Survey regarding school and computers

[deathdrow]

For the school system to do what you want riku, there would need to be a hell of a lot more funding, which a lot of school's don't have.

My school just built a huge football stadium and is currently building a new building for the students. The district built a 2-story elementary school not to far as well. [cabbage] we don't have enough funding.

My school is falling apart, we hardly have any sports programs or extra curriculars, the school can't afford to buy like, anything at all, and everything is made really cheaply. You're just [bleep]ing lucky to go to a good school like that, I go to a [cabbage]hole, and half the teachers don't even have the proper uhm, what's the word, requirements kind of, to teach. half of them don't have degrees past high school.

[ThurinEthir]

Sports take too much dominance in our school lives. Western society.

 

 

I think at least through middle school, all subjects should be taught. Sitting in those classes is often what tells people what they're interested in. My middle school also had some random classes we had to take, like art and tech ed, which also help people explore their options.

My high school has only a 2 year math requirement, so maybe I don't see this as as big a problem as some of you do. Sure, I'm going to take math all 4 years (or maybe just 3 since I might not have anything to take as a senior... :unsure: ), but if someone's made up their mind as a junior that they want to pursue a career in something that involves very little math, then they can probably simply not take math if they don't wish to. Though I think just about every science career involves some sort of "advanced" math. And in today's world, there are a lot of those. (and tons of other careers do too)

Math classes really should be about the the concepts, rather than the execution. Though honing quick arithmetic couldn't hurt. I couldn't care less whether someone does something with a calculator as opposed to in their head or with pen/paper. What does matter more (if they're an engineer or something, I dunno) is whether someone knows how to find the angles of a triangle when given two sides. What does matter is whether someone can add up prices quickly. I know there are some absolutely useless concepts (proofs might fall under here, although for curious people who want to know why things work, it wouldn't), but looking beyond those things, I think I've learned a lot more useful stuff than useless in the time I've spent learning math. Maybe the math curriculum where I am just doesn't suck.

And did I mention that math can be fun? Yes, I know I'm a nerd, but it's...fun. And apparently it's good for your brain or something. Cool.

Also, my pre-calc class is getting along pretty well with very little usage of calculators. My teacher is really young too, so he's not one of those old guys who thinks calculators are evil. He grew up in an age of calculators himself.

On another note, my calculator just ran out of batteries. Damn it. <_<

[Giordano]

 

And did I mention that math can be fun? Yes, I know I'm a nerdasian, but it's...fun.

Math isn't fun. :sad:

[Riku3220]

 

And did I mention that math can be fun? Yes, I know I'm a nerdasian, but it's...fun.

Math isn't fun. :sad:

It's fun when you're passing...

 

My teacher gave me a zero because the student behind me who graded my paper didn't put a grade on the top... :wall:

[ThurinEthir]

 

And did I mention that math can be fun? Yes, I know I'm a nerdasian, but it's...fun.

Math isn't fun. :sad:

:razz:

I ranted on more than I probably should have. Oh well.

And if anyone cares, I think I spend more time playing games on my calculator than actually doing math... :huh:

[PoorLepRecon]

 

And did I mention that math can be fun? Yes, I know I'm a nerdasian, but it's...fun.

Math isn't fun. :sad:

:razz:

I ranted on more than I probably should have. Oh well.

And if anyone cares, I think I spend more time playing games on my calculator than actually doing math... :huh:

 

If mine had games, I would play them all the time as well. I always borrow someone else's calculator if I am extremely bored.

[Giordano]

 

And did I mention that math can be fun? Yes, I know I'm a nerdasian, but it's...fun.

Math isn't fun. :sad:

:razz:

I ranted on more than I probably should have. Oh well.

And if anyone cares, I think I spend more time playing games on my calculator than actually doing math... :huh:

I did that. Not playing games, but messing with graphs and writing down messages.

[Maleficus1055]

And did I mention that math can be fun? Yes, I know I'm a nerdasian, but it's...fun.

Math isn't fun. :sad:

:razz:

I ranted on more than I probably should have. Oh well.

