[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:
While I realize this was only one college, since it’s suppose to be a better place to get a degree in education I imagine it’s a fairly representative picture of education students. [/quote]
It’s not just your school, I’ve seen it myself and heard it from others. Education has become one of those “easy” majors for people just looking to get a degree, like psychology and communications.
[quote]malonetd wrote:
stokedporcupine8 wrote:
While I realize this was only one college, since it’s suppose to be a better place to get a degree in education I imagine it’s a fairly representative picture of education students.
It’s not just your school, I’ve seen it myself and heard it from others. Education has become one of those “easy” majors for people just looking to get a degree, like psychology and communications.[/quote]
Yeah, know others at other universities that say the same thing. Funny you should mention psychology. For various reasons a few years ago my old school instituted a 3.0 gpa requirement for education majors. Although this didn’t do too much–additional grade inflation helped most students–it did get rid of the worse of the worse. I was told though that what ended up happening was that many of the would-be education majors switched to psychology once they were kicked out of education–psychology didn’t have gpa requirements, ha!
What’s even more amusing is when education/psychology/communications people go around bragging about their 4.0, or try to complain about how hard their classes are.
The school system I graduated from was well-funded. Class sizes weren’t large, we had a lot of different advanced courses, and we always had nice computers as well as books. I am from a middle-class family in a genrally middle-class school system.
To address OP’s quoted statement:
I think I am a pretty average American. To be honest, I DON’T care what sports the rest of the world likes. I don’t really care what the rest of the world likes at all, unless it affect MY country. If they agree with our practices/culture, that’s cool. If not, who gives a shit?
[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:
I mostly agree with all the anti-union-teachers-are-over-paid-and-under-performing sentiment. My perspective though isn’t as a parent looking into the actual system working, but rather as someone who went to a four year university that had a major teachers college. While there were a few education majors that I liked, the vast majority of education majors that I ran into where some of the laziest and dumbest students I’ve ever met.
Many of these education majors where in education simply because they didn’t know what else to do. I tended to see a lot of secondary education math majors in my math classes, and I wouldn’t want most them teaching my children mathematics at ANY level. While I realize this was only one college, since it’s suppose to be a better place to get a degree in education I imagine it’s a fairly representative picture of education students. [/quote]
I understand that in most universities, the College of Education is the one with the lowest average SAT of entering students, and where students take the GRE, the lowest average exit GRE scores.
However my anecdote is a little different. Admittedly it is an n=1 example. Now actually my undergraduate program was microbiology, but it has a lot of required chemistry courses and while I was at it I decided to take almost everything required of a major in chemistry as well.
(I skipped Instrumental Analysis because the professor was a mannish lesbian bitch who was a real nightmare, and I couldn’t have double-majored anyway because I had never taken the “Diversity” classes required by that college.) So I had a lot of chemistry courses, and there was a lot of tendency towards study groups. Which are useless to me, but a friend liked them, so I did them.
ANYWAY there was a guy that was consistently a real dummy. One guy: everyone else was pretty smart. He had already failed PChem II, as quantum theory was too much for him. He’d just barely skated by every other class required for his degree, and had been told that if he didn’t get at least a C in PChem II this time, he’d be kicked out and have to start on another degree.
He did not legitimately earn a C. His final was awful, something like 40%, and other exams were not so much better. But the professor gave him a mercy C. (Which was highly unusual at UF in the science programs I was in. Actually that is the only case I know of.)
So what did he do?
Got a job as a combined coach / science teacher in a junior high school! (I am not clear on how, but he did.)
Everyone who knew him was appalled. Those poor kids.
However at least he was enthusiastic about science – just not any good at it – whereas it seems most government-run school teachers of science classes hate science, which rubs off on the kids.
[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:
Good stuff…
[/quote]
But the thing is… that comes from our culture now. The American economy just doesn’t “produce” like it used to. The economy doesn’t revolve around engineers and entreprenuers anymore, because kids grow up and it doesn’t seem like they need to.
