Where is balance Academic priorities 249
To all,
And it's valuable as such, but not strictly necessary for many people. No, we covered that one in comprehensive school, wasn't missing. The hard part...
I've been biting my tongue as I read this thread. You see, I've tried a unique experiment with my own kids - giving them a top-down rather than the clbuttical bottom-up education, which of course can NOT be done in today's schools. Their mother comes with a degree in education and credentials as a teacher, and I come with a technology slant. This has been a challenge because we are (one of) the first to try this. This is related to a technique that has come to be known as "unschooling".
The implications are wide - giving them substantial real-world responsibilities and challenges at a very young age. Each of our kids has solved (and failed to solve) problems on which people's lives have quite literally depended. Speaking of MOTIVATION, no kid in school ever had such motivation! There is certainly no shortage of such problems in our world just waiting for someone to work on. They then pick up the more basic skills while working on these problems, e.g. they learned to read from newspapers, etc., which worked out MUCH better than using basic readers, because wild guessing only works when the vocabulary is severely limited. Of course the primary skill that they hone to perfection is RESEARCH, which they seem to understand better than any PhD I know.
But these things can be taught in other ways, not necessarily better, but more memorably. For example, two jokes: Joke 1: A...
They have had some spectacular success too numerous to list here, and seem to be generally developing pretty much as expected.
I consider our present educational system to be hopelessly beyond repair. It has become SO bad that a MOTIVATED kid without formal schooling can easily outperform most the graduates of our school systems in solving challenging real-world problems. Give them some direction and WOW.
Barb, Suggestions? Remember, while I had plenty of influence, the kids made up their own minds what to work on. What in YOUR neighborhood has people's...
Of course, their math skills are (presently) algebra, some trig, and they have some concepts of calculus w-o being able to actually solve a calculus problem, only because that is all that they have actually needed so far. However, they know how to "fill in the holes" they have if-when they need to. If only I could have found more math-intensive real-world problems for them to work on.
"When I think of all the crap I learned in high school ...
Steve Richfie1d
Where is balance Academic priorities 250
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