One thing that has never ceased to amaze me is how websites can simply break even when you haven’t touched them at all. You’ll just be surfing along and headed towards one of your favorite sites, like Shyzer.com, and instead of receiving your semi-daily pointless banter from me, you get some garbled up error message.
Isn’t technology grand?
During my senior year of high school, I took a few AP classes, which were advanced classes where you took a giant test at the end of the year and depending on your score, earned college credit. I didn’t know it at the time, but these AP classes ended up enabling me to go to Australia my senior year of college since I didn’t need a full semester of classes to graduate then. So suffice to say, AP classes = awesomness.
One of the bad things, however, was that at the time, there was a huge surge of AP classes being offered on a trial basis. The state was trying to further advance the opportunities offered to students, which I give them full credit for, so they almost doubled the numbed of available AP courses from the basics like Calculus, English, and US History to include new ones, such as most foreign languages, Government, and one I ended up taking, Psychology.
My AP Psychology teacher was great. She wasn’t that much older than us and loved to joke around and converse with us as equals, not as kids. She even ended up having us over at her house for a giant water balloon fight / pizza party at the end of the year, which was well above and beyond the call of duty. However, when it came to the actual class and subject material of psychology…well, she left a little to be desired. She was a recent college grad with a degree in Interior Design and had only recently started teaching, yet here she was “teaching” us psychology, which basically amounted to her reading out of the book and trying to stay one chapter ahead of us.
And yet she was one of my better “non-qualified” teachers I had throughout the years.
There’s something inherently wrong with much of the education system these days. With exception to a few small things, we are essentially teaching our children in the same method and style as our grandparents were taught, despite changes in society and technology (Hi there computers! Is that a TV over there in the corner? Dry erase markers smell funny!), while at the same time expecting our teachers to stay one step ahead of the curve. Yet the curve keeps winding around a different corner faster and faster each year and you can’t go a week without tripping over an article in The New York Times about the plight of finding qualified, much less warm bodies, to teach.
Nothing stands out more than when you have a technological inept middle aged woman teaching kids how to use a computer. We understand that in every aspect, children learn complicated tasks faster than adults. Why do you think there’s been such a big push to teach kids a foreign language at a young age? Because they’re much more likelier to pick it up in the 1st grade than in the 12th! So then why do we have teachers leading kids at a snail’s pace simply because the teacher is having a hard time learning and understand HTML, PHP, new ways to Google search, new computer parts, etc. etc. Almost every computer class I’ve always been in, I’ve outsmarted the teacher by a mile, which is more the norm than the exception.
Simply put, we have done a horrible job at keeping our educational system up with both progress and expectations.
We’ve put too much of an emphasis on finding “qualified” teachers; people who have the complete package (ie, know every subject well enough to actually teach it with some sort of authority) and who also have the passion and desire to teach. The faster we come to the conclusion that there’s not nearly enough of these people out there as we would hope, the better our children and our schools will be.
The main school I’ve subbed at for the past year has begun to try and address this problem. Despite being an elementary school, where traditionally kids only have one teacher throughout the year, they’ve instead adopted a more middle/high school approach where kids have multiple teachers, no matter what the grade level. Each teacher gets a specific subject to “master.” Usually this is something they excel at and have a great track record of teaching successfully and in exchange, they drop a subject they are weak in or don’t want to teach. Thus, each student has it’s main teacher, say Mrs. Smith, who teaches them everything except for one subject, say English. When it comes time for English, they kids pack up and head over to Mrs. Bell’s class since she is the English whiz and Mrs. Smith gets to teach math to Mrs. Bell’s class.
This might seem pretty basic, but it’s the first school I’ve seen do it. No other school in the area does it and I know none of the schools where I grew up did this either. It greatly enhances certain areas of importance, though. The students are all guaranteed to be taught at least two subjects where the teachers absolutely know their stuff, while at the same time have their main teacher’s glaring weakness nullified. Is this the solution? Not entirely, but it’s certainly a move in the right direction.
This still doesn’t address the greater issue at hand, which is that save for a few small differences, kids today are taught in much the same manner as our grandparents were. Students are given textbooks at the beginning of the year and for the most part, all of their learning is pulled from that, despite the many studies and books (I highly recommend the one to your right) that have been written that show how faulty the majority of textbooks are. Knowledge, just like everything else these days, seems to shift and change with every new sunrise. Hell, Pluto isn’t even a planet anymore! My very excellent mother just served us nine…um….damn. It’s for this reason alone that we need to shift away from teaching materials that take months or years to update to material that takes days to be updated. Put it this way: whoever creates a full array of teaching materials that can be downloaded straight onto the computers in a classroom and who can market it in a way that makes people realize that teaching from computers is the way of the future is going to be filthy rich.
