This afternoon the router wasn’t working and both boys (Grade 8 and 10) had a short-lived panic episode, as they needed to get on the Net to do some schoolwork; assigned today and due tomorrow. Of course, they cannot do homework without Net access.
It appears that the school here has done a pretty good job of off-loading much of its work to third parties:
- There are few up to date books in the library
- There are few computers at school; time has to be booked; they are blocked from many sites; and they are slow.
- Spare classes are not allowed (can’t control the kids), so there’s no time to do research at school anyway.
- Homework is assigned to be done at home, where at least our kids have high speed Internet access and a quiet place to do work, not like at school.
On top of all this off-loading of access to knowledge, not once has either of our teenagers received any instruction at school on how to do research, or how to check a source. I have set up a list of Student Resources for them, but no teacher has ever done that. No teacher has created a Wikipedia entry or shown how to do it, and Wikipedia is the main reference (next to Google search) that students seem to use.
The school administration goes on about quality education but they are being completely bypassed in knowledge gathering, basic research, and connecting to these young learners. Where are the teachers in our community using the Internet to connect with their students? I fear that far too many are hiding behind the walls of the institution and the comfort blanket of the union.
At this rate, it will soon be obvious to all that there is little value in actually attending school. Around here, in New Brunswick, Canada, the schools are making themselves rather redundant.
One of the problems with the school is a litteracy problem. At first I thought that many of the teachers were technology illiterate.
Now I believe that many of the teachers are actually just plain illiterates. They just aren’t into learning.
I was reading a US school reform report a while back. The report described how it is often the students that cannot make it into disciplines that became teachers. Scary.
The report also suggested that teaching staff should be a mixture of teaching professionals and passionate people. Sure couldn’t be worst than what I have seen in schools.
If universities are a physical version of plentyoffish .. schools are a physical version of.. FaceBook maybe.. a now I like schools.
Gilbert
We are very fortunate in our district here in St. Louis in regards to the effective use of technology by teachers, not only to support their teaching but to support the kids’ learning.
An example is my elder son’s Geometry teacher – using a smartboard and .mp3 recorder, he records all lectures, including examples, and posts them to his website before leaving school that day. Not only does it help my son go back and make sure he’s got his notes straight, it helps us parents to know what they should be working on.
A great (huge) improvement over the last district we were in, which sounds a lot like what you described here.
I have mixed feelings on the use of technology in subjects like mathematics or music. These are two fields where we have seen child prodigies. I certainly do not need technology to teach those subjects.
I do wonder how sound the school curriculum is and methodologies are. One morning my son wanted to play games on the computer. There were no games on my laptop but some of my work in computerized formative assessment was on that machine.
My son was in NB grade 3 at the time. I logged in to Quebec grade 4 formative assessments for mathematics and told him to it was a math game. He had trouble with the first few questions and then his level changed. He went throught the entire grade 4 and grade 5 program within less than 4 hours. He did higher than 90 on two summative assessments. Never had to teach him anything.
So I wonder what are they doing in school if a kid can do 2 years of math in 4 hours without even sweating. If you take into account that my son was assessed by the school system as a slow learner in his first year, it really makes you wonder. He seemed to like school at the time although when the teacher asked how he felt about school he said that it made him want to puke. Got a good laugh out of that one because he didn’t realize there was anything improper about such a comment.
Gilbert
From an interview with John Gatto (NY City, teacher of the year):
“It’s funny, you can take five-year-olds off the street, and teach them in about two weeks to do all the arithmetic operations mentally ? really, up to multiplying four or five figures! That’s all it would take, two weeks. Even accomplished mathematicians say that the entire mathematics curriculum through calculus and trig takes about 50 contact hours to deliver.
The consensus is that it takes 30 contact hours to bring someone to the point where they can be a self-teacher in reading for the rest of their lives.”
http://osdir.com/ml/culture.autism/2006-10/msg00004.html
Funny that the mental arithmetic comes up in the discussion. I once trained a few kids to do 3 digit by 3 digit multiplication using muscular techniques.
Took about 3 hours. They were very fast. Less than one second for a calculation.
Wow. That John Gatto post is awesome.