And if anyone cares, I think I spend more time playing games on my calculator than actually doing math... :huh:

 

I had that game on my calculator where theres all these colored ballas on the top of the screen (my calculator had them in different patterns of pixels) and you shoot balls from the bottom to the top ones and if you stick 3 together they disappear, i believe it was called Bust A Move. I spent more time in Geometry class playing that than doing math my freshman year. Then when my calculators batteries died the game somehow got erased :(.

I still have Pong on there though!

[krimi]

What is so bad about learning something that isn't your specialization? High school, perhaps college too, tries to broaden students to be well-rounded. You could say that the school system isn't doing a good job of it, but is it really that bad to learn a little about everything and do well in one thing?

 

We should get more computers in our school though, we need more Maleficus1055s in the world.

[pennywise]

I think math is necessary to learn in school. Even if you think you want to do something in your life after graduating high school, it might not work out the way you wanted it to. You might be interested in the subject matter of a particular course, but once you actually enter that line of work it may not be that appealing to you. For example, for years my brother thought he wanted to be a journalist or whatever, but when he graduated hs and actually went into the journalism field, he realized he didn't like any of the people he would be working with or how the industry itself worked. He cooks now.

 

 

Anyway, my point is, just because you think you like a particular math-less subject now doesn't mean you will like the actual career that deals with that math-;ess subject. and if that happens, you should be able to fall back on a job/career that requires you to use your math skills you learned throughout school.

hopefully this makes sense

[michel555555]

Havn't done the survey yet but i will later.

 

I agree that some of the traditional subjects need to be changed. Theoretically you should know what your career path will be by the last 2 years of highschool. if not you are in for a lot of trouble when the time finally comes to choose subjects for university. Which is why finishing up this last year of school for me is a bleep because I don't need to know advanced algabra and, although i enjoy reading shakespeare, I have better things that i could be learning with my time rather then the same english courses over and over again.

 

The way I would like to see the school system orginized is the first 2 years of high school to still contain some of the higher core courses, but have it more career orientated. such as when learning about biology actually go out into the woods and show people what is actually done in careers that use biology from day to day instead of just reading a text book and going, " this is a plant. Unlike animal cells plant cells have a cell wall". That way people will actually get an idea of what it means to be a biologist or a chemist and won't be stuck learning what each career is about from a university pamphlet.

 

The last two years of high school could then still offer core courses but not as advanced except in areas that would help with a chosen career.

[Wongtong]

Did the survey for you. :)

I like cursive writing :(

[i_love_burritos]

Actually, calculators are banned from all advanced math classes if that hints at anything (I think it does). Calculators are only needed for businesses, where employees have to churn out data they already know how to process. It just makes things go faster, it doesn't promote learning at all. You can't teach a kid how to find a square root if the kid knows the calculator will just do it for him. Do any of you know how to find a square root without using a [bleep]ing calculator? Most of you think it's impossible, and this is the freaking 21st century.

 

Sure for stuff like parametrics.

 

But for geometric progressions ?

 

To find out how many moles of Hydrogen will be released when glucose forms cellulose ?

[Wkw]

My $0.02

 

I am probally going to go into an IT field for computer repair or video game design. Understandable how knowing math will help.. But I'm just going to list the tech classes they my school has

 

-Microsoft Office 1 and 2, which consist of teaching you how to type

-Web Design, which consists you of using Microsoft frontage 1998 to make websites for people with 28k dial up.

-Another one that the name escapes me, but I took last year, that teaches you how to type. Exact same software as MAO1 and 2 used.

-Visual arts, which has you running phoroshop on a computer that doesn't even meet the minimum requirements for photoshop..

 

However, if you came from another middle school you are forced to be in a "robotics program" that as far as I know, just teaches you about electricity and legos..

 

But really, I am almost 18 and I don't need to learn how to paint, how to analyze a 16th century poem, or that some guy the Great in Turkey was kind 1500 years ago.

 

 

 

However I strongly believe that schools K-8 should remain the same. highschool is about launching you into the real world, not doing crap work which is really busy work, and signing up for as many college fairs as possible just so you can leave school.

