School spends a long time “wasting” our time but learning things is a great way to learn how to interpret information and make actual informed decisions
Back in high school in the 70s, I had a long-haired subversive English teacher, never wore a tie, bell bottoms, etc. He was a great teacher, and I made sure to take one of his English classes in grades 10/11/12, including Shakespeare 1 and 2.
He had a unique, very Socratic teaching style, that required us to make choices, and then defend them, and more importantly, recognize when someone else’s idea is better, and put ego aside to embrace the better concept. After three years of that class, I could write, communicate, and debate effectively, far beyond my years.
Years later, I started listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio, and wondered why I wasn’t being seduced by his rhetoric, like so many of his listeners. I realized it was because I had good Critical Thinking Skills, and wasn’t buying his bullshit.
When I asked myself how I got those skills, I realized that it was entirely due to Mr. Clark, and I loved him all the more for it. He was teaching English and Shakespeare, but he had an ulterior motive, and used those subjects to actually teach Critical Thinking Skills, and give us the confidence to defend our positions. He knew what he was doing, but NOBODY else did, including the school system, whose curriculum he gleefully subverted.
I tried to look him up, but he had died a few years earlier. I wish I could have told him that I was on to him, and he gave me the most important educational gift of my life.
Thanks, Mr. Clark, you were the greatest teacher of my life, and the lives of many others.
My HS History teacher was exactly like that and I had a dream with him in it the other night. Really weird timing since I hadn’t been in highschool for over 20 years. Also he died a couple years ago.
Oh gosh. I have a specific special brother. He’s an undiagnosed economist. He took That Class from the specific writing teacher you mention that was at our school. I also took him, but my specific special brother oh gods. First day in class they mention how one of the themes is going to be resistance and rebellion. The next day in class my idiot brother mentions RATM and how themes of rebellion are everywhere in media, and wouldn’t true rebellion be conformity? He got sent to Remedial Writing to take a nap every day. I loved the class, but uh, i have some family members.
Undiagnosed Economist?
he’s an economist and he has the usual economist things wrong with him (i should know i’m one too), but he’s undiagnosed.
Ohh i understand, i thought it was a typo but really couldn’t get to any other possibilities
If there’s one thing my school has never even tried to teach me it’s how to learn effectively.
I also think undergraduate degrees are mostly to teach good working habits and learning habits. Though not everyone succeeds at learning those things.
Yeah. A lot of people get degrees that don’t end up being super-applicable to their eventual career.
What a degree tells me about a candidate is that they can complete a long-term project that requires balancing multiple milestones (semesters), multitasking (multiple courses per semester), while being self-directed, working with others, and navigating bureaucracy.
For lots of jobs, the specific degree may not matter that much. They’re usually educated enough they know how to learn and adapt to new tasks relatively quickly. For things like engineering, medicine, and science the specifics of the coursework are essential, but for most jobs the specific degree basically tells me what they may be more prepared for fresh out of college and maybe something about how they look at the world (a geography major’s holistic big-picture view of the world versus a psychology major’s more focused, individualized view).
When I started uni, there was a special “how to learn” class that everyone took on their first semester. It was just a refresh of how to cite sources, fact check, take efficient notes, and proper time management. Absolutely would have failed without it since I was one of those kids that breezed through highschool without much effort.
I wish I had that
Damn that sounds useful
That’s a good idea for ALL colleges.
In theory, partly.
In practice, it’s more of a check the box thing for teachers.
Most teachers, franky, suck. I say this as someone with family in that world, and having been a technical instructor.
Being effective is not easy, throw an awful bureacracy on top and even good teachers will suck, because they can’t fight two battles simultaneously.
Having watched the US educational system go to shit over decades because of the growth of the admin really tells the story. My first university tripled their admin since I went there, yet the student body has grown only incrementally. The stories I hear from family attending - the bullshit from admin is astounding.
Yeah english class activities we had were not on citing sources or thinking critically. We learned how to read and write fast and that was most of it.
As example there was those multiple choice questions asking stuff like “which paragraph had this sentence in it.” What does that even teach?
Hell I used to be praised for writing huge paragraphs of text. Then found out splitting into small ones makes it more readable by my own testing.
