Education Discussion

[morganb]

Having lived in Asia for the last 10 years and just moved back to Australia the local Principal of my children’s school asked me if I could locate a sister school in China for them to interact with. Broaden horizons by understanding another’s culture and also 2 way language improvement.
The Principal of the Chinese school I met today was not interested as he has so much pressure from the parents to only be focused on getting the highest marks possible so the Children can advance to the right middle school and all efforts must be made for obtaining these high marks.
Can I ask for your thoughts on this? I believe education is much more than marks and believe this sort of program is excellent for children’s development. Note the Chinese school also studies English.
Having been out of the education system for so long maybe I am far out of touch and would like to get people inputs.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Without getting too political, I agree - education SHOULD BE more than just getting grades. The problem is these days, it's all about the grades (from the student/parent perspective) and it's all about furthering particular political agendas (school perspective). The system is just as broken as the healthcare system (at least here in the USA). Students get caught in the middle and ultimately end up being the losers.

Kudos to you for trying to impart some real-world value into the kids' education. This is something that our current generation of "educators" doesn't really do. They just try to indoctrinate and make sure enough of their students score high enough on the standardized tests where they can keep their jobs.

[M.D. Holloway]

My guess is that you will be hard pressed to find a Chinese school to participate due to that reason. You may get better luck with private schools or even ex-pat schools. While it doesn't offer up a true perspective of Chinese life it does offer a different one, that of others trying to fit in and understand a very interesting and diverse culture.

[jyl]

It depends on the society. If the country's system rewards only performance on examinations, then that's what the school has to emphasize.

[look 171]

From our stand point, testing performances is going about it the wrong way. For them, real world experience will not get you into the "right" middle school. Now you can forget about the right high school also. That also means right university, then the right job. It is a different world over there.

[Rikao4]

what's this best grade stuff..
don't they pass everyone like we do..

'Mr or Mrs' is so yesterday..
beotch & no ingles works just as well..

Rika

[red-beard]

Originally Posted by jyl

It depends on the society. If the country's system rewards only performance on examinations, then that's what the school has to emphasize.

What would you use for determining how a student or school is doing?

[jyl]

I think that in the US, we do need a focus on testing students for basic educational progress. The higher-order skills like creativity, independent thought, personal development, analytical skills, etc are important but I think should be upon a foundation of being able to read, write, do math, and other basic knowledge. I would not like to see us abandon the concept of standardized testing, but rather to improve it.

I can see that for the best students in the best schools, standardized testing isn't as valuable as they are performing far above "standard" and are trying to learn those higher-order skills. But even for those students, I think standardized testing can be useful.

For example, my daughter recently took the SAT (only in 8th grade, it was just a learning exercise for her) and also went through a battery of standardized state tests at her school. Her strong and weak scores on the state tests were a pretty fair reflection of her strengths and weaknesses, as I perceive them and as were reflected in her SAT scores. Yes, she was in the top 5 percent statewide in almost every subject - but relative to her overall standard, there were weak spots and it was helpful to see those clearly identified.

The Dept of Education is trying to start a computerized testing program where each student would be tested multiple times per year with the results easily retrieved and tracked by students and teachers. Idea being that teachers could use this to assess individual students' learning progress during the school year, not just a once-per-year snapshot of the school's performance, with streamlined administration and grading compared to traditional fill-in-the-bubble paper testing. It seems like an interesting idea.

[jyl]

Originally Posted by red-beard

What would you use for determining how a student or school is doing?

Not given this much thought, but -

For a school - I think I would use standardized testing plus things like graduation rate, college rate, number of students taking subjects not covered in the testing (languages, programming, music, etc)

For an individual student - at the low end (the poorer students) I guess I would use standardized testing, at the high end (the better students) I'm not sure - standardized testing sure, but then whether the kids gets into Harvard or U of State seems like just degrees of excellence, seems to me that the govt (fed or state) should worry about whether kids are doing "bad" vs "good", and let the kid/parent worry about doing "great" vs "good".

[RWebb]

Originally Posted by red-beard

What would you use for determining how a student or school is doing?

an old quote, but quite true:

if you give exams, the students only learn what will be on the exams

if you do not give exams, the students learn nothing

[sammyg2]

Performance, grades, learning, bah!
Waste of time!
Letting the students enjoy themselves, explore plenty of free time, discussing how the FEEL about things that's what really matters!

My kids learn and get straight As and are taught to do the work and perform.

The other kids that don't focus on performance can end up with their names on their shirts and work for my kids.

[Mark Henry]

Originally Posted by morganb

Can I ask for your thoughts on this? I believe education is much more than marks and believe this sort of program is excellent for children’s development....

I see you've been drinking the teachers union balanced literacy kool-aid .

Quite frankly I believe the US and Canada will have 3rd world status in less than 25 years and we will have three classes in our society.

-Gold collar workers, who are the creators and innovators in society;
- Menial laborers, who work for low wages, are paid hourly and are often on contract;
- Chronically unemployable, who have no marketable skills and cannot find work.