Your standard white (or middle/upper-class black) kid grows up knowing that he/she can sleep through high school and parents will mortgage the future to send them to some 40k/year school where they’ll half-ass it for 5 years and get some bullshit liberal arts degree… and graduate and have enough connections and be able to get a decent paying job.
… at least until now with the economy blowing up and so many of these kids (many whom are my friends being that I’m 22 and recently graduated) can’t get a job to save their lives. It might take a generation or two growing up in harder times to fix things.
The thing is that, in America, most lower class kids are dumb and most middle class kids are soft. For the most part, the lower class kids I went to school with had parents who didn’t care about education and so the kids didn’t care. The middle/upper-class kids had no sense that anything they did mattered because every time they screwed up, they would be bailed out by their parents.
The reason test scores are as low as they are here has to do with many different things.
But one thing many people forget is that America is the land of opportunity (yeah laugh all you want you fucking limeys out there) and as such, there are many poor, impoverished people who come here searching for something better than the pitiful existence they had in other countries, be it from a poor economy or unsafe living conditions due to totalitarianism, urban crime or general sanitary/health concerns (such as India, the Middle East, Mexico, or China).
They aren’t going anywhere else in nearly the same numbers. Why? Because we say “sure, come on over. We’re the land of the free and we’re wealthy as shit and as such, we have an inherent responsibility to try to provide the oppressed, weak and unfortunate with a better life if we can do so.”
What happens is that for every one child of the poor and uneducated who have risked life and limb to come here (some of whom end up spending their whole lives sucking on the govt’s teet and some of whom actually make something of themselves here), there are ten or twenty children who grow up in a home predominantly speaking a language other than English, or their parents both work menial jobs to put food on the table and are not a strong fixture in their child’s lives and so on until one day it’s time to take some stupid fucking standardized test and they’re clueless.
Is our education system fucked? Perhaps so, but Americans are still pretty damn smart. Say what you will about this great country but most of it is unfounded. I hear people say New Zealand is better; NZ is currently experiencing a “brain drain” meaning that most well-educated people leave the country due to a lack of jobs for educated people there. Where are a huge majority of them going? America.
Others talk about Sweden or Switzerland. Sweden’s citizens pay about 80% of their income toward state-run programs like healthcare and public education systems. Are these systems well-run? Sure, but where’s the equity in that if you don’t need constant healthcare or want to go to a private school?
The ability to choose where your hard-earned money is virtually gone. On top of that, the percentage of those countries’ populations that are of school age is much less than America’s (Sweden and Swtz both have one of the highest death rates in the world because everyone over there is old, just like Japan). As a result, a smaller percentage of the population gets a larger percentage of the total amount of taxes for things like education.
Lots of people talk shit about America because it’s an easy target, like my friend’s girlfriend who grew up in Indonesia. She really shut her mouth up quickly when I reminded her where most of the money to rebuild the entire region (including where she grew up, which was wiped out) that was decimated by the tsunami a few years ago came from. America uses its power and wealth for many stupid things, but we also use it for many more humanitarian endeavors than ANY other country in the world.
On the one hand people talk shit about “greedy” Americans, but on the other hand they ignore the fact that their own countries don’t give shit to oppressed and/or disaster-stricken countries compared to what we give to ALL of those countries. Fuck, we’re the ones paying for most of the food and drinkable water being used in third world countries, along with whatever health care they get (like Zimbabwe; what the fuck does Europe give to Zimbabwe compared to America?)
As for England, well, my roommate is from England and while he may be pretty booksmart, he is by far the stupidest motherfucker I have ever met, and every one of my friends who knows him wholeheartedly agrees.
I suspect the OP isn’t much smarter if he thinks that our country’s lack of interest in a sport that has never been big here is a clear indication that our education system is broken. It may be in disrepair, but only a fool would think that we’re idiots based on the sports we watch.