I learned where to use who and whom in a LoTR meme posted on lemmy ffs.
So yeah it was mostly children being used for checkboxes to get funding and whatnot.
Yep. We don’t teach kids math so they can learn to do math. We do it so they can develop an intuition for abstract reasoning.
yeah i dont know how i couldve survived without eigen vectors
Also sometimes it actually just is good to know maths. Engineers, researchers, actuaries, accountants…there’s a huge range of practical applications for maths that’s more complicated than basic arithmetic in a very direct fashion, before you even get into jobs that more indirectly use abstract reasoning learnt through high school maths.
Sure. And for the 90% of kids who correctly say they won’t use math, it doesn’t matter. We are doing math so they can learn to navigate formal systems of reasoning. We could honestly teach deductive logic instead, or set theory, or group theory, or finite field topology. It doesn’t have to be algebra or anything remotely practical.
deductive logic instead, or set theory, or group theory, or finite field topology
All of these are maths, though?
Abstract versus applied math. It looks different. More like studying numberless patterns and proof methods.
Who doesn’t use maths on a day to day basis?
Most professions don’t require mathematics, and we’ve automated so much of it anyway.
Honestly I don’t know anyone who doesn’t use it on a fairly regular basis.
You know people who use the unit circle on a regular basis? How about conic sections or the quadratic formula? These topics take months if not years to learn in school. We do so not because they’re useful in any practical sense for most people, but because they instill intuitions about how the world works.
I’ve never touched on the unit circle or conic sections as part of formal education, so I can’t really comment. The quadratic formula - occasionally. Almost all of the maths I learned at school until age 16 was practical or useful in some sense. In the UK maths is optional after the age of 16.
I’d argue my maths education at high school level gave me a sturdy understanding of day to day maths, the building blocks for more advanced topics and the knowledge that certain tools exist and how to use them should I need them. I won’t remember the specifics of everything, but a quick refresher is usually enough.
Again, most of the more advanced stuff in the UK is optional and mostly not done by anyone who won’t want to carry that on to a more advanced level - usually a degree with a STEM adjacent subject.
Beyond the simplest arithmetic? Lol sure bro.
If we keep redefining maths to not include the bits of maths that are inconvenient to people’s arguments it all sort of becomes pointless.
Youd be supriced how much simple everyday things use maths and you dont even notice. When you look at the speedometer and calculate im your head how long its going to take to arrive you are doing supricingly complex math. Add how much it will use gas and how far you can get with full tank.
Same when you compare two different sized packages of the same product and try to asses which one is more bang for your buck.
Or if you are trying to calculate is it legal to drive after night out now or should you wait for an hour.
After a weekend trip with your friends when you start to tally who brought what stuff and how expensive it was and who is the vegan who did not eat the steak but brought case of wine that everybody was drinking exept Steve who was the dedicated driver. Then there was Sarah who was only one night at the rented house while everybody else was there two nights, but she bought the steaks and other meat that the rest of the crew (not counting the vegan) ate the whole weekend.
Also almost anything done with building or renovations.
More closely you understand the calculations the less it becomes math and more to just how things work. Math is funny like that.
Yeah maths is just the world written down and understood
A couple weeks ago I used pythagorean’s theorem to calculate the maximum size of tv my friend could buy to fit in their entertainment center based on the vertical space they had.
Every time I drive I’m mentally running through calculations on where each car around me is going to be based on their current speed, current acceleration/deceleration, and position relative to other vehicles that may cause a change in acceleration/deceleration. Having learned calculus that’s a lot more intuitive and easier to do than if I hadn’t.
I would be a less functional person if I had not learned anything beyond basic arithmetic.
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First of all no, school fails miserably at actually teaching anyone to learn effectively, so that’s not why they do that. Second, they could just as effectively teach kids how to learn by teaching them things that are actually useful. I would’ve loved to have classes for note taking and studying, critical thinking, maintenance and repair… instead I’ve had to teach myself all of those things, meanwhile my school was too busy making me read about Victorian era dress styles to teach me any of that. Even math beyond algebra 1 is fairly niche and is probably better taught specifically to the people who need it. I’m in comp sci, I use that math all the time, but my friend getting his master’s in plant breeding probably doesn’t need to be intimately familiar with calculus.
