National Education

I suppose I shall start out this post by apologizing for what might be slightly incoherent. Maybe, maybe not. I have addressed this topic briefly in my college German classes, and my personal opinions on reform generally stem from my views on such European educational structures.

I am going to discuss the primary and secondary educational systems and why I think there should be a more national viewpoint towards education than a state one. Currently states can set their own curriculum; there are some national guidelines, but they are dangled in front of state school systems by offering funds for complying. At least that's how I view it. But I think education is one of the things that should be a national issue; if we are going to formulate a competitive, intelligent educational system that prepares students for making their way in the world, should the system not be standard across the country, while allowing for states to include some geographical material and history? It makes more sense to me than watching what the Texas School Board will decide about their curriculum and analyzing how it might affect the country.

More specifically, I think our educational system is broken in directing everyone towards the path of college. Sure, high school would quote how people could do other things after high school, but the emphasis was always on college. And here is where I really found myself liking the German system. While there are some schools that are becoming more general like the United States, mostly secondary schools are divided into those who are looking towards the college track and those that are going to more trade and vocational type professions. I am generally aware that other European countries have systems that are similar to that, but I do not know many details. Doing so would allow less people to go to college, a college degree feel more important, and clear up a clogged system. I have talked to people who have mentioned how they needed a degree to get a job that they knew how to do, but needed the degree to prove - I'm not sure, but it felt pointless and a waste of their time and money. When a degree and not experience can earn a person a high wage, it is sad. Or at least, I think it is sad.

And although I think that creating high schools that focused on trade and vocational professions would be extremely useful in improving our educational system, I do not think it will happen any time soon. Standing in the face of such change, as with many European systems are American cultural values. The American Dream, letting anyone be who they want to be, would not want such a divided system. And I think that is why we push everyone towards college, because we do not want to be seen as pushing anyway towards being second best.

But here's the thing; when we are promoting everyone to be future mathematicians and scientists and problem solvers, we are leaving behind the people that have to do everything else. I think our problems lie at a more administrative level than an educational one. I think we are still capable of coming up with new and better ways to teach, but it is the bureaucracy, the emphasis on showing skills a certain way, that will be our downfall.

I sit here and I am not sure what to say. I know I think that solving our higher level educational problems starts at examining how our primary education is run, and what exactly to we emphasis. But on some level I also think we are doing fine on our own, we are out there developing new teaching techniques. Ideas about the classroom are constantly evolving. I just worry the system is too slow to catch up. So perhaps at the heart of it, the way I feel is summed up by national control of our educational system. Not streamlining, but making the system more efficient so there is more time to focus on preparing people for a realistic future. My hope for the other side of education - the actual teaching is summed up better by this video by 60 Minutes. Perhaps it will work; perhaps it will not. I do believe on some level teaching will never be perfect because we are not all the same, but I did enjoy this video the first time I saw it on CBS. And it proves to me that people are always trying to work towards a solution.



I also say watch this Sunday's 60 Minutes, which is to have an interview, of the preview that I have embedded below, on an alternative to college.

You think YOU'RE idealistic?

A lot of the posts this week have focused on money. Teacher's salaries and tuition are both very important things, but there's another crucial component to education: the student.

As you may have seen on the About Us page, I'm studying to become a game developer. This gives me an interesting view of things because when I learn things, I tend to tie it back to "How can I use this to make more awesome games?" When it comes to education, though, it's the other way around. Games can make education more awesome.

Video games have gotten fantastic at the psychology of play, trying to get the gamer to do something continually for months on end. Pay-to-play online games need this principle to survive. If you don't like the game, you stop paying them for it and they stop making money off of you. Games have perfected many psychological tricks such as skinner boxes and reinforcement schedules to make games rewarding for the player. I think the real challenge for video gaming is to use those techniques to do some good in the real world and I think that starts with education.

The first thing I'm going to talk about is Alternate Reality Games. The basic premise of an ARG is that it's a game, usually on a website, that implies that there's more to this world than we know, a secret that's just dying to get out, and you're the one it needs to be told to. There might be numbers at the bottom of a webpage that, when translated from binary to ASCII, code for a URL. Going to that URL might show you a countdown. You don't know what the countdown is for, but you figure out that it's for a couple days from now at 2PM. At around 2:10, you check the website again and find that the "government" has taken it down, but wait. In the source code, you find a comment that says the truth will be revealed and has a ten-digit number. You call that number and a recorded voice tells you they need your help decrypting a signal and...Well, I'm sure you get the point. It's exciting and makes you want to find out more. Perhaps more excitingly, with the combined power of the internet, codes way more complicated than converting binary to text could be cracked.