Hell, I played varsity soccer in high school and even I don’t like watching it-it’s fucking boring to me and I actually understand all the little nuances of the game as well as anyone. Are the English idiots because they don’t like baseball?
Only a moron would truly think so and only an utter fool would use that line of reasoning to judge an entire country’s education system, just like only an utter fool would think that the grammar level on some fucking weightlifting forum (from America by the way) is an appropriate cross-sectional representation of a country of 330 million people’s grammar level.
Before you start talking a bunch of shit about this country because we don’t like SOCCER of all goddamn sports, take a look in the fucking mirror and do some evaluating of your own country first!
I agree with the problems with American educational system.
However, I personally benefited greatly from it moving from a developed country in Asia.
Place where I am from, children are bombarded with after school education when they are as young as three years old. Emphasis on school system is almost non-existent, the president is in favor of more after school education like tutoring. When you are a high school student, you have extensive tutoring for about 3 ~ 8 hours. The tutoring can cause anywhere from $500 to $10000.
I moved to US when I was in middle school because my parents who were educators did not believe that there should be more emphasis on after school education than the regular schooling.
Now back to the US education, what I see is that everyone has opportunity but your environment will always greatly influence your education. Students with parents with advanced degrees will be more likely to do well in school versus those with single parent without high school education. I am privileged to have parents who are well educated and have always been in that environment, although my parents almost never told me to study or anything.
I think the educational system here provides good support for those with desire and brain to study; however, I see that the system can improve when it comes to an average or below average student. The government needs to fund more in education so that better teacher and resources can be allocated.
And one other thing. Another friend of mine who also happens to be from England made a good point just now. He said that in Europe the general consensus is that America is a bunch of ignorant fools, but upon living here for a year, he’s realized that that simply isn’t true.
Are there ignorant Americans? Of course, but only a truly ignorant simpleton would call America ignorant as a whole based on some warped lenses they look at us through from halfway around the world.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Our k-12 public education may be somewhat lacking, but our university system, both public and private, is the best in the world. England may have Cambridge and Oxford, but we have Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, Northwestern, University of Chicago, William and Mary, and Georgetown, just to name a few.
Plus the whole Ivy League. On top of that, our system allows virtually everyone to go to some sort of four year college. College isn’t for everyone, but here in America we make damn sure we make it available to everyone. Hell, we even make public education available to everyone with learning disabilities, from autism to dyslexia to down syndrome to cerebral palsy.
U.S. colleges=best as a whole.
[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
However at least he was enthusiastic about science – just not any good at it – whereas it seems most government-run school teachers of science classes hate science, which rubs off on the kids.[/quote]
Thanks for the story, it gave me a nice little chuckle. As for being enthusiastic, I think this is worthless if you don’t know the subject matter. Many of the less-then-competent secondary ed. math majors I knew where enthusiastic. Unfortunately, they didn’t understand the fundamentals of algebra, had only done mediocre in calc and had certainly missed the bigger picture there, couldn’t do proofs to save their life, and had maybe one stat course.
Now, can enthusiastic teachers like this still “teach the book” to their high school students? Sure. Will teachers like this really know wtf they are talking about, be able to answer “why” questions that go beyond the book, or be able to explain the important concepts in a way that will naturally fit with what the students will one day learn in a college math class? Hell no.
As an example, consider this. Most of the secondary ed teachers I ran into couldn’t tell you the difference between a rational number and a ratio (and yes, it’s a very important difference). If you don’t understand the difference, what are you going to say to a struggling student who was lost already in elementary school when they saw things like “1/2=4/8”, and now is expected to solve things like “1/x=6/12”? “1/2=4/8” isn’t an obvious thing (if you think so, consider “13/17=247/323”), and clearly the ratio ‘1/2’ doesn’t equal the ratio ‘4/8’. The rational number ‘1/2’ though does equal the real number ‘4/8’. All the enthusiasm in the world won’t help a student who doesn’t just “get it” understand fraction notation if the teacher themselves doesn’t understand it.
