What's new
By:
Filters

TEACHING TRADITIONAL "HISTORY" A NO NO

This was the exact same thing I got in college. I took an American History class and we spent one day out of the semester skimming over everything leading up to the civil war. I asked her why we did not go over it in detail and she said that 'it isnt as important as everything else'

I wanted to slap her, and if she had been a man I probably would have. I left the class the next day and wrote a very angry letter to the Dean. To my knowledge nothing got done. The dean wouldn't even speak to me. I transfered into an African history class, because it was really the only thing open. And low an behold, almost the entire thing was about slavery in American NOT anything about Africa. I was a little dissappointed, some of the North African countries have amazing histories.

I would tell kids to research history themselves but even on the net it is getting harder to find the whole story.

"Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

I still find it amazing that I went to a Christian High School that has OBVIOUS biases and I got a more well rounded education then I did in College. We did not have revisionist history teachers, we went over EVERYTHING. You would think that a Christian School would want to skim over the Salmen Witch Trials. We spent a full month on it! I learned more about differeing religions and world beleifes in my Christian School then I did in my World Religions class in College!

Its pathetic what is happening to our school system. We used to have one of the best school systems in the world. That was back in the 50s and 60s when we had the 'traditional' system where the teacher teaches and the students learn. Now we have a system where the teacher suggests that the students learn and the students ignore them.
 
Chuck Muth (by way of GoingNova) said:
The student-centered "discovery learning" method would include something like turning the school desks on their sides and having kids throw balled-up paper at each another from behind their "bunkers" to "feel" what it was like to be in a Revolutionary War-era fight. They then sit around in a circle and share with each other how they "felt" while in combat.
Click to expand...
This is an inaccurate description of "discovery learning". The short version of "discovery learning" is that you teach children how to find the information. Jesus had a saying about this method, "If you give a man a fish he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish he eats for a lifetime." If you were to have a class using "discovery learning" on the Battle of Lexington you might send the students to the library to look up material on the subject. You might assign questions to individual students about different aspects of the battle and then force each of them to actually do some reading. It is a method which has been used in teaching since at least the time of the ancient Greeks and it is the only way that any new information is discovered. How do you suppose people complete PhDs?

I understand that many people like the traditional "teach at you" approach to learning and that is fine but sometimes you get more out of learning if you have to do a little work to find the information yourself, ie. "discovery learning". Also, there is nothing about "feelings" in the pedagogy.
 
Using Your Gray Matter!

:applaus: Well now! Hooray for bob gray!:applaus:

I must say this is the first time I am in 110% agreement with bob. Forget 100% let me up the ante - 200% agreement!

Teacher do teach at kids and for that reason many escape detection that in grade 8 they still can't read or write. Make the kids look it up! Make them research information! Show them the value of books and of learning to find facts!

Passive teaching stifles the imagination. Few students wish to exert themselves, heck they are kids who just want a good time. Why study? Gaming and TV is more important at their stage of development. However, if they were required to exert energy into their homework perhaps we would be turning out a population of well educated children!

I see only one draw back - the teacher! If the instructor does not want to do anything but parrot words on a page to the class then say he did his job then he is not going to want the students doing work that GOD forbid he may have to check or correct.

Some teachers push the students through passing the unfortunate kid onto the teacher in the next grade. The kid knows nothing and the teacher looks the other way! Too much like work to discover the child may be dyslexic or a slow learner. As long as he is not your student, you have done your job!

I give you an A+ on this one, bob! Now if only we could clone the teacher you have described!:applaus:
 
bob_gray said:
If you were to have a class using "discovery learning" on the Battle of Lexington you might send the students to the library to look up material on the subject. You might assign questions to individual students about different aspects of the battle and then force each of them to actually do some reading. It is a method which has been used in teaching since at least the time of the ancient Greeks and it is the only way that any new information is discovered. How do you suppose people complete PhDs?

I understand that many people like the traditional "teach at you" approach to learning and that is fine but sometimes you get more out of learning if you have to do a little work to find the information yourself, ie. "discovery learning". Also, there is nothing about "feelings" in the pedagogy.
Click to expand...

Bob, I agree with you as well, HOWEVER, I believe what you are describing used to be called "projects", or at least it was when I was in school. We would normally be "taught at", and at least once a semester, sometimes twice; the teacher would assign a "project" in which we did exactly what you described. We had to look stuff up, and present our findings in front of the class. Sometimes we so in groups, some times projects were on our own.