This has huge applications in education. What if, instead of having to write a paper on the Renaissance, you had to crack codes based on important historic facts? What if there's a secret hidden in history that you can only figure out by researching? The best part is that this doesn't even really rely on extrinsic motivators. The most powerful draw to this idea is the fact that figuring out stuff and feeling smart is awesome. Every time you enter the right password (which would hopefully be more interesting than "Name Henry VIII's fourth wife"), you get that rush of endorphins. That high that says you won. It'd give a sort of instant gratification that's rarely there in most school assignments. It would reinforce the idea that learning stuff for learning's sake can be awesome. Yeah, it would be for a grade, but once you got into it, it would be so much more than that.

Another game-related idea that I think could be implemented is a little more cheap: competition. Qwizdom is the first thing that comes to mind of this sort of thing already in action. The basic idea is that you get controllers for each of your students and program in the questions. After that, there are a bunch of pre-programmed games that the students can play. Maybe it's a racing game where the faster you put in the right answer, the faster your car can go. Maybe it's just as simple as grouping people into teams and playing Jeopardy in the classroom. Either way, the result is that kids have more fun and they have more of a desire to do well.

Or maybe you could have a review website where you upload homework assignments. Maybe you only assign 15 math problems out of the book, but you add in a bunch more from the same chapter. Maybe you even add in some for later chapters, but the key is that for every question they answer, there's a 10% chance they'll get a coin. Coins accumulate throughout the year and they can be redeemed for things like homework passes or extra points on an exam. They could even been redeemed for physical items like school supplies or maybe candy. I know I'd spend more time on assignments if going beyond the minimum actually had some sort of tangible (or at least measurable) reward.

There are a lot of things wrong with education today, but I think one of the main ones is focusing on creating a minimum knowledge base instead of focusing on cultivating a desire to learn. As a great philosopher once said "All the fun parts of life are optional." Teaching shouldn't be about getting you to memorize facts. It should be about getting you to go beyond and to realize what kind of awesome stuff lies out there if you have the motivation and intelligence to reach for it.

For more information on ARGs, feel free to watch Extra Credits' episode on the whole deal, which I admittedly stole a lot of the optimism from.

Education Reform in America's Colleges and Universities

I'm not even sure where to begin in discussing this week's topic of education reform.  I know many families who use this topic as a regular discussion topic around the dinner table, and even then, the discussion is varied, so I'll try to focus on one specific area of education, which is the evolving demographic of students entering and completing college.

As a student at a private liberal arts college, I've taken classes with many students who were incredibly intelligent and focused on learning, but there were other students who just seemed to be taking up space as they waited to graduate and shortly after, work in a nicely paying position in the family company.  I'm only vaguely familiar with how other education systems work around the world, but it seems like in the American system, just about anyone can go to college if they are willing to pay tuition.  I don't see any problem with system attempting to educate those who have a strong desire to learn, no matter what their capacities are.  I find it problematic when those who want a better education cannot afford it and these individuals with a greater desire to learn are unable to attend college, simply because they cannot afford tuition.

On a personal level, a number of people I went to high school with had received scholarships and financial aid to state universities, but many of them had to return home after one year or one semester, because they found that they could not afford to take out a loan for tuition.  This is very unsettling to me, especially when I look around the classroom and see so many students who aren't attending college for a rich educational experience; instead, many people are now attending college because they don't believe that they can get a career with a livable wage and benefits without a college degree.  For the majority of people, this is true.  But as the majority of individuals who can afford to attend college go, many people now view a bachelor's degree the same way they once viewed a high school diploma.  Because most Americans who can afford to go to college today can find an institution that will accept their money for tuition, bachelor's degrees in most fields are not as valuable as they once were, and in many ways, they are now viewed as a kind of stepping stone degree.

The demographic of students who are currently enrolling and completing college has greatly changed in  the past 50 years, and in many ways for the better.  While a greater educated youth should be beneficial to society, if nearly everyone who wishes to attend college, for reasons ranging from needing an education to work in a specific field to needing a degree in order to join a parent in the family law firm may, then schools must continue to keep their educational standards high, because a college-educated society isn't necessarily a more intelligent society.

Semi-educated Rambling

Honestly, I'm not even really sure where to begin with this topic.  I don't have a great outline of my post laid out, and so this may turn into an unstructured flow of thoughts more than anything.  Let's see how it goes!

