Quote:
Originally Posted by epchick
Exactly!! I am astonished to see how much my mom struggles (she's an 8th grade language arts teacher) to teach her kids something that DOESN'T revolve around testing. She always telling me how her curriculum has to focus on the TAKS tests. In 8th grade they don't take the writing TAKS, they take the reading. So to make sure her kids pass the TAKS she has to focus her curriculum on making sure the kids know what to do on the reading, and so their writing skills suffer!
My mom says that the main worry in the schools is to just teach what the kids will be tested on...why? Because the teachers just want to be able to keep their jobs.
I was SHOCKED to see my 8th grade cousin (who is very bright) plagerize her science fair report. When I questioned her about it she said that:
1. she didn't plagerize b/c she changed a couple words around
2. her teacher never taught them how to make sure NOT to plagerize
3. her teacher doesn't even care.
I know that I got in major trouble in 4th grade for plagerizing, and to see that it isn't taken seriously at this stage is appalling. What is she going to do when she goes to HS and college?
I know that soemtimes testing can be good, but not everyone (like me) do well on standardized testing. I think we should just go back to the days when teachers were able to TEACH!
|
I agree with your comments, but we can all improve our grammar. Plagiarism is a serious offense and if one fails to learn it when they are young, he or she will fail to learn about when in college and they actually do test you on those subjects.
What we learn today is different from the teaching methods of yesteryear. It can be explained that 20 years ago, all we had to record our ideas were a PC on DOS, listen to music on a huge CD player and rented movies on VCRs--beta max. Now, we view movies on line, digimons and DVDs, iPODS if we have them. We record music on our iPhones, MP3 players and we program our directions to our destinations on our GPS's.
All this to say that when we ask our teachers to prepare our students for the technology world, then we need to be thinking in projects, with showing our work. There are other activities that we can do to give the "experiential method" versus the "Skinner, Piaget and partially Socratic" method of teaching.
I bet if you asked kids in a urban high school to organize a business model that will attract a defined number of people, using a safe production procedures, folks would be amazed...
When I get my students, I find their weak points, then I built them up from there.