In 9th grade, an incompetent guidance counselor told me, “Girls take typing. Boys take wood shop!” Being unable to type was a bad disadvantage in college. During this same meeting with this guidance counselor, I was not allowed to take Algebra I, the rationale for this given as “That’s too much math.” It sure made things interesting in Algebra II the next year. My high-school physics teacher was an affable, inconsequential, old bit of fluff who gave us organized, well-prepared lectures on physics all of twice during the entire school year. He didn’t cover electricity at all. It put me at a disadvantage in calculus-based physics as a first-year undergraduate.
In college, I was not allowed to take public speaking for credit, even though I was at a university with famous theatre and film departments. My undergraduate education was badly marred by institutional conflict between the astronomy and the physics departments, who had been merged “in a shotgun marriage no one wanted,” as my undergraduate advisor told me. He hadn’t done research in 20 years, and taught how to develop photographic plates, which had been obsolete about that long. The words “electronic imaging” never passed his lips, although there was a revolution in it happening exactly then.
It is nice to know that my students can’t be fouled up by some of the things I struggled with. They all take typing (more properly, keyboarding) quite young, and public speaking is a common undergrad general-ed course now. There are still other problems, though. To what extent did your schooling interfere with your education?
–-Froderick Frankenstien from Fresno
History, as taught (or not taught) in my high school. This was the late 60s and early 70s, when there was a lot of pedagogical experimentation going on. The result was that we never, not once, had a coherent, comprehensive, chronologically organized US history or world history course. I should have taken the truly well-designed Western Civilization course that my college offered as its intro history course, but I was afraid that my lousy preparation would make it too difficult. (Bass-ackwards thinking, I know, and if I had it to do over again, I'd sign up for that course in a minute. In fact, I wish the college had required it, the same way they required freshman composition.) I've done a lot of reading since then, to try to fill in the gaps, but to this day I'm mad about it.
ReplyDeleteI was also a much better speller than some of my teachers, but that's minor compared to the wholesale dereliction of duty that was our high-school social studies curriculum.
Ed-school pundits often call coherent, comprehensive, systematic survey courses "a mile wide and an inch deep." Ever since I was a freshperson in 1976, they've argued that students are better served taking specialized courses, seemingly as early as possible, in literature, history, philosophy, and science. To this day, I'm mad about it, too.
DeleteFirst you do the mile-wide part, THEN you do the deeper-than-an-inch part, so you have a framework on which to hang the details. This was exactly the problem with my lousy social-studies courses: piles of seemingly unrelated details, with nothing to connect them or to show how the later ones developed from the earlier ones.
DeleteOur English curriculum suffered from the same discontinuity, although to a lesser extent. I didn't have any real idea of literary history until I started taking French lit courses in college that were, in fact, chronologically organized. Suddenly a lot of things made a lot more sense.
When I was a kid, we experimented with Individually Guided Education. We read some modules, took a multiple choice test and gave it to the "teacher". I was also around for the "new math" in the early 70s. Somehow, I learned anyway.
ReplyDeleteWe had a reading program like that in fourth grade. It did nothing at all for those of us who were already strong readers. Happily for me, we moved to a different school district the following summer, where the classes were divided by ability within each grade. Our fifth-grade teacher didn't use any "reading books" at all. We read real books on our own, and wrote real book reports about them. I loved fifth grade.
DeleteWe also had a reading program like this when I was in 6th grade (in 1970). It took me very little time to get to the last module. My generous-minded principal, who liked me, placed me in the highest-level reading class in the school, which was at 8th-grade level. It was great, because we read real books there.
DeleteMy girlfriend, who was at another school at that age, did not have such a good opportunity. Like me, she was allowed to take 8th-grade reading while still in 6th grade. Since 8th grade was the highest grade her school had, though, the next year she repeated 8th-grade reading, and the following year she repeated it again. Fortunately for me, after I finished 6th grade my family moved and transferred me to a school that did have higher grades.
And of course, I was a charter member of the generation burned by “the New Math.” This was a K-12 (and especially K-6) mathematics curriculum devised in the wake of Sputnik I that was designed by---God help us---mathematicians.
It was essentially concepts from the intermediate-level undergraduate courses on set theory and analysis, introduced as early at the 1st grade. No kidding: I learned about sets, sub-sets, and Venn diagrams when I was 6 years old, with truth tables and the octal and hexadecimal number systems covered in 8th grade.
The near-universal symptom of this curriculum was students who couldn’t get any answer, not even a wrong answer. I was the only kid in the school who understood any of it. The upside was that it made me suspicious of innovation in education only because no one can think of better ways to teach. Subsequent experience with teaching machines, programmed instruction, Whole Language, educational television, self-esteem, process writing, writing about "feelings,” peer instruction, learner-centered teaching, and now Common Core has amply justified this suspicion.
History & English were a bit messed in my secondary ed. days, but this was more down to government policy than teacher competence.
ReplyDeleteWe were forced to do role-play type activities in history classes, and covered a lot less ground than students a few years older than us had.
As for English, there was an argument that all UK accents were to be treated equally, and that dialect-based spelling and grammar were to considered fine.
In fact, it was a very good school (and the fact that I could go there at all is down to Her Majesty's largesse) so I have few complaints.
One of the problems with Batshit U now is that it seeks to limit students' options in the way that Frod describes. It used to be possible for students to take a range of classes that interested them, but admin saw this as, I don't know, unpredictable?