While I am not going to argue about the definition, I believe what Mr Muth is describing, while it may not really be "discovery learning", is called that, and it is in practice. The difference between what you described and what he described is HUGE! I do not like what he described, and I do not think it ever should be put into place.

While I do not think what you described should be the exclusive way of teaching, I do think when it is used as "projects", and as an addition to "teach at", it is an excellent method.

Bob, I am going to start calling you my favorite "progressive thinker"! I would say "liberal", but I am not quite sure that fits! ;)
 
UPDATE:

Read the email of a teacher responding to Mr Muth. I found it amusing.

Here is the Link

It is under Liar, Liar...Pants on Fire
 
Muth is an excellent, EXCELLENT writer. I do like the proposal of having students take a more active role in their education as bob gray mentioned (projects) only on a more often basis. However if Muth was teaching history I would go back to junior high or high school just to take his class. Awesome! I studied American Labor History and the instructor knew his stuff but at the time it was merely a required course for me. Would love to attend classes on the topics Muth covered in his response to the young grammatically incorrect instructor! The kid is a product of teachers who didn't care about sentences or sentence structure! Muth slapped him back into line! Big time!
 
I will admit and tell you all up front that I did not read beyond the very first post. All I have to say is - WHAT????!!?? A TENURED TEACHER WHO IS NOT A MEMBER OF THE UNION???!!?? Sign me up to vote for this guy, whatever he needs to be elected for!! I'll vote for him!!
 
WOW, what an update!

Go to HERE and check out the November Update, "The Empire Strikes Back".

The long and short of it is, these people are not used to dealing with such bright and intelligent adversaries. They are used to bullying people with lies and misinformation, and expect them to accept it. When someone with a brain questions them, well... the trouble starts!
 
Wow...not much more to say about it. I'm glad I'm not planning on having kids so don't have to worry about this in regards to them. Though I pity the way the school has yet to even admit there is an issue with the curriculum.
 
Now i must admit i did not read all of the replies so i don't know of this has already been said or not but anyway.

As a student who has gone through middle school and some of highschool i must say i almost have to agree with the school board because by the time i was in 8th grade i knew allot about the explorers and such. I will admit we never did the consitution or the revolution well but the whole background had been drilled into our heads. But not once had we gotten even to the civil war. that year we did the civil war to WWII and now i'm in tenth grade and i have classmates who have no clue about the vietnam war or the korean war which just bugs me beyond all belife. There are people who think the only reason WWII was fought was because of the holocost. People don't even realize that Italy fought with germany. So i can almost see why they would only have history go from the civil war because by the time your in 11th or 12th grade you probabally know it very well.

But that still doesn't make it right just to skip it because many VERY important things take place in that time period and they should be at least gone over but the things which really need to be cover is from the civil war on because noone knows what happens then
 
Kids in grade 8 here don't even know the provinces and their capitals let alone any in depth Canadian history!
 
i never officially leaned the states and capitals i just picked them up allong the way.

I've always been a bit of a history buff but only because i read books and things of that nature. but whatever it still bugs me
 
In my years all the way up to graduation in High School I covered everything from anchient Egypt all the way to the gulf war. It was covored thoroughly. Also, I learned the states and thier capitols (Dont ask me to spell them, not because I wasnt taught but because I cant spell) In 12 years you should be able to cover ALL the major stuff. Heck I even covered the history of my own state. (Which is a very sad history full of morons and baffoons.) Why is it that I had enough time to cover all the bases and these kids dont? Was I a fast learner? Yah I was, but lots off kids were not and they still got it all. Our classes where not hard, there was not huge amounts of homework or reading to do. I find it hard to believe in the 3 and a half years since my graduation that there was so much history added that everything before the civil war needed to be removed.

So there you have it. Children CAN learn it all, they have the time to cover everything, why not? Why would you purposfully withold a large portion of history when there is plenty of time to cover it? WHY! These morons are supposed to be teaching our children?!? Did they just forget it? Can they not look at formor classes and see that it is possible to teach children this stuff? Are these teachers just so dumb that they would do this? Or is it because they have an agenda?

Regardless there is a problem with all these new ideas for teaching. The problem is, that the old ideas WORKED! We had a good education system, kids could read and write and they knew thier history and they knew thier arithmatic. We tought our kids WELL! We had one of the best educational systems in the world? Then we changed it and now it sucks. It does not take a rocket scientist to see what needs to be done here!
 
