One of the quotes that stood out the most to me in this section of the readings was when, speaking about the current generation of students, Ellen Kumata said that “They don’t have less of a work ethic. They have a different work ethic.” As someone at the upper cusp of this generation, I think this sentiment is very accurate. In this era of 24-hour news cycles, constant Internet access, and social networking, the old nine to five workday seems a bit of a relic to me, and this carries over into education as well. For my own part, I always found that I did my best work at night, and so it always vexed me that school and tests started so bright and early in the day.
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I agree that many aspects of our school system (and, subsequently, the working world) are relics from a past era. At my last school site, several teachers were talking about a major study that had come out. While I don’t recall the specifics of the article, I do recall that its general point was that expecting students to perform academically before 8 30 was doing them a grave disservice. I’d believe that. I know that early mornings usually leave me feeling groggy, and I’ve seen the same thing happen at my school sites; first period is usually quiet as a tomb, as students are still struggling their way to full consciousness. I’m sure part of the motivation for this is to make it easier for parents to get their kids to school before going to work, but releasing students at 2:30 or 3:00 is just pushing the problem to the other end of the day. Besides, in the modern world, many jobs no longer fit this mold, making the helpfulness of this timeframe even more dubious.
While I freely admit that one of the reasons I was interested in teaching was because I liked the idea of still having summer break, I can also acknowledge that having a two month break causes students to forget a fair amount of what they learned the year before, forcing the teachers the following year to spend more time reteaching old content. Maybe by altering the schedule, even while retaining the same amount of time for break, student retention of information can be increased and more time can be spent on new content.
The bell system was useful for training students to be used to shift changes in industrial jobs, but the American economy has turned more and more toward services instead of industrial production, making this adjustment of limited utility. What’s more, this gives students the mindset that learning is to be compartmentalized, hampering their ability to develop critical thinking skills across subject boundaries and instilling in many a lack of interest in lifelong learning.
I think that this issue in particular is addressed by the approach High Tech High takes. While I don’t like most aspects of charter school operation, I did like HTH’s practice of eschewing textbooks in favor of projects, especially the heavy emphasis on interdisciplinary work and the lack of discrete “classes” like world history or english 9. Belief in interdisciplinary study is a big part of why I am working towards credentials in both social science and english.
I was also reminded of the notion of “Big History”, a school of thought based around approaching all of the various academic fields (mainly mathematics, the sciences, and the humanities) as different aspects of the same unifying narrative- the history of the universe. Big history starts with the Big Bang, and continues through the formation of the Earth, the first emergence of life, evolution, and the emergence of humanity, all the way through the present. A good example of this kind of thinking can be found in either version of the television show Cosmos, which combines scientific information with historical fact and at times literature as well, especially moving into discussions of modernity. I think that, if more schools adopted a similar approach, we would find that students were more engaged, because it would be easier to see how different content areas were related to each other and why any of this matters.
While I freely admit that one of the reasons I was interested in teaching was because I liked the idea of still having summer break, I can also acknowledge that having a two month break causes students to forget a fair amount of what they learned the year before, forcing the teachers the following year to spend more time reteaching old content. Maybe by altering the schedule, even while retaining the same amount of time for break, student retention of information can be increased and more time can be spent on new content.
The bell system was useful for training students to be used to shift changes in industrial jobs, but the American economy has turned more and more toward services instead of industrial production, making this adjustment of limited utility. What’s more, this gives students the mindset that learning is to be compartmentalized, hampering their ability to develop critical thinking skills across subject boundaries and instilling in many a lack of interest in lifelong learning.
I think that this issue in particular is addressed by the approach High Tech High takes. While I don’t like most aspects of charter school operation, I did like HTH’s practice of eschewing textbooks in favor of projects, especially the heavy emphasis on interdisciplinary work and the lack of discrete “classes” like world history or english 9. Belief in interdisciplinary study is a big part of why I am working towards credentials in both social science and english.
I was also reminded of the notion of “Big History”, a school of thought based around approaching all of the various academic fields (mainly mathematics, the sciences, and the humanities) as different aspects of the same unifying narrative- the history of the universe. Big history starts with the Big Bang, and continues through the formation of the Earth, the first emergence of life, evolution, and the emergence of humanity, all the way through the present. A good example of this kind of thinking can be found in either version of the television show Cosmos, which combines scientific information with historical fact and at times literature as well, especially moving into discussions of modernity. I think that, if more schools adopted a similar approach, we would find that students were more engaged, because it would be easier to see how different content areas were related to each other and why any of this matters.
This TED Talk does a great job of explaining the basic concepts of Big History.