I have an idea for how I feel middle and high school should be. Please, tell me what you think.?

Question

Very often I am told I would make a good teacher. I love being around kids and youth and feel an instinctive compulsion to avail them of all the knowledge I possess. I understand what other people see when they look at me in the company of my younger fellow human beings, a bright eyed, energetic, engaging young man who talks to his younger kin with excitement, interest and respect. I understand because that is exactly how I feel. I see my younger self when I look at young ones and I feel the sympathetic eagerness and zeal that pulsed ever so strongly in me during my childhood and youth. Now, as an adult, I want to be the man who inspires youth, the man who I wish had been there to inspire me. An adult brimming over with vitality and vigour and zest for life. YEAGH!!! sigh. if only i could be that way in our current education system...a monolith of stagnancy and antiquated notions of humans needing an environment of didactic discipline and regulation to enable any sort of productivity.

Answer 1

That was one extremely long statement and should have been in a blog. :)

Well It is good that you see that there is more of a purpose for you to become a teacher than money. I respect that.

Answer 2

While I think you have successfully identified some of the problems with out public education system, I think your solution misses the mark by a wide margin.  I think that your biggest error is how you mark the purpose of public schools. While it's admirable that you care so much about the individual student, I think a greater argument can be made that public schools exist to produce productive members of society. Public education exists for the public.

I think that some very basic questions need to be answered before your ideas can be given serious thought.

1. What if students don't want to learn anything? What if a student wants to go play Halo 3 all day at home? What do you do with a student like that?

2. Would this system, if it woked well, produce adults who are only good at one thing and nothing else? Why or why not? Do you think this is a concern?

3. Why does a student have to go to a school building to simply pursue his or her interests? Why not just give students supplies and such at home so they can do that? Why make them all go somewhere?

4. What about students with disabilities?

5. How do you determine when a student is done with school? How does one "graduate" from your system?

The simple fact of the matter is, and I think you already know this, is that your plan, as stated, has absolutely no chance of ever being implemented in your lifetime. Essentially zero. This doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad idea, mind you, but I think you have to agree that what you've got here is 90% passion and 10% practicality.

Today's educational system has its problems, there is no doubt. I don't think it's as bad as you seem to, but there's a lot of room for improvement. If you take a historical look at things, at the types of people and the types of plans that really changed the world, you'll see something. You'll see an abundance of passion, something you have. But you'll also see an abundance of hard work and failure. Especially failure.

If you end up being one of those people, if you succeed in really changing how we educate in this country, I believe you're going to look back on this proposal as one of your stepping stones, probably one of your early failures. I'm sorry, but I can't see any way that what you've got here is going to work.

Answer 3

hey, um  dont write so much... and i feel that a teacher should like to teach their students and be friends and parents to them.  if a teacher acts like a robot and doesnt like to teach,  what is the benefit for anyone?

Answer 4

Congratulations on identifying your passion and rationalizing it!  

Montessori education sounds a lot like what you propose.  Have you looked into their ideas?

http://www.montessori.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori

Answer 5

I would like to say that, yes, it was long but I'm glad I took the time to read it. I'm sure something will have rubbed off onto me. You have a pleasant journey you hear !

Answer 6

Yes and no.

First, if what goes on in elementary school is non-educational (in the sense of intellectual empowerment, rather than drill in meaningless snippets), then the middle school kids will have no motivation to learn (since they don't know how fun, interestig, and empowering learning IS), and won't know how to go about it.

You might be interested in reading what I put on my blog about education.

http://360.yahoo.com/ajabinker

I've spent most of my working life in educational reform, so your ciritcisms of what we do now (deadening, rather than empowering minds) is near and dear to my heart.

You might be interested in the notion of Essential Schools -- which is much like what you're proposing. Students work on projects, that span many fields, are self-driven, and genuinely educational.

You might also be interested in the current reform movement in Math. If the other subjects would follow suit, we'd be well on our way to a genuinely educational system. (I gather physics education is having a similar movement, just starting.)

The gist of MY plan for education is: Every area has a relatively few most broadly applicable ideas. Education should focus on students mastering the use of those ideas in understanding their world better.

Instead of "giving" students bits of stuff, and micro-skills, they should be getting and constantly applying, those big ideas, on this or that situation, task, problem, phenomenon, etc. Individually and collaboratively applying their minds at the task of understanding or doing something; and incorporating those useful ideas, thus making them part of their intellectual tool-kits.

Do read my blog items on education, and leave comments, or email me. I'm keen to know what you'd think.

Many years ago, there was a Reasoning and Writing Across the Curriculum program in Greensboro, NC district (unfortunately axed after five years, do to district mergerage). They had a component they'd developed: Write in the Middle.

As an alternative to the standard middle school Language Arts class, they had writing workshops. Everyone wrote, read each other's writing, revised, discussed writing, and produced publishable works.

At the end of the year, students were interviewed about the experience, compare to the Language Arts classes they'd had before.

Every one of the students said the Writing Workshop was harder. Two-thirds said they preferred it. They got so much more out of it than diagramming sentences for no reason whatsoever, and the other meaningless activities they'd been used to.

You may want to devote your energies to helping reform education. There's a lot of worthwhile research being done in better understanding how students learn, and what has to happen for genuine learning to take place.

There's also teaching all this to future teachers.

And there's the political aspect -- educating the general public about what genuine education entails, so they'll support its implementation.

Do not give up on this most worthy goal.

I firmly believe our continued existence and our well-being depends on it.

BTW, I hope this isn't offed as a violation of the Guidelines as not a question. Although you're asking for our feedback, it's hecka long and not very questiony.