Which leads me to my next point. Why are we so reluctant to use technology in the classroom? (And crappy PowerPoint presentations don’t count.) I’ve already written about how kids these days have changed, even when compared only to my generation. This is a technology driven society now, one where you can’t take a piss without a computer in the toilet thanking you for your deposit and so kindly flushing it away for you. So then why is it that when I walk into a classroom, I see only a few computers in the corner that are only used as rewards for good behavior or finishing an assignment fast?
And cost shouldn’t be an obstacle. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project has the chance to revolutionize the way we approach education, not just here in America, but throughout the world in general. But even without that project, computers have fallen in price so dramatically that I could go out and buy a $300 computer that would rival the brand spanking new one I bought for $1500 six years ago. The technology for wireless internet throughout a school is not only already here, but easily installable, affordable, and maintainable. If I can rig up my entire household to receive Internet no matter where I am for under $100, schools could easily do it for under a grand. This isn’t rocket science we’re talking about here, it’s adults who are apprehensive to changing and adopting with new technology.
We need to rethink the way we’re teaching kids and we need to do it fast. Otherwise, we’re doing a disservice to our children, not ourselves.
I ordered a bullhorn off the Internet today. I’m not really sure why.
I’m sure I’ll be able to put it to good use, though. And by “good use” I mean continuing to make fun of people constantly, only now in a much louder and more obnoxious voice.
One thing I love about teaching kids is talking about them to other teachers. Preferably when they’re not around.
It’s almost a guilty pleasure that feels so wrong, it starts to feel right.
I just want it on record that I’m opposed to whoever came up with the concept of giving me beautiful weather one day after such a cold winter, only to snatch it back from me just as quickly. Yesterday it was 70 degrees with clear skies at 6:00 thanks to the new Daylight’s Savings time. 24 hours ago, I’m jumping on the trampoline with the Gooblings, dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, listening to the dogs run around beneath us and bark in wonder as they try to grasp the concept of us floating above them.
Tomorrow? I may be pulling out my boats to go shovel the driveway.
I blame El Nino.
I promise when I’m finally on one of your shows, I won’t get up and walk off screen as soon as the interview is over. You can tell a lot about a guest who does that…well, actually, you can only tell that they never watch either of the shows, but that’s all we really need to know about them.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a long post over here on Shyzer, which is part purposefully, part circumstance. It doesn’t take a genius to know that “pithy” is not a word used very often to describe my writing, even when I’m aiming for that short, but sweet type post. I like to think I’m getting better at it though.
On the flip side, whenever I actually have had time to work on something, 9 times out of 10 I gravitate towards a project on Hey, It’s Free! and devote all of my attention there. Today while “teaching,” I made a list of all the projects I’ve got half complete on HIF! and that ultimately led to doing the same here for Shyzer. Who remembers this? I sure as hell do. I remember sitting outside on the deck or trampoline and trying to come write it all. I easily spent 15+ hours working on it - trying to research stuff I could turn into jokes, setting up the best matches possible, writing more then I even ended up publishing here on Shyzer…
And yet I never finished it.
Those last four words don’t even surprise me anymore when I say them. “I never finished it.” Shlyrics. Tens of thousands of words strung out between dozens of potential posts. The Religion Tournament. And this is just on Shyzer. Is it because I’m lazy? Do I enjoy just dabbling my feet in something new before growing bored with it? Do I start them only to realize they are going to suck and thus cut my losses?
I don’t know. I’m too lazy to bother thinking about it.
When it comes to substituting, one factor is a constant. The level of the grade you’re teaching is directly equal to the number of hours you’ll be prohibited from doing a damn thing while at the same time representing your level of happiness with the material you are allowed to teach.
If I have to talk about Christopher Columbus or explain how to multiple 8 by 4 one more day, I may just stab myself with a blunt spoon.
I’d totally hug this guy.
Digg.com has seen a bunch of quizzes pop up lately where people seem to take pleasure in finding out how little they know. Name the 50 US States. Name all the African countries. Name all the countries in the world.
Well fine, if people enjoy feeling stupid, then they can take my Goob’s Thought Quiz and find out just how futile it is for them to try and follow my train of thought! For best results, just don’t answer at all and read the “solutions” from start to finish.
TADA!
