The Future of Education - ReRolled Solves Problems

We had to take some technical writing class in engineering and the teacher said all of our papers were the most boring pieces of shit she had ever read because it was straight up point A to point B facts with little to no life, typical engineers

Tuco_sl said:

Like I said in my post I don't have a strong opinion on it. I'm not an education professional and don't know much about the field. Those were mostly just musings I had as a student and someone who sees people the education system failed.

AS to the english stuff, I'm not here to talk shit about liberal arts, but in every english/art/film class I had the analysis portions were laughably trivial for all the engineering students. We'd be dumbfounded watching non-engineers struggle with describing the underlying components of the story, writing, cinematography, style, whatever. Posts in the political thread of this forum require more thought than what it takes to do well in those classes.

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If you were an engineering student what level of English classes were you taking? I agree that basic liberal arts classes are easy as shit, but then again, so are basic math, science, and other technical classes. I don't believe you could drop an engineer into a graduate level liberal arts class and expect him to analyze works of art very well. Likewise, I'd never expect a liberal arts person to do well in a high level business or technical class. My point is that both require different kinds of analysis and skills. Sure, being an overall intelligent person will make both easier, but to say that being excellent in one area equates to being excellent in the other area is just plain wrong.

We had to take some technical writing class in engineering and the teacher said all of our papers were the most boring pieces of shit she had ever read because it was straight up point A to point B facts with little to no life, typical engineers

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This is a very good point that demonstrates how liberal arts skills and technical skills are quite different. My "day job" is in government contracting and I write proposals for submission to the government. I have to work with our IT folks - developers, engineers, system admins, etc.-- to get the "meat" of the proposal, so to speak. Every time, without fail, I have to practically rewrite everything they submit because they have no concept of how to write. Note that I'm not talking about basic English grammar, they're all very well spoken and well written in that regard, I'm talking about things like audience, purpose, style and the "why's" of what we're writing.

Yeah our teacher was a bitch anyways. One of the students hated her so much that he managed to snag an official class cancellation sheet and put one on our class door everyday. They had to excuse all the absences that resulted.

Tuco_sl said:

Sounds like technical writing, right?

You're correct, they were low level classes. But my assumption was that this thread was discussing lower level education.

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Well, the OP mentioned college. But anyway, my point applies to high school as well. Did you really not have any of those super nerdy students in your high school who were wizards in math but couldn't write or analyze literature to save their lives? There were several students like that in my classes in high school and it always amazed me because I think I was more similar to you; i.e, relatively well-rounded, so the basics of everything came easily to me. That's not the case for lots (probably most) people.\

Oh and McCheese, here's another dumb idea: The US govt should tax high education for majors with poor employment opportunities and use the funds to subsidize majors with high employment opportunities!

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I don't necessarily disagree with this, although I'm not sure about specifically taxing majors. However, I do think we need another "Sputnik" moment; some event that will make the U.S. realize just how far behind the curve it has fallen in terms of science and technology. After the Soviet Union bitch slapped the USA with the launch of Sputnik there was a massive, nationally-backed government educational emphasis put on science, technology, and foreign language in order to catch us up to the commies. We need another "holy shit" moment like that. There are far too many people studying shit like sociology, communications, gender studies, and other fairly worthless majors and even in high school there is too much emphasis put on humanities rather than employable and life skills.

Someone before mentioned teaching things like how to pay taxes, how to open a bank account, how to get a mortgage, etc. While I would have hated a class like that at the time, now that I'm an adult and dealing with all this stuff I would have KILLED for a class that taught me the basics of how to navigate the necessities of modern life. Instead I was forced to study African and Native American literature.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/1...-read-chekhov/

Reading literature increases social skills. That is in addition to the fact that having a grasp of language and the ability to communicate is essential for any profession. I am incredibly tired of nigh unreadable technical manuals or science papers written by bright people who thought English was a useless class and writing a useless skill. It isn't. You will end up talking to people, writing things that other people read, asking or answering questions, interacting with people, etc., no matter what you do in life. Learning to use language helps with all of that. Whether literature develops critical thinking or not, it does develop language skills.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Gaming 'is good for you'

Studies on that go back much further. It doesn't improve your writing though, even though it improves your social skills.

And actually I think an "educational MMO" would be a great idea. Not sure what the implementation would be like for it to be effective, but I know kids who know a lot about real world smelting because of Minecraft.

Oh for whoever asked earlier if you can "teach" people to be proactive and not give up: this is known as "grit" in a technical sense (serious) by people who study what it takes to be successful. Yes, it can be taught.

Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit - YouTube

TED Talk on it.

There needs to be a system in place to judge intelligence and then assign educational needs.

Some people are just born to be losers/burger flippers. I see to many people who walk around with no clue how to act in society.

People below a certain intelligence level/poverty level need to be taught basic life skills. How not to steal, how to shop, how to no shit where they live basically.

You don't go to school for the knowledge, you go to school for the social development and structure. It's the reason why home schooled kids are always uncomfortable to be around, you need to learn how to work as a group since we are a pack animal.

They should do away with all the bullshit like Calculus and replace it with just more real life math like "If you are a cashier at a grocery store and a customers bill is $4.35 and he hands you a five and two quarters, what change do you give back or do you just blankly stare at the man for overpaying?

College is another story though since that's specialized(somewhat) and actually has a point, any functioning retard can graduate from highschool/elementary school with little to no effort but even then college is mostly about networking and laying the groundwork more so than knowledge.

I maxed my mining skill in WoW bro, I know how that shit works.

McCheese_sl said:

A big problem is that a lot of teachers--both in the grade/high school level and at college--simply suck. They're lazy and/or incompetent. It's way easier to prepare and deliver a traditional lecture-style class than it is to create a lesson plan that involves exploration of the material by the students, numerous kinds of interactions, interesting games to manipulate the content, and creative ways of measuring success.

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As a teacher this is kind of offensive. Do you understand how much time it takes to prepare a lesson like that (and that they are easier to deliver)? Now consider that most of your free time is taken up by students/marking/training/paperwork and you need to plan 3-5 of those types of lessons per day - so you go into unpaid preparation time at home and you are already paid less than people who are equally qualified as you. My facebook is full of my friends in finance/law/science flying around the world.

Then many students are lazy and take those kinds of lessons as a chance to do nothing for an hour. I actually do try to do lessons like that as much as possible but working in an inner city school most of the kids are too badly behaved to handle it and you end up being a glorified babysitter whom the parents expect to raise their kids for them.



For lesson quality like you say, what is really needed are preprepared packs of lessons for different ability levels - I don't see why I need to plan a new lesson from stratch when it's being taught millions of times across the world, yet that is what I do. They need to be tailored to each class and student of course but starting from nothing seems kind of wasteful. Those preprepared lessons that are out there tend to suck, like a teacher didn't design them. Best you can hope for is a pack of resources (worksheets/videos) which you assemble yourself into the lesson.

Then have them online in a format students can access. Khan Academy is fine but last time I looked it was only lecture style exposition, there are others which have markable practice questions with them but still missing key parts of a lesson. It should be possible to develop a website which delivers content in the same way and order a real teacher would using educational theory, this would be the future I think. Stick some MMO style levels and facebook shit on it too.

Bring back shop and home-ec classes.