[geeks] Education

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 @ 19:29 -0500, Michael Parson said:

> 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.

It does... *IF* the teachers are competent.

If a poor teacher or a poor curriculum is used, rules-based English is a
disaster.

> 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.

I never got into comic books either.  Sci-fi and fantasy caught my eye
early, especially Asimov and Tolkien.

I read various "technical" magazines my father bought.

> 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. =)

Note: I didn't feel like *I* was behind, I felt like the *SCHOOL* was
behind.

> 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.

Hmmmm... where I went to school, the GT and AP classes were sometimes
mostly just more of the same.

However, English was pretty good.  AP English was the first such class I
ever liked.  I had been forbidden to take it for years because I was
"too dumb", but in reality it probably was what I needed.

I was also barred from taking computer science in high school.

A few AP classes were project based, and I wasn't allowed to take them
either.

Of course, if you were one of the rich kids or a military brat, you
could take whatever you pleased.  The school catered to them at everyone
else's expense.

> 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've never been a good student either, but in the colleges I attended
the combination of difficulty (which was shocking given the low quality
of my public education), and flexibility in how I studied, worked pretty
well for me.  I suppose it forced me to change really fast to survive.

> 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.

I think it is sad that you ever have to learn to work the system.  You
should just be able to study and get what you need.

> 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.

I always hated it when professors interrupted my programming work to
teach me how to program... :)


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["Consulting wouldn't be what it is today
without Microsoft Windows" -- Chris Pinkham]