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Post by Ian Wolf-Park on May 12, 2013 13:10:54 GMT -5
I just found out something that I think is relevant to this. Apparently, schools are now expected to have their students read less fiction so that more people will want to become scientists and engineers. I think this is horrible! Because 1. that's pre-conditioning someone to want a job and thus killing a part of their personality, and 2. that's actively trying to weed out creative individuals like myself. I was drawn to fantasy novels, and thus want to publish one someday. I do NOT want kids to be forced to take a certain path in life. Let every child decide for themselves what they want, and as long as no one else comes to any harm by it any lifestyle's perfectly okay! Actually, scientists and engineers can be quite creative, if you think about it. Where do you think we got some of our innovations/inventions from? Scientists and engineers, of course.
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Post by Deleted on May 12, 2013 14:51:55 GMT -5
I just found out something that I think is relevant to this. Apparently, schools are now expected to have their students read less fiction so that more people will want to become scientists and engineers. I think this is horrible! Because 1. that's pre-conditioning someone to want a job and thus killing a part of their personality, and 2. that's actively trying to weed out creative individuals like myself. I was drawn to fantasy novels, and thus want to publish one someday. I do NOT want kids to be forced to take a certain path in life. Let every child decide for themselves what they want, and as long as no one else comes to any harm by it any lifestyle's perfectly okay! Not only does that sound silly, it also makes no sense - sci-fi's a great place to get kids started in on techy stuff. Where did you hear this from? Mom was talking about it. And she's an author who has been presenting her new children's book to elementary schools.
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Post by Komori on May 12, 2013 14:53:56 GMT -5
Honestly, I'd like to hear a source for that, Sae. EDIT: Mm, so no official statements from schools, then?
Also, reading fewer fiction books in school isn't going to suddenly turn a novelist into a statistician. Everyone has their own natural bend, and replacing Moby Dick with Moebius strips isn't really going to do all that much. I think so long as kids get a little bit of experience in a wide range of subjects/genres, they'll figure out what they like. I'm honestly more concerned about them completely removing things from the curriculum like arts, music, even PE, than I am about them changing proportions between the STEM fields and the Lit ones.
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Post by TJ Wagner on May 12, 2013 15:39:18 GMT -5
I'm surprised about much of a discussion that has become, but it a pleasant surprise. However, I do want to clarify a few things.
First, I know that not every bit of writing can be fun and exciting. I honestly had no problem with essays, and I'm the only person I know that actually enjoys diagramming sentences. I understand that we need to teach structure so students look to express themselves. Those things aren't really an issue with me. I have had more than one experience where I was discouraged from writing and have seen the same thing happen with other students.
When I was six grade, I started writing poetry and my English teacher that year was very encouraging. In eighth grade I wanted to put some of my poems in my portfolio. My teacher that year wanted me to get a higher score so she took it upon herself to 'correct' my poems before allowing me to submit. I'm not saying that she corrected them grammatically and the structure needed work. She wanted me to use more sophisticated words in order for me to get a higher score. Without telling me, she rewrote my poems and actually changed the meaning on quite a few. I got a higher score, but it wasn't my writing. When I was working as a substitute, I saw the exact thing happen to another girl. Her portfolio had gotten a high school as well, but she told me that it didn't matter since the stories were no longer her own but belonged to the teacher.
The issue I saw was that schools are now so worried about the scores the are no longer worried about actually teacher the children - or at least that was true in the school I taught. We were told we had to teach them to write in order to get the best score and not to express or communicate - and the students who were given a prompt that fit nice and orderly into the only pattern they were taught were lost. I saw that happen with my own eyes. We were only allowed to teach essays, but one of the prompts was to write a short story. Funding and even teachers' jobs are tied in with scores, so that really has become a focus. A year before I taught, one teacher was accused of cheating on the test by giving her students answers. Although it was never proven, her students told me on mulitple occasions how she had helped them to cheat when they had been in her class. Writing isn't the only subject that suffers. I was teaching fourth grade and I found that many of the students couldn't subtract if you needed to borrow. I really focused on this to help them. One day, the principal comes in and announces to me so that all the students can hear. "I just found out that the students can use calculators on the math and science portions of the test, so it doesn't matter if they can add or subtract correctly. Just teach them to use calculators." He said that in front of the students.
As for creativity - I was told in high school by one teacher that I should give up writing because a short story I had written for class was too creepy. How creepy was it? The same story won a short story contest that same year.
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Post by Komori on May 12, 2013 16:18:29 GMT -5
TJ, I'm unfamiliar with what sort of "scores" you're referring to. Ones that are outside of what the teacher's actually giving you?