[quote]artw wrote:
…
Is our education system fucked? Perhaps so, but Americans are still pretty damn smart.
…
[/quote]
I thought about responding to your post point by point (some of them I guess I agree with?), but in the end most of your post was off topic ideological babel that I guess was suppose to support this point.
[quote]artw wrote:
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Our k-12 public education may be somewhat lacking, but our university system, both public and private, is the best in the world. England may have Cambridge and Oxford, but we have Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, Northwestern, University of Chicago, William and Mary, and Georgetown, just to name a few.
Plus the whole Ivy League.
[/quote]
I’ve already talked about this, but I’ll repeat it. The only way out university system can be seen as “the best in the world” is if you limit it to the few dozen elite institutions we have. The other few thousand universities we have by and large seem to be below quality. Now if you’ve been following the post I argue elsewhere that this is because those universities operate largely in a free market system, but that’s another point entirely.
The point is to list a dozen elite American intuitions and to thereby claim “ah ha! The American university system is the best in the world” shows you might be a product of the American university system.
This is part of the “do-all, be-all” image we have of universities that makes our overall quality low. You’re right, college isn’t for everyone… in fact it’s not for most people. In America, instead of making damn sure we make something available to everyone that not everyone needs or wants, we should make damn sure we make something available to everyone that they need and want. What we need to do is to first destigmatize vocational training and then work on providing the sort of high quality vocational training our future workforce will need. Those who only want a ticket to a better job should not be in an institution primarily intended for research in the sciences and humanities. The fact that we have a one-dimensional education system that centers around a “do-all, be-all” image of the university and systematizes this attitude is a major problem.
I could both rant about this issue and argue it for awhile, but I’ll leave it at that.
In this day and age in the U.S going to a regular high school is supposed to prepare you for college not a career. College is what should prepare kids for careers not high school which is just a stepping stone to college. However you dont have to go to college, vocational high schools are a great way to learn a trade.
Also if people are willing to work hard military, police, firefighting and government positions are great careers. However if kids dont do any of those they will have a hard time with just a diploma from a standard high school.
I am from the Netherlands and have a master degree in psychology (just so you know my background). I recently took a course with an American university in ‘quantitative reasoning for business’ - so quantitative statistics. The level of education being offered surprised and frankly shocked me. It was unbelievably easy.
The course was mostly math that I did in high school. And not even the end of high school, I mean math I got when I was 14 or something. Some of the concepts covered were a little more advanced, like the normal distribution curve and standard deviations and stuff. This was covered a little later in my educational history, namely during the first few weeks of my psychology bachelor. I got many more statistics courses during my psychology program and every course after the first one went into way more detail than this statistics course did.
Now two things surprised me especially.
So students that had already completed a 4-year American bachelor degree were struggling with concepts that I thought were the most basic math and statistics stuff. There must be something wrong with the American education system if bachelor graduates have a hard time with high school concepts I think…
Just to note, I had already taken other business related courses with this university where the level of education was fine, as well as the level of comprehension my fellow students displayed. The disparity was specific for the math/statistics course.
For the Americans here: Is math covered well (and enough) in typical high school / college educations?
[quote]HerbertNL wrote:
I am from the Netherlands and have a master degree in psychology (just so you know my background). I recently took a course with an American university in ‘quantitative reasoning for business’ - so quantitative statistics. The level of education being offered surprised and frankly shocked me. It was unbelievably easy.
The course was mostly math that I did in high school. And not even the end of high school, I mean math I got when I was 14 or something. Some of the concepts covered were a little more advanced, like the normal distribution curve and standard deviations and stuff. This was covered a little later in my educational history, namely during the first few weeks of my psychology bachelor. I got many more statistics courses during my psychology program and every course after the first one went into way more detail than this statistics course did.