Public education is a failure, standards are getting lower and the rich (or smart) prop up the system by paying for tutors, private school, etc.
Good news is my kids will have your kids job....oh wait...that's only good news for me.

[Mark Henry]

Peeps here have an opinion on everything else, but as soon as you start talking about education you can hear the crickets chirping.
You really thing that what is happening in Detroit couldn't happen where you live?

Time to pull your head out of the sand.

[Zeke]

Editorial in the paper today said if you want your kids to be able to do math, write and read well, teach them yourself along with the kids attending school.

I don't know how the Chinese see it, but since the OP lived there for 10 years, they tap him. I say find a school in a country that will embrace being a sister school. I think here in Long Beach we have sister schools in Asia, but maybe not China. I'm pretty sure there are some in Japan.

[Mark Henry]

Originally Posted by milt

Editorial in the paper today said if you want your kids to be able to do math, write and read well, teach them yourself along with the kids attending school.

I don't know how the Chinese see it, but since the OP lived there for 10 years, they tap him. I say find a school in a country that will embrace being a sister school. I think here in Long Beach we have sister schools in Asia, but maybe not China. I'm pretty sure there are some in Japan.

Then what do we need schools for? And what about the parents who the school system failed them in their their generation. Most failures of these children can be traced back to not understanding the basic concepts of language and math from an early age. Most chronic unemployment is generational, if the parents don't have the tools to start with how do you expect them to teach their kids?

Want to know how the Chinese see it? They are too busy teaching two languages, math and science to be interested in frivolities. They have no interest in lowering the bar in the name of self-esteem. They plan to take over the spot as the most technology advanced country in the world.
My bet is unless we grow a brain they will.

[id10t]

Bruce - ran into one of our adjuncts who teaching International Relations and has done exchange/trade w/ China in the past, I've sent her contact info to you in a PM as well as her contact in Bejing. HTH

[jyl]

"Then what do we need schools for?"

It is not a simplistic "all or nothing" situation. Schools do some of it, parents do some of it, how much from each depends on a lot of things.

My kids, for example, learn most of their stuff from school. My wife and I read to them, help w/ math and spelling/conjugation drills, the occasional question on science, and push them to read books. We probably spend 1/2 to 1 hour/night on average, school spends 7 hours/day. Time considerations alone mean we need the school to do most of the education. Ask home-schoolers - teaching kids is a time-consuming task.

"if the parents don't have the tools to start with how do you expect them to teach their kids?"

Even if a kid has zero parent help and is himself neither bright nor motivated, I think they should at least emerge from school with a basic level of reading, writing, math, general knowledge, etc. That's a minimum. Anyone who is not retarded or in a really dysfunctional home should be at least at that level. I know it doesn't necessarily happen, but that would be a goal, I think.

[Mark Henry]

Ask home-schoolers - teaching kids is a time-consuming task.

Ask away! I'm a home school teacher, this is our second year. Not as much time as you think. We start at 8:30 and are done teaching at noon. 3-4 times a week we do phys-ed which is a 25-30 km bike ride or two hours of swimming, downhill skiing in the winter.

My wife and I read to them, help w/ math and spelling/conjugation drills, the occasional question on science, and push them to read books. We probably spend 1/2 to 1 hour/night on average

You are a home school teacher too, you just don't realize it.

school spends 7 hours/day

US schools must have longer hours than ours. 9:00 till 3:30 is is 6-1/2 hours. Minus an hour for lunch and breaks that 5-1/2... assemblies, art, games, social studies, etc. leaves not a whole lot of time for the three "R's"
I have a niece and her husband are both teachers, when I said to him that I read that in school it's lucky if they had a child's attention for 45 minutes/day, he told that reality was about half that time.

Even if a kid has zero parent help and is himself neither bright nor motivated, I think they should at least emerge from school with a basic level of reading, writing, math, general knowledge, etc.

What do you consider basic? grade 6? That may have worked in the past when we had lots of good factory jobs, but most of those are gone. Many kids today do not know how to do basic math equations without a calculator. Ask a cashier at McDonald's or Walmart to make change without a calculator. I was at Home Debit and bought 10pcs of 14' baseboard, the pretty high school age girl on cash had to use a calculator to figure out the linear feet.

[RWebb]

to be honest, she is probably hard-wired into the calculator now - using it is more like a reflex than anything else

glad I don't have to run a cash register

[PorscheGAL]

We do a virtual Public School. I teach some and my son has a teacher that lectures everyday through a live video chat. This gives us the benefit of both worlds(public school and homeschool). We get done with required core course work by noon. He and I are learning Mandarin and he is learning 2 musical instruments.

I find China interesting because they are so focused on their work. I think you would find schools in the US that would argue they don't have time to participate in the program for the same reasons. Difference being: Their students are actually learning something. Parents demand it. Local radio host on the radio said last week "Yeah, school is starting. Now they can deal with my child's crap." I personally would love to see more American Families demand that type of commitment from their schools.