind isn't wired in such a way that I can code for long periods of time. I would never have found this out if my high school hadn't required that all students take a rudimentary computer programming course. Obviously both of our examples aren't true for each person, but at the lower-echelons of education I would prefer we err on the side of caution. That we provide a comprehensive education for the students who show intelligence and promise. Tracks are a good idea, but you can't convince me that we shouldn't teach things to people just because "they can't be used every day." I don't use knowledge of literature or music or art every day, but my life is enriched by having been taught them. I believe this is the case of many people.
Similarly, even reading something like Brave New World, our discussion was often, what does this say about the world around us? What does this mean? Never did we discuss things like topic sentence, tense, logical flow of the thoughts in the paragraph, how to organize to help girder your argument, etc. We didn't stop and say, let's look at this paragraph by Mark Twain and see how he works toward the punchline in the last part. We said look how funny he is, let's talk about his representations of slavery and boyhood, etc.
The whole editing, revising, clarity thing is not served by reading a Tell Tale Heart or the Raven. It is served by doing, by writing, then editing, then revising, then sharing it with a group of committed readers to work on clarity, etc., then studying some good old fashion linguistics and stylistics etc. which emphatically is not served by reading Howl, it is not served by reading On the Road, etc. so on and so forth.
Lit and comp are two totally separate fields of study, and should be treated as such.
I guess at this point the question is whether or not it's reasonable to forcibly enrich people's lives, or give them the choice of whether they want to be enriched and require only the bare minimums necessary to function as a useful member of society.
Which is why, again, I prefer a barebones approach to the required curriculum and then in the extra time they have (which will be ample) they can choose the courses that they feel like taking.
Sure, some kids don't realize they love math or hate coding this way, but oh fucking well. The tradeoff for that is not teaching Quid the quadratic equation, which he will never use and got no value from. Seems fair to me.
EDIT: And my experience was similar to GEM's post above.
Engineers can still read Shakespeare under this model, but it's not required.
I also use algebra an awful lot, and a loose understanding of economics and statistics, as well as a largely self-taught interest in political science, and so on. These are hobbies, though, largely self-taught outside of high school, because the GE college courses I took were basically just rehashing the material I had learned either in public schools or during my own free time.
I'm not advocating against a universal education, I'm simply saying we should de-emphasize its requirement.
Well, his argument falls apart on the "I wouldn't have known I didn't like X" front, but is still pretty applicable on the "I'd never have known I liked Y" side.
But at that point I guess we have to make everybody take relativistic physics in high school, because you just never know.
Just ask yourself the question you asked before, but without the context of only one single book:
One book gets you nowhere. A whole bunch of books helps you understand all kinds of things in writing and how to properly use them. So then when you, say, need to send a tactfully-worded two weeks notice or make your resume sound better than it actually is, you have some tools at your disposal.
And all the while you were doing this you were learning implicitly how to distinguish a proper sentence from a fragment, which verb tense you need, the meanings and connotations of a shitload of new words, and all the other fundamentals of reading comprehension that are absolutely critical if you want to write coherently.
You missed his point anyway: the more literary, as opposed to technical, aspects of studying literature will still enrich your communication skills. The much-reviled five paragraph essay is what happens when public schools attempt to distill the same thing into a context-devoid situation. There's nothing wrong with the five paragraph essay, it's a good (if basic) framework for structuring your thoughts and doing more than just rambling until you think you're done. But breaking it down so thoroughly is difficult to teach explicitly, and so its the sort of thing learned best by immersion. Not only that but you learn much more effective and subtle ways of structuring arguments, stories, conversations, and interviews by picking them up as you go.
(Jesus this thread moves fast)
I had no idea what i was going to do with myself until I was 21. Assuming that all high school students are going to be able to check a box on a form listing trades a, b, and c and colleges x, y, and z by the time they're fifteen seems a bit naive.
Gym was mandatory for 3 years. What the fuck was that about? Can't they include a theory component? I would be ok with mandatory gym if I actually learned about nutrition or how to work out properly, but it was just fluff. Get really sweaty and go to your next class because the shower areas are not maintained.
Also, I don't understand why I had to take English literature every year, while people can discontinue math after their first year. I'm writing essays about Alias Grace, but I have no space to take politics or computer science courses. My schedule in final year was English Literature, Economics, Finite, Calculus and Algebra and Geometry. The year before that was English Literature, Gym, Finite, Calculus and Algebra and Geometry.
Our graduation requirements were four years mathematics (calculus for two of them, sophomore and junior), three years each of biology, chemistry, and physics, two years of engineering-design, and then the very meager state requirements for liberal arts stuff. We were also required to take a years' worth of electives for each scientific discipline over our four-year stay.