Now two things surprised me especially.
So students that had already completed a 4-year American bachelor degree were struggling with concepts that I thought were the most basic math and statistics stuff. There must be something wrong with the American education system if bachelor graduates have a hard time with high school concepts I think…
Just to note, I had already taken other business related courses with this university where the level of education was fine, as well as the level of comprehension my fellow students displayed. The disparity was specific for the math/statistics course.
For the Americans here: Is math covered well (and enough) in typical high school / college educations? [/quote]
Same here.
We did distribution curves, probabilities and calculus at 16-18.
[quote]HerbertNL wrote:
For the Americans here: Is math covered well (and enough) in typical high school / college educations? [/quote]
Yes and no. Yes in that if you show desire and aptitude for it, you can learn it, but I think that “math” in general is downplayed quite a bit in American educational culture. I went to a city public school (not a private or a wealthier suburban school, just a normal, fairly poor city school) for elementary and middle school and did just fine with the math. I started Algebra in 6th grade and took Geometry in 8th. I would say the typical American kid takes Pre-Algebra or Algebra 1 in 8th grade and takes Algebra 1 (most kids) or Geometry (most “smart” kids) in 9th. For high school I went to a Charter school (this is like a public school in that it is free and open to anybody, but like a private school in that you have to take a test to be accepted and majority of the funding comes from local business, not from government) which was a pretty prestigious and many of the students there are pushed to fast-track in math and science courses. I tested into Pre-Calculus in 9th grade and took Calculus 1 and 2 as a Sophomore and Junior in HS. This was fairly common at my high school, so our school had a program where students could get registered in the local state university (Delaware) and had a professor come to our high school and teach a section of Calc 3 (Multivariate Calc) during the first semester and your basic introductory Differential Equations class during the second.
That’s kind of an exceptional case in that our school had so many kids (15 or 16, I believe) that were on the level to take these classes so they provided for us, but any high school kid can get a limited enrollment at a local college to take classes that a school doesn’t provide for.
America has a system called AP (Advanced Placement), which essentially are college courses spread out over a full year (instead of compressed into a half-year/one semester as they are in college) and end in an exam. If the student scores highly enough (they are scored on a 1-5 scale, typically a 4 or 5 is needed) on this exam, many colleges will accept that as college credit. Almost every public school offers at least AP Calculus AB, which is the equivalent of a 1st-semester college Calculus class, and most offer AP Calculus BC, which is like a 2nd-semester Calculus class. So, for the majority of kids who have the aptitude and work ethic for it, they can enter college having already completed the equivalent of their first year’s work of Calculus.
There are a variety of other courses in the AP program and you actually don’t need to take a class to sign up for the test. For instance, I never took the class, but I just got study material and took the European History exam and passed the test. I also took US History, Physics (there are two tests, one for a typical 1st-semester Mechanics class and one for a typical 2nd-semester Electricity & Magnetism class) and Economics (two tests also, one Macro and one Micro) and English Literature. There were also AP courses such as Chemistry, World Literature, Music Theory, Biology and Computer Science offered at my school where you could take the equivalent of 1st-semester college courses in these subjects, but I didn’t take them in high school.
My school was a bit exceptional in that it was a Charter school for math and science and you had to test to get in to it, so there were a lot more higher-aptitude kids in there and thus more of these AP or college-level (our school also had University sections for 2nd-semester Biology and Computer Science classes) courses available to take… but I would say that the standard, suburban, middle-class high school offers most of those courses and even the lower-class city schools offer close to half of them.
But as far as the average kid goes… despite the opportunities available, there just isn’t much importance placed on math. I took a couple business classes (like a basic entry-level Accounting class) and I am convinced that a solid 30% of the other kids in those classes should never have passed Algebra I. I “helped” a friend with a graduate-level business statistics course (similar to what you mentioned) and it was legitimately 11th-grade level stuff.