I suppose I'll start with what I think is one of the biggest concerns about teachers, and that's their salary.  One of my friends is an elementary school teacher, and she's given me some detail (though not told me directly) how much she makes... and I'm shocked by how little it is.  In addition, my ex planned for years to be a teacher, but she eventually abandoned that idea because she just didn't think she'd be able to support herself on a teacher's salary.  I know that the debate over teachers' salaries has existed for a long, long time, but it still feels like a really important issue to me.  We have a lot of things in the US that feel like giant wastes of money, and I have to question whether that money could be used to better support the people that are supposed to be teaching the people that will eventually be running our nation.  How many athletes make millions of dollars for playing a sport (which doesn't even span an entire year)?  How much could we improve our school systems if even one of the major sports took a year off, and donated the money they would've paid the athletes (less enough for them to live comfortably, of course) to the educational system?  How much could we improve if this was a yearly thing, with the sports affected rotating through a schedule? ... I enjoy sports, for the most part, and I understand that a large portion of the nation follows them seriously (almost religiously, in some cases).  But this seems like a fairly simple sacrifice that would be a huge benefit to the concept of funding educational reform - not only increasing teachers' salaries, but making necessary improvements to schools in order to keep them competitive and efficient.

I can see people making the argument that if teachers get a salary increase, their students' grades should increase, but I don't think it's quite that simple.  It's been a long, long time since I was in school (particularly the non-college variety), but I'd imagine that one of the bigger challenges facing teachers is relating the material to students in a way that they can understand.  There's a lot of pressure on teachers to get the material across to -every- student, and that seems like it can be fairly intimidating.  I would imagine that class size is one of the largest contributing factors - I've always been a fan of smaller classes, where the students could get more individualized attention.  I haven't looked into the details, but I'm going to make the (possibly incorrect) assumption that the opposite is happening in schools, for the most part - classes are getting bigger as schools are closed and students are relocated, in an effort to save money.  Larger class sizes seem like they'd be detrimental to creating an atmosphere where every student can learn; from my years of management experience, I can share that a large part of the problem, sometimes, isn't in what you're communicating, but how you're communicating it.  Some people need things explained to them in different ways than "normal" in order to really grasp the concepts being presented, and that seems like something more easily accomplished in a smaller setting.

This isn't a problem that can be fixed just by throwing money at it, though.  I think that, somehow, the mentality of our nation needs to change to put more of an emphasis on education - from the teachers all the way down to the students themselves.  I'm not an expert on foreign education trends, but it seems like students in foreign countries have the mindset of wanting to not only attend school, but to excel.  To them, school isn't a mandatory exercise in frustration and futility, it's a real opportunity to learn and better themselves.  I don't think enough students in our country truly believe that the things they learn in school are beneficial to them and their adult life, and the truth is that they miss opportunities because of it.  The question of how to change the mentality of people is a tough one, though, and not one that I have a good answer to.  My initial thoughts include the idea of the government taking a more active role in schools and the curriculum taught, but there are a lot of inherent flaws and issues that would take ages to resolve.

I don't have too much to offer as far as the cost of college education goes.  My only real experience with it is knowing several people who got into debt from taking out student loans, and had to spend years devoting part of their income to paying those off.  I personally don't like the idea of having a long-standing debt, but I don't think it's necessarily a terrible thing - it seems like the easiest way to allow people access to higher learning, while still providing the place of education needed income.  The timely repayment of the loans (assuming such a thing happens) would help the credit of the loanee, and... well, I don't see much else that could efficiently replace the system.  I don't think that a college degree is a necessity, yet, but I definitely see things moving in that direction.  I'm at a point in my life where I can comfortably support myself, and I don't have a degree - however, in order to give myself the best opportunities I can at what I want to do, I'm going to work toward earning one.

Ultimately, I do think reform is needed here, in order to stay competitive with the rest of the world - but I don't think it's reform that can be accomplished quickly.  We need to change the core thinking that lies at the root of our educational system, and let the effects spread outward from there.  The unfortunate part about this concept is that it would take a lengthy amount of time, and a lot of money, to accomplish - but in the end, I feel that the results would be more than worth it.

Apologies if my post this week wasn't excellent - I'll try to do better next week.  Pendleton's up tomorrow, so everyone should look forward to reading what she has to say.

Too Idealistic? Maybe.

Approaching this topic is surprisingly difficult for me, for two main reasons. The first, though less relevant, is that being the person to really kick off this week's discussion is a little inherently challenging. The second is that, with education being my intended career path, this topic is one where I really don't know where to begin because I have so much to say, and parsing it down to something that would be interesting to read is a little overwhelming.

That being said, I'm going to try to address something that's not really a reform driven by public policy as much as it is driven by teachers simply doing their jobs more effectively.

Now, my sister's 3rd grade teacher sounds like one of the most terrible instructors to ever be allowed in a classroom. She is terrible at classroom management, she teaches topics in a disjointed manner, and she throws tests over material that she skipped over at them on a semi-regular basis without any warning. To top it all off, she's close to retirement and makes a point of saying how much she hates teaching and is ready to be done with it.

A less extreme example of a bad teacher, though still a seriously flawed one, is the teacher that a friend one of my teaching classes worked with this semester at a middle school. We had an observation task centered around motivation to learn, and at the end we had to interview the teachers. When asked about what we, as teachers, could do to address students that simply aren't motivated, her response was that there's nothing we can do.

