[geeks] Education

[Michael Parson]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2005 at 12:47:26PM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Fri, 30 Sep 2005 @ 11:34 -0500, Michael Parson said:
>> Right.  The homework I hated the most in grade-school days was pure
>> busy work.  Copying down the vocabulary words and looking-up/copying
>> the definitions out of the glossary in the back of the book.  
>
> Yeah, and doing literally hundreds of multiplation problems, sometimes
> *YEARS* after I had mastered it.
>
>> People learn different ways.  I learned to read by learning the rules
>> of the English language.  The whole 'i before e except after c' type
>> stuff.  That worked for me.  Won't work for everyone, some people do
>> better with (the ironically named) phonics.  
>
> I never understood it from the rules point of view, however I suspect it
> was because of the way the rules were taught.  I can remember a lot of
> frustration in English because the rules were often different from
> teacher to teacher, or at least were presented so differently that I had
> a hard time learning them.

My mother is a reading teacher.  She's taught everything from
grade-school all the way up to post-graduate stuff.  Right now, her
basic classes are either remdial reading for college age kids at the
community college and teaching reading teachers how to teach reading.

She hates blanket policies too and recognizes that different students
learn in different ways as well.  But in her experience, most kids seem
to do better with rules than phonics.

I was working with a friend's six year old today, she picked up a book
that was just a level or two above her and she was trying to read it by
sounding out the words, full of examples of how phonics aren't any more
a catch-all than rules-based.

> However, I could read from encyclopedias and the KJV bible when I was
> four.  My mother taught me, and I learned a lot, believe it or not, from
> watching television.  I somehow picked up on words on the screen, and
> what people were saying, even if the program was not educational.

My parents let me read just about anything I wanted, whenever I wanted.
I read encyclopedias, bibles, anything I could get my hands on.  They
just never got me any comic books, and I never really didn't know what I
didn't have.

> It was not until fifth grade that the school curriculum caught up to my
> level of reading.

I never really felt like I was behind.  But a lot of my teachers would
let me read in class if I was quiet and not disrupting the others.
Never really knew that wasn't normal. =)

> I *HATED* reading in school, and it led to a general hatred of English
> until I got into college.
>
> I was reading sci-fi, technical rags, and lot's of stuff in my grade
> school years.
>
> But in the classroom, I was sitting there reading things like "Jane lies
> on the grass.  The grass is green.  Jane looks up at the sky.  The sky
> is blue."
>
> I had to sit in school waiting on kids who took 10 minutes to write
> their own name.
>
> I was a terrible student in junior high and most of high school, mostly
> because I was bored to tears, and because the conformity brainwashing
> didn't sit well with me.

Once I figured out the game, I was able to do pretty wellin junior
high and high school.  I found out that the 'honors' and 'gifted and
talented' classes did more project based work and little, if any home
work, definatly no busy work.  More group oriented activities in class.
I took those classes cuz they were less 'work' than the basic-level
ones.

> Going to college was like waking up from a nightmare though, and up
> until I started having to work a lot, I suddenly became a straight-A
> student.

College was a big slap in the face for me.  I never learned how to
really study or be a good student that the colleges were expecting.  I
couldn't manipulated the system like I had in HS, at least, I didn't get
it figured out in the short time I was there.  The system was too big
and too different from what I'd been in before.

>> When I went to school, most people were taught the same way I was, so
>> I did OK with that, but a lot of kids didn't.  These days, we have a
>> strong push for phonics, which will catch those that got left behind
>> when I was a kid, but might not work so well on kids that learned
>> like I did.  Blanket approaches don't work so well.
>
> I hate blanket policies.  It's a classic wrong answer given by
> government and organizations in the place of doing the job right.
>
>> Whatever method that most math teachers use to teach higher
>> mathmatics didn't work very well on me.  I'm fine with arithmatic and
>> basic algebra, but once I got into trig and calculus, I was lost.
>> Doing the 'homework' didn't do me any good when I didn't understand
>> the fundamentals.
>
> I took calculus in college three times.  The last time my professor
> was different from the others in that he was a lot smarter, and he
> paid attention to individual progress.

After failing calculus twice and finally geting a low C the third time,
I went back and took college algebra.  I was lost even in that class at
first, but one day, without my prompting, he went back and filled in the
one piece I was missing.  Suddenly 3 semesters of calculus made sense.
I really was missing just one basic piece.  I remember when I figured it
out, suddenly I was able to rip through the problems in a few minutes
what had taken me tens of minutes to do before.  I saw the bulb go off
in a few other students heads too.  Sadly, I don't really remember what
it was that finally clicked it.  That was quite a few years ago.

But I'd pretty much given up on the whole college thing by then.  That
one class wasn't enough to turn me around and get back into it.  Classes
kept getting in the way of me learning about how to run the VAX and Unix
systems.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org