We also did not have Wednesdays in our senior year, in that every student was required to attend a research project or an internship on that day to build connections and work experience before graduation.
I was one of the 20 or so students who went into a liberal arts major after graduating. I was absolutely not harmed by having checked a box when I was 15 and set myself on a track, and the 100 students who stuck to that track were infinitely-more prepared. It was win-win for everyone. Some fields require, or at least greatly benefit from, increased academic depth. Some fields do not, at least not to the same degree.
There is a much more steady progression in the hard sciences than in the liberal arts and 'general education' stuff. There's just so little reason, in my mind, to require anything, but especially to require the latter. We were given the option of tracks and we were effectively catapulted into the post-high-school environment, immeasurably ahead of our peers, notwithstanding the generally-higher quality of the high school I attended.
When we reach the stage of specialization, electricians really don't need to be required to know who the fuck Lady MacBeth is. Knowing who Lady MacBeth is and what she represents does not help an electrician communicate. They sure as shit don't need to be reading Emily Dickenson and analyzing whether or not she was some sexually repressed dyke who would kill a man with a bare hands were it not for the veil of patriarchy descending all around her.
AND AGAIN
People can (and do! even) read in their own free time. The question is to what extent it should be required. I think no one, once freed from the general, universal portion of their education, should be required to read poetry, because a finer eye for poetry is just about as applicable as a nuanced understanding of calculus, and I sure as shit don't think I should have to take a calculus course if I want an English degree.
The way we nurture and encourage indecision by not really requiring anyone to specialize until they're 21 (because that's about the time your fucking GEs are wrapping up) plays a part in this as well. And all told, I'd much rather have a specialized degree completed at age 21, with the opportunity to go back for a second should I so choose, than to be dipping into the shallow pool of knowledge in a wide range of topics I then possess in order to choose my future from then on out.
I mean, I got an English degree. My current employment (as with many college students) really has jack shit to do with my degree at this point. I still really wish I had been employed and earning at least a year or two earlier instead of taking biology, and "Intro to Liesure Studies" (an actual GE option), and feminist and gender studies and a bunch of other dumb shit that was irrelevant to linguistics.
In my mind, this was a pretty goddamn ideal program. I'd support expanding it to every high school, to avoid qualms like yours, because your qualm is eminently reasonable.
EDIT: [strikes], because we apparently were just "certified first-respondents." I have no idea what this means. All I know is that I have a laminated card and it means I'm not able to be held liable if I perform CPR and crack ribs.
Not average, maximum. Average should be around 17.
Until we do that, we're rearranging deck chairs.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
First of all, going after my intelligence isn't very nice. Second of all, I said that "arguably de-emphasizing certain subjects decreases the challenge of high school." Replacing something that they are not good at with something that they are good at, perhaps at a higher level than what they would get normally, may very well keep the "challenge-level" equal. Like letting someone who excels at writing take advanced creative writing courses instead of Calculus. This seems like a good idea, but would be difficult to implement. The school will have to finance classes at the local community college, or if there is a significant enough demand for these advanced classes from a large percentage of the student population and the school is well funded, it can teach the classes itself. It's going to cost a lot of money to make sure that Johnny Calculus gets his super-advanced math courses he wants and Sarah Loveswriting can take all her advanced creative writing courses.
In addition, the argument that these required courses are pointless is somewhat subjective. Many people don't know what value they'll get out of a course until they take it. Furthermore, when you are 16, and you think you hate your biology class or whatever because it's so useless, it isn't necessarily coming from the class itself, it may be coming as a result of exterior factors. Maybe the student isn't applying themselves, or it's hard, or maybe it is boring, or it isn't being taught properly, but something isn't automatically useless to you if you don't like it.
A solution would be to emphasize the creation of "specialized" high schools for the humanities or math/science (which is something I know they have in New York City). The problem is that this model doesn't necessarily work for most schools, who operate on shoestrings and are understaffed as it stands already. These specialized high schools in NYC get less money from the city on average, but a considerable amount of money from Alumni, who donate money to them like they're universities. In many ways they are similar to universities; by the junior year a student's schedule is fairly open and there are many, many electives. They only get money though, because they're good and people leave them with fond memories for the most part. The students also tend towards higher paying jobs and excellent universities. So, I don't know if this works in areas with populations spread out over wide areas, and I don't know if this model would work in a school in NYC that doesn't have the funding to be more creative with student programming.
In the statement you quoted, I indicated that both of our personal experiences should not be used as the yardstick that we apply to everyone else's experience is all. I could easily ask you to provide proof that of the people who took Calculus, less than 50% of them found no value in it. This argument will go nowhere though, since neither of us have any proof and by our nature we view the issue through a biased lens.