The biggest thing is that teachers don't realize that you may have covered the pilgrims 300 times by the time your in 12th grade so they think they need to really make sure everyone knows that and then they need to skip pieces to get caught up again. It's not that there is to much history it just that there needs to be a progression from grade to grade.
 
painogb said:
The biggest thing is that teachers don't realize that you may have covered the pilgrims 300 times by the time your in 12th grade so they think they need to really make sure everyone knows that and then they need to skip pieces to get caught up again. It's not that there is to much history it just that there needs to be a progression from grade to grade.
Click to expand...

And this is WHY we need set curriculums! From 7-12 grade I went to two schools that operated in tandem and meshed thier curriculum so there was no repeating somthing over later. It was efficient and gets the job done.

The problem with this school is that they are taking out the founding REGARDLESS of wheather the children know it already or not.
 
Well your schools were obviously very good and knew how to do things.

My school is the kind of school that boasts the great use of technology in the classroom and supposedly we're doing all of these really great things with the technology yet you are still required to take the class that tells you how to open MS word and save a document. The server is using windows 2000 and the only thing the chief tech guy can do is reset peoples passwords when they forget them.

So anyway my school at least has some serious issues with getting everything together. History is supposed to be 2 2 year sections, 2 years of world history and then 2 years of U.S. history. The 10th grade history teacher dislikes the 9th grade teacher because he thinks his teaching style is better. (all of the students think pretty much the opposite) so they don't work on getting things to work together so many key elements are missed in the transition.
 
Your right my school was FAR more efficient. It was WAY better. And it did it with 1/100th the funding of the other schools in the area. Granted we had less kids, but the amount of dollars per child was WAY less. The teachers at my shool earned half that of other school teachers in the state. Our text books where cheap and re used for years. Our computer lab was small and full of old windows 98 systems. (Still is) But I learned everything I needed. I had a very comprehesive class in microsoft office. Because of the yearbook class I was able to learn Publusher and Photoshop. My english class was taught at a college level. I read books in my junior english class that some of my college english friends had not even heard of.

I went to a private school. Why is it that these institutions can provide learning at a level far and above public schools while recieveing no where NEAR the funding?

Its simple, they are not in it for the money. Public schools get higher funding based on student preformance. (That just seems **** backwards to me) So rather then taking the long hard path of increasing the students grades, they take the quicker path of lowering thier standards. All of this at the expensse of our children. Private schools get more funding based on student preformance AFTER school. They get more buisness based on the success of thier students in the real world. They make money by word of mouth. You know, like a buisness.

Schools need to be run like a buisness whos product is educated children. If they put out a poor product, no one buys it, if they put out an exemplory product they bring in the customers.

Here is my solution to the problem. Instead of getting money from the state based on students grades you get money from the state based on an exponent determined beween grades and amount of students. Secondly you allow parents to send thier kids to any high school they want to. No more districts. Third, based on the population of the area you place a cap on school attendence. You still keep the districts for one reason. Students within the school district get priority in attendence beyond that of students outside that district. That way all the local kids who, say, cant afford to travle to another school, get assured an education. Students outside the district would apply to the school like you would to a college. If they dont get accepted they still have thier own district to fall back on. Every kid is still guarenteed an education and parents have the ability to send their kids to a different school if thier local one does not meet thier needs. Eventually, the poor preforming schools will HAVE to start preforming better. They will have to make up or close down. There is a problem with this though, what happens when schools start closing? Well, thats a problem that has to be solved befor it presents itself. You have to change the way your teaching. You have to start putting out better product. Its a problem current schools already face. The difference is that now, a school is shut down because they are putting out kids who cant live up to the world standards, not because they are putting out kids who dont live up to that schools standards.

Both the current system and this have thier week points. But this system's strong points are FAR superior to the current system's.
 
one other point i should make, i go to a private school, which is one of the best in the area, solely because they can expell people who don't meet the school standards :D. So all the other schools get stuck with the expellees from my school. and suppoesedly students from my school do very well on the MEA's (Maine Eduacational Assesment) but i look at some of the kids and wonder how that happens. I don't know some things just don't make sense
 
Seems there are alot of us who attend or have attended private schools. Awesome! Aren't we the special lot. I wish I had gone to public schools though. I may be more street wise than I am now!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top