It feels better to tell ourselves that all of the years wasted by school are actually for something but the reality is that school just does kind of a bad job at equipping people with the skills they need, and it needs to be improved dramatically.
Abstract reasoning is the most “useful” intellectual ability you can have. However, the most important would be the normative insights we usually call “wisdom” (which isn’t taught but learned — for instance by reading literature and living life with curiosity). Critical thinking and other philosophy goes without saying.
Yes and No. School really lacks a sort of “general knowledge” class, to get a general overview of lots of varied things.
It’s always been incredibly strange to me how you’re supposed to pick your career after high school (more or less) when you usually know about less than 10% of the jobs that exist.
PICK YOUR CAREER RIGHT NOW, GO TO COLLEGE IT’S OK TAKE OUT A LOAN YOU’RE GOOD FOR IT WHEN YOU GET THAT JOB YOU JUST PICKED
if you don’t do that you’ll FLIP BURGERS! Do you wanna be a greasy shithead for the rest of your life?! NO GO TO COLLEGE RIGHT NOW.
tens of thousands of dollars in student loans and a degree I will never use later, I went back to trade school and am in fact a greasy shithead. Fuckin best thing I ever did. Fuck you college salesman guy. You gave me a bad advice
Shit I’d be a burger flipper for life if it paid a living wage. I worked retail for 11 years and the only problem I ever had with it was the garbage pay.
how you’re supposed to pick your career after high school
And the complete lack of the school to provide much help. They just shrugged it off by saying there are too many fields and possibilities. Yeah, so some more guidance by people with experience would be invaluable to somebody young. Then comes the complaining about students dropping out or change fields in college.
SO TRUE!!
I didnt kniw what to do with myself.
So I got into another (i believe that’s whats it called) vocational school for 2 years.
But then I knew what not to be doing as a job. But I knew it should be anything with IT.
Now I am at an MSP doing IT :) (not thanks to our school system, lol)
Also to not fall for pitifully obvious scams.
I just bought neuron enhancement patches on Temu, so I never have to worry about pitifully obvious scams again.
Teachers hate this one simple trick!
Writing essays, for instance, helps one structure their thoughts and form with them a narrative. It’s actually really concerning that even that is being delegated to ChatGPT, as if people weren’t ignorant and mentally incompetent enough already. 😭
Regarding students cheating with ChatGPT, I liked this article from a professor, quote:
“Students are afraid to fail, and AI presents itself as a savior. But what we learn from history is that progress requires failure. It requires reflection.”
But when failing anything in class, students usually end up having fewer options, need to get better marks elsewhere to compensate, or get forced to repeat a year. So they use any tool or technique that might help them pass.
college too. i can’t remember most of the specifics I’ve learned, but I could jump back into any topic and get “fluent” quickly again
There used to be courses that acted to weed out students by being difficult and having shitty teaching as a way to weed out students who would only do the bare minimum within the structure of the class.
yeah my college has been infamous for that. our laws require universities to admit everyone who meets the formal requirements, and they’ve had 3x the students they could handle. so they “examed out” 2/3 of the people to get rid of them. economics, accounting and maths have been ridiculously difficult
Unless your educational system inhibits creativity and encourages memorization without understanding.
And everything memorized must be available for a timed 0.5-3 hour session with no access to any kind of notes, which risks destroying any chance of those memories “sticking” long term.
The only times in my adult life where
- Time was crucial
AND
- I had no access to any helpful information
was never
All it did was exacerbate my underlying mental health issues while my brain was developing.
It’s also important for the induction of critical thinking - children need to be exposed to a large variety of information and social context to form a sharp mind.
children need to be exposed to a large variety of information
Explains why my parents don’t have much Critical Thinking…
That what happens when you grow up under the People’s Refucking of China, it’s why they built a fucking firewall
Wait till you realize that the point of homework is delayed-gratification, prioritization, and self-reliance.
The real learning was the learning we did along the way.
I “learned” a lot of falsehoods in history and civics classes that was just american exceptionalism.