[fastortoise]

Actually, calculators are banned from all advanced math classes if that hints at anything (I think it does). Calculators are only needed for businesses, where employees have to churn out data they already know how to process. It just makes things go faster, it doesn't promote learning at all. You can't teach a kid how to find a square root if the kid knows the calculator will just do it for him. Do any of you know how to find a square root without using a [bleep]ing calculator? Most of you think it's impossible, and this is the freaking 21st century.

 

Sure for stuff like parametrics.

 

But for geometric progressions ?

 

To find out how many moles of Hydrogen will be released when glucose forms cellulose ?

Why, does your brain stop working when you try multiplying two numbers with a couple of more zeros together? Doesn't that say something about your education? Every glycosidic bond "excretes" a water molecule, so twice the amount of hydrogen moles are released than cellulose molecules. There's nothing you can't do without a calculator, and if there is, you're supposed to have learned it.

 

And Riku, yes, calculators are banned from advanced math classes. Calculus 1, 2, 3 (3 is university level) and linear algebra all have bans on calculators.

[Sbrideau]

wkw, just saying, you should tell them to use notepad++, frontpage adds a lot of garbage to your code apparently.

 

Games on calcs? is it that bad now? I've never seen a calc that had games on it, much less a graphing calculator. I was on the old program though, and used a normal calculator (like the windows calc on scientific gui) and used it with sheets of paper. That was the way to do it, do all what you can without the calc, and when you're stuck, it's a way to help you. It's also a way to make sure your answer is right.

 

I believe maths should stay right until college, as it is very important, there's maths everywhere, no matter the job you will have in the future.

[Perakp]

I don't think of school subjects as plain "math" and "physics", or "English" and "history" anymore, I think that they teach you naturalism, humanism, theology etc. They each work from a certain set of values and assume that you inhale some of them, to allow you to better understand the surrounding world, society and yourself.

For example you have to know some mathematics if you want to understand the history about it, and how new mathematic discoveries have changed cultures and still do so.

[dusqi]

I take issue with the people who say that you'll never need to solve a quadratic equation in life. I research in psychology, and just the other week I realised that for what I wanted to do I had to solve a few quadratic equations. It surprised me at the time, but I was grateful that I knew how. True story.

 

The point of me telling you is that you never know what you'll need. Also, you never really know what skills you have learned from your previous classes. I studied History at one time, and have subsequently forgotten all but the most general facts about the time period I spent two years on. However, I did learn how to write and structure an essay, and that continues to come in handy. Similarly, at some point I learned to think logically, but I don't know where that came from.

 

I also disagree with people who say that highschool should be about preparing you for a job. Education is about general training in how to be intelligent and how to train yourself for the specific knowledge you need for a task. It's stupid to prepare people for jobs because jobs change. How many people think they'll be doing the same thing when they retire as when they take their first job? Many (most?) jobs that existed 40 years ago don't exist any more. Unless you learn how to communicate, how to think critically, how to find out what you need to know, how to put knowledge from various areas together, etc.etc. then you'll never be able to adapt as the world changes and you'll be left behind.

[michel555555]

I take issue with the people who say that you'll never need to solve a quadratic equation in life. I research in psychology, and just the other week I realised that for what I wanted to do I had to solve a few quadratic equations. It surprised me at the time, but I was grateful that I knew how. True story.

 

The point of me telling you is that you never know what you'll need. Also, you never really know what skills you have learned from your previous classes. I studied History at one time, and have subsequently forgotten all but the most general facts about the time period I spent two years on. However, I did learn how to write and structure an essay, and that continues to come in handy. Similarly, at some point I learned to think logically, but I don't know where that came from.

 

I also disagree with people who say that highschool should be about preparing you for a job. Education is about general training in how to be intelligent and how to train yourself for the specific knowledge you need for a task. It's stupid to prepare people for jobs because jobs change. How many people think they'll be doing the same thing when they retire as when they take their first job? Many (most?) jobs that existed 40 years ago don't exist any more. Unless you learn how to communicate, how to think critically, how to find out what you need to know, how to put knowledge from various areas together, etc.etc. then you'll never be able to adapt as the world changes and you'll be left behind.