Many schools used to require Latin, and many still do to this day (mostly private schools). I mentioned earlier that I thought that foreign language teaching should be required as well, at least to some extent, though not necessarily Latin. Learning another language has been shown to help people learn other things. Again, it may not provide direct benefit to a student, but learning some other language provides many indirect benefits. The whole basis of my arguments is that higher mathematics also provides indirect benefits.
Well, there was basically intro to comp sci which was required (as far as I recollect), and AP comp sci offered in my Jr. year. You didn't have to take intro if you took the AP one. Had I taken the AP course, I would have done poorly and it would have affected my grades negatively. As it stood, I was able to get away with a moderate grade (because of persistent work and help from my friends in the AP course) in the introduction course and found out that I didn't care for it (re: was terrible at it).
Edit: I can see how this same issue could apply to people who suck at higher math. THAT BEING SAID. I think there is more value to higher math than many people give it credit for. It's not just something to take so that you can find out if you're good at it. I think it's something to take to make a better learner and more intelligent.
However I still think arguing that because you were talking about a specific example did not teach the overall ideas is well, incorrect. There's room, certainly, to talk more specifically about the general ideas of writing however the point in many cases is that if you're picking apart a novel then you will much more effectively learn the general ideas.
Spoilered due to size.
I'll just say that you do have a point here, that solutions that may be easy to implement in suburban or urban high schools with large and diverse (interest-wise) populations but much harder to implement in smaller rural high schools. The breadth of classes you can reasonably offer to a student body of 400 is a lot different than what you can offer to a student body of 2,800 (I attended high schools of both sizes).
What are you counting as "higher mathematics?" Algebra? Calculus? If the latter, you will have to consider that by requiring all students to take it you're basically going to require teaching two separate courses...one for students who are actually interested in going beyond basic Calc and one for students who are just there because they're required to be. As it is, almost half the students who chose to take Calculus in my college courses either dropped or failed. There's a reason engineering is referred to as a "pre-business" major. Unless you're looking to throw a lot of F's on a lot of high-school kids' transcripts, this means you're going to have to give a "Higher Math for Dummies" course.
Unless you've just failed to consider that not everybody has the aptitude for math that you do.
This is an excellent idea, though perhaps it would be better named "an Introduction to topics in Calculus." I don't want the school system to throw out the concepts behind higher math being required simply because some people don't get the minutia. If you test out of this class you could simply take regular calculus, etc.
People are not only going to be doing electrical work for the rest of their lives. They might switch careers. And at minimum, we expect them to be able to understand the politics of their country to some level. Every person, no matter what in America (and well, my country too - perhaps more so because of mandatory voting and not selling our democracy to voting machine vendors) has the ability to effect their nations course even if only in infinitesimal detail and it's fallacious, I would say, if we discount this given that every second post in the American Politics thread is ruing the problems of uninformed voters and the slow but gradual decline in the political discourse of America that that's had.
There was a real progressive elective class in Jr High called 'Future Problem Solving'. It was something of a structured creative writing class. Excellent for critical thinking development.
Well, the concepts behind higher math are, I think, more applicable to different areas of life than most other subjects. Please keep in mind that I agree with you on the trade/college track thing and that this isn't necessarily applicable to trade students. To college students, it definitely should be though.
But then at the same time this applies to pretty much every subject, at which point a theoretical student's schedule would rapidly fill up...goodbye electives, I guess.
Well yeah, that's why I suggested that a requirement of four years of history/civics/economics (and maybe even more than four years...double up one year or something) is reasonable. And I also suggested the idea of substituting a basic logic class for a higher math class, for those not actually interested in Calculus. As well as a few other "basic" classes that anybody casting a vote should have to take.
In fact I'm starting to think there's not a hell of a lot of actual debate between this threads participants, just semantics - I mean any system where people can choose a trade/college track rather lends itself to not excluding specific classes but taking some which give them an idea of how other areas work and/or some important learning and reasoning skills.
Currently -- we have lots of interdisciplinary requirements even when people are studying their specializations. I want to reduce that. I'm saying the one interdisciplinary requirement that I think every single last person should be required to study until the day they leave school is composition.
I expect electricians to read, take electives, be informed, be able to make sense of the newspaper, etc. so on and so forth. I've never taken a single economics course besides the one in high school (which was one of the most useless exercises of my life taught by one of the most talentless teachers I ever encountered), but I still regularly read the business section of the paper and can make more sense of this financial news than (a little appallingly) many people in my office. I did this by teaching myself what I know in my own time. I would not have benefited from an increase in the economics requirement of my education.