







South Korea hopes to replace print textbooks completely by 2015.

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RE: US school system
By bah12 on 7/5/2011 10:18:19 AM , Rating: 1
Plus it doesn't help that the students are.

1) Lazy
2) Belligerent
3) Entitled
4) Parentaly Undisciplined
5) Parentaly Unmotivated
6) Annoying little fucks more interested in updating their FB pages than paying attention. Operating in a system that is castrated to provide any real punishment for fear of lowering their "score" and losing funding.

The teachers are to blame to a certain degree, but put some responsibility on the brain dead students with no support from home too. I weep for our future.

RE: US school system
By wordsworm on 7/5/2011 10:39:26 PM , Rating: 2
It's easier for parents to blame teachers than to take some blame themselves or even imagine that their own children ought to be responsible for doing things such as homework.

RE: US school system
By lagomorpha on 7/6/2011 4:12:57 AM , Rating: 2
As an educator, something I've noticed is that the vast majority of children do enjoy learning but never get the one on one time required for them to get a decent framework to build from. As a result they tend to just fall farther and farther behind. Their parents don't take the time to