Actually, maybe it would help if you told us what country or state that's in, because I'm not familiar with a system where teachers are sending their students work to someone else to be scored.
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Post by TJ Wagner on May 12, 2013 17:20:05 GMT -5
Well, I went to school in Kentucky and I taught in West Virginia. Kentucky was worse for portfolios. You had to have selections of writing from each subject that was scored as from proficient to novice - and the goal was to have everyone score as proficient. You were given your scores and told what was wrong, but never how to correct your problems. For example, I was told that I had no sense of audience but not given examples on where this was an issue or what to do to make it better. It didn't help that my prompt was about cities with curfews and I had grown up entirely on a farm in a very rural area. After the first year of portfolios, the teachers would practically write our essays for us if we didn't write exactly what they wanted.
The scores I was referring to when I taught was more from the WestTest from WV which is the end of the year test. Part of the test consisted of giving the children a writing prompt and having them write an essay or short story. I'm not sure exactly how those scores were tallied, but we were told to teach all the kids to express themselves in one particular way that got the highest scores. The goal was literally to make all of the them write the exact same way which scored the highest, but they couldn't write anything that didn't fit the mold they had been taught.
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Post by Huntress on May 13, 2013 3:31:16 GMT -5
That sort of stuff is hardly US-specific. You get that here as well; not in all schools, but it seems to be common enough. Considering how schools are compulsory up until 9th grade and helping a student actually understand things has to happen in your own unpaid free time (and that's assuming they even want to understand instead of being all "pff, I'll never get this and I don't care"), teaching kids to jump the hoops the right way is about the fastest and most efficient way to keep the system moving. Even if it's not the best by any means. (Although I could again devilsadvocate that and say that life is all about jumping hoops the right way and oftentimes doing as you were told without necessarily understanding why. Not that that's the best way to be either, but at least schools and everyday life correlate in this regard?)
In fact, we live in an interesting transition period in that regard, where individuality is only now truly becoming a desirable goal. The entire idea of schools is to prepare kids for life, but life is twisting itself in the direction of a generation that wants individual feedback and individual say in what their job is about and why. Up until recently, individual creativity was more of a private-time hobby thing (the starving artist stereotype is still nicely ingrained). Which means that school curricula have now adopted things like "The aim of secondary school is to prepare a youth to function as a creative, varied, socially mature, reliable person able to acknowledge their goals and reach them in different fields of life: as a partner in personal life, as one who carries and promotes their culture, in various roles and professions on the job market and as a citizen responsible for the sustainability of their society and environment." (§ 3 of the Estonian National Secondary School Curriculum. Sometimes being a translator can be really convenient xD)
...and as a guideline, it's so incredibly nebulous and wiggly and how the everloving heck are you supposed to pull it off with constant overtime and €600 a month when the abovequoted is as specific as it gets and nobody knows more than you do because it's so new?
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Post by Kino is Slightly Derpy on Jun 28, 2013 3:59:34 GMT -5
Just came across this thread and wanted to give my experience I had during my high school years.
Throughout High School, I hated English class. It wasn't my teacher's fault, he was great. He was sarcastic and witty, overall a very good teacher. I just couldn't grasp or stay focused because I really wasn't truly interested in the curriculum they had in my school.
I could tell that my teacher wanted to do so much more, but was bound by the curriculum. From the lessons he had to teach to the books we were forced to read.
I'm a very impatient reader. If something doesn't keep my interest, I generally will just skim through it and not retain much at all.
It was about halfway through my 2nd year class, that I decided to pick up a pen and start writing. I found it pretty ironic that I couldn't pass the brutally hard tests that I would have to do in class, but I seemed to have a knack for writing stories.
Eventually after about 3 years, I finished writing my first "novel". I still have the lined paper I wrote it on in all it's originality!
I found a bit of an intimate connection to the story when I wrote it on paper, as opposed to typing away on a computer screen. It's much simpler and clean to type everything out now, I don't nearly write on paper as much as I used to.
It's been a little while since I've been in a classroom, so I don't have any idea on how things are approached now. If it's all done on PC or laptops or if they still have notepads and binders. I do know one thing though, writing that story engaged me in learning and (unfortunately) it wasn't something that the school had given to me, rather something I had found in myself (seemingly against the school's best efforts).
I'm rambling a bit now but in a nutshell, the "painting-all-with-one-brush" approach didn't work for me and I think that is what schools should be re-focusing on.
Despite passing English with a 54% average, I've been published several times and achieved many accolades. I think that's more important than an obscure, judgmental non-statistic of my life.
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