[quote]jtrinsey wrote:
…
But as far as the average kid goes… despite the opportunities available, there just isn’t much importance placed on math. I took a couple business classes (like a basic entry-level Accounting class) and I am convinced that a solid 30% of the other kids in those classes should never have passed Algebra I. I “helped” a friend with a graduate-level business statistics course (similar to what you mentioned) and it was legitimately 11th-grade level stuff.[/quote]
I think your whole post is a nice description of what you can do in the American educational system (most of the time). The problem though is, as you’ve identified here, that most people do not take advantage of what opportunities there are. Hence you get people in graduate school who still don’t know basic high school algebra.
Despite all this, there are people here who somehow think that letting our secondary education up to the free market is a good idea…
[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:
Despite all this, there are people here who somehow think that letting our secondary education up to the free market is a good idea… [/quote]
I’m not sure it’s as bad as you think. The high school I went to is a Charter school that is nationally renowned. In terms of scholastic competitions, classes offered, test scores and college acceptances, there are not many schools comparable across the country. And although the school is distinctly middle-class, the student body was not of exceptional wealth or privilege. I would say the only distinctive thing about the student body was that it was something like 25-30% Asian… as you might expect a math/science school to be.
There was no tuition, only a placement exam. There was only limited government funding I believe to maintain the building as it was converted from an old public high school. Most funding came from local business who sponsored the school. To be honest, our school wasn’t even really well funded; it wasn’t in a great (not bad, but not too far away from some not-so-desirable neighborhoods) part of town, the ceilings in the hallways leaked all the time and our track was just some dirt that went around a crappy football field. It wasn’t teacher pay either, Charter school teachers don’t even have to be accredited and are not union, if I recall correctly. Many of my teachers were retired engineers or scientists who didn’t have any formal teaching degree, but knowledge of the subject.
Realistically speaking, the only real reason that my school was so high-achieving was simply because it took a ton of smart kids and put them in the same building. It created an atmosphere that fostered learning. The nerdy asian kid taking Calculus as a freshman now doesn’t get picked on (as much) but instead has four other freshman in the same class that he can relate to. The suburban white girl who is good at science doesn’t feel like she’ll be an outcast if she takes AP Physics, etc. etc.
The thing is, government-funded education is not concerned with higher-level achievement, they are focused purely on the median scores. My school is a perfect example now as legislation has been put into effect to remove the admissions test because pulling the “smart kids” away from other schools makes them look bad. So instead of being happy that a kid with a strong aptitude for mathematics is having the opportunity to take that skill as far as possible, legislators would rather see that kid get thrown in the low-achievement school to help bring the test scores up.
In the end, I don’t think that government solutions work better for the low-achievement kids either. There is so much focus on “teaching to the test” that the lower-level kids don’t develop any interest in learning as they are never exposed to teaching methods that get them interested in learning anything. It is just, “cram stuff into their heads so they can pass the test and dump them on the next teacher.”
When you have a government-run solution, it tends to be fine for the median population but terrible at either end of the bell curve, which is exactly where the American education system is currently failing.
[quote]G87 wrote:
This was inspired by a reply in the US Soccer thread:
BigBartDawg66 wrote:
The U.S. doesn’t care what sports the rest of the world cares about. We don’t try to fit in.
My thoughts were:
LMAO at you sounding proud of this. It’s not so much that you, as a nation, don’t care through conscious choice. It’s more like, with the weakest school system in the developed world, you just don’t know any better.
Quite a few media outlets have written about US kids having difficulty with maths and English after graduating from school, and needing extra help in getting ready for uni. Judging from this forum alone, US teens don’t have a very good command of their native language. Of course, I’m just judging from statistics and forum-experience, which isn’t worth much…
So! Everyone who’s from the US… How do you/did you find your education system? I know how weak it is overall, but I’d be quite interested to hear some first-hand accounts about people’s schools. [/quote]
Wow G, you went off on a real big tangent there.
sport preference to education system