In both of these examples, there's a critical flaw: attitude. Teachers cannot have this negative attitude toward their students. It sounds a bit clichéd, but teachers need to have faith in the ability of every single student to succeed, and their job is to do everything they can to make sure that their students walk away with the necessary content knowledge and belief in their own ability to succeed in future classes. I know that not every student that I have in the future will end up successful, but goddamnit, I will do everything in my power to help them get there.

That being said, attitude clearly isn't the only thing that needs to change. Elaborating on a point that I made before, content knowledge is a necessary thing to give students. The remainder of my discussion is going to be heavily oriented toward math classrooms, though honestly, I believe that the ideas at hand can be adapted to other classrooms to address similar issues in those fields.

I'm going to start with a sweeping generalization that is going to highly offend at least one reader: elementary school (and usually middle school) teachers suck at math. They don't understand how it works or why it matters. There are dozens of anecdotes out there about basic algebra tests being administered to them with abysmal results.

This is why so many people loathe math, even though it's the most beautiful and pure of the core academic subjects. They're being introduced to it by teachers that don't have the conceptual understanding that is needed to do well in high school and beyond. Instead of being taught to see patterns in how things work, students are thrown massive tables of numbers to memorize, a daunting task which turns most people off to the subject entirely. Occasionally, a student may actually be interested and ask a question like, "What if I want to subtract a bigger number from a smaller number?" to which a teacher will probably say, "YOU CAN'T DO THAT." This is terrible and not how math works. To quote Vi Hart (whose videos on YouTube you should check out immediately if you've never seen them):

The true mathematician takes 'You can't do that!' as a challenge. If you someone tells you that you can't subtract a bigger number from a smaller number, just invent negative numbers! If someone tells you that you can’t multiply a number by itself to get a negative number, then invent imaginary numbers. If someone tells you you can’t multiply two non-zero numbers together to get zero or raise one non-zero number to another and get zero, you should probably say, ‘I’ll do both at once! And in eight dimensions!’ And if you ignore them telling you that numbers aren’t eight-dimensional and that inventing fake numbers is a useless waste of time and actually figure it out, next thing you know you’ve got split-octonions, which besides being super awesome just happen to be the perfect way to describe the wave equation of electrons and stuff.

The more appropriate answer to the student's question would be, "Well, you can only do that with negative numbers, and those are a little too complicated for us right now, so we're going to stick with the numbers we're used to for now." It may not be the answer that the student wants, but it will help them to feel less lied to later on when they're told that negative numbers are real and have these strange multiplication properties that seem like more ridiculous arbitrary rules.

Instruction should focus on trying to develop a conceptual understanding of material rather than a procedural one. This more deeply instills a sense of understanding in students than simply throwing rules at them and saying, "THIS IS HOW THINGS WORK." It makes them feel like the subject is less stupid and arbitrary, and the fact that you're probably not speaking in all caps makes them respect the class far more.

To get to the underlying point I'm trying to make, teachers need to not suck. They need to be able to do their jobs well. Allowing crap like the teachers I mentioned earlier to continue existing in the schools is an abomination. I think that these issues could probably start to be addressed by US society treating teaching like a legitimate profession and giving teachers slightly more than minimum wage as a salary, but until that happens, the burden is really on teachers in the system to actually give a damn about what they're doing and try to fully understand the material they're teaching and why they're teaching it.

But most importantly, they need to never give up on their students.

Week of 5/13 - Education Reform

For our third week we will be discussing Education Reform.

Our group resides in the United States, so our experiences are all influenced by the American educational system. For any international readers, I will try to briefly summarize how our system works. We go to school from we are around five to about eighteen, although the age varies between states. Unlike some other school systems, people do not go to a separate high school depending on the occupation they are looking into; everyone attends the same school and takes similar style of classes until college. After finishing school at 18, people can go to college if they wish, or enter the military or some sort of trade school or just enter the workforce.

Here, most of the thoughts behind education reform try and address two problems -  the idea that our primary and secondary education system is falling behind the rest of the world, especially in poor urban or rural areas and that the cost of college education is becoming unsustainable just as a college degree is becoming practically necessary to holding a good, high paying job.

I am interested in reading how our group's experiences with education have influenced how they think it could be better. I am looking forward to how many of our posts address other country's educational systems, ways reform is being tried here, or perhaps their own, untested hypothesizes on how we could better educate our futures. But as with all opinions on reform, perhaps some will address whether it is actually necessary, and how plausible it is to try such reform, and whether such broad institutional change would actually be possible, especially in a federalist country such as the United States.

See you all this Saturday, as I weigh in with my own opinion on the topic.