 

At the same time if you are not prepared for the immediate future you will not be in a position to adabt when the world finally does change. One of the big problems I have about the current curriculum is that the only glimps into the world of banking, economics ect. is through calculating interest. Other then that you need to take special courses. And because of that a lot of people are clueless as to what actually happens in the real world when they need to start paying taxes, fill out the piles and piles of forms or even just making smart investments rather then believe the media hype that this company will do well and should be invested in.

 

We arn't saying that all that we learn should be to help us with a job. But what we want is for courses to contain more practical knowledge that will actually help us when we finally leave those walls.

[l0l0lpur34]

This whole "you'll never need to do x in a job, so it's pointless to learn it" arguments are stupid, sure you might not need to do the stuff again but it's transferable skills - e.g. say you study History. It's unlikely you'll ever use any of the knowledge from it ever again, but it teaches you how to write an essay, analyse sources etc.

[rangeor]

I take issue with the people who say that you'll never need to solve a quadratic equation in life. I research in psychology, and just the other week I realised that for what I wanted to do I had to solve a few quadratic equations. It surprised me at the time, but I was grateful that I knew how. True story.

 

The point of me telling you is that you never know what you'll need. Also, you never really know what skills you have learned from your previous classes. I studied History at one time, and have subsequently forgotten all but the most general facts about the time period I spent two years on. However, I did learn how to write and structure an essay, and that continues to come in handy. Similarly, at some point I learned to think logically, but I don't know where that came from.

 

I also disagree with people who say that highschool should be about preparing you for a job. Education is about general training in how to be intelligent and how to train yourself for the specific knowledge you need for a task. It's stupid to prepare people for jobs because jobs change. How many people think they'll be doing the same thing when they retire as when they take their first job? Many (most?) jobs that existed 40 years ago don't exist any more. Unless you learn how to communicate, how to think critically, how to find out what you need to know, how to put knowledge from various areas together, etc.etc. then you'll never be able to adapt as the world changes and you'll be left behind.

Exactly! However, some of the general education courses don't fulfill that. Most standard history classes are simply memorization courses; with the exception of my AP European History class last year, which forced me to actually think pretty hard. A lot of the coursework was analyzing difficult documents from hundreds of years ago, however the exam was mostly just memorization... and a lot of it. My teacher didn't prepare my class for the exam at all (I got a 1 >.>), and her quizzes and tests were only memorization challenges as well, but the work itself really made me think.

 

What I think is wrong with the educational system is the teaching to the test. All students in my county are forced to write a 5-8 page research paper their Junior year of high school and if they fail it, they can't graduate until they re-do it with a passing paper. My AP English teacher pretty much told us the first week of school that our goal is to meet the minimum requirements of the paper (simple things like you must have 6 sources, follow concrete detail > commentary > commentary sentence structure, correctly cited sources, etc. ) because there isn't any benefit to doing any better. While that's logical, that's not the type of thinking teachers should be teaching students. Most courses taught by lazy teachers only teach material covered in the final exam. They don't care if the students actually learn anything, they just want the students to memorize the content of the exam and pass it. Very rarely will teachers actually try to make their students think.

[dusqi]

What I think is wrong with the educational system is the teaching to the test. All students in my county are forced to write a 5-8 page research paper their Junior year of high school and if they fail it, they can't graduate until they re-do it with a passing paper. My AP English teacher pretty much told us the first week of school that our goal is to meet the minimum requirements of the paper (simple things like you must have 6 sources, follow concrete detail > commentary > commentary sentence structure, correctly cited sources, etc. ) because there isn't any benefit to doing any better. While that's logical, that's not the type of thinking teachers should be teaching students. Most courses taught by lazy teachers only teach material covered in the final exam. They don't care if the students actually learn anything, they just want the students to memorize the content of the exam and pass it. Very rarely will teachers actually try to make their students think.

 

I agree completely with this. The challenge is to create exams so that when teachers teach to them, they (inadvertently) also teach useful skills.

 

For example, I think that multiple choice tests nearly always encourage rote learning, especially when used in subjects like English. Asking vocabulary questions on the American SAT is just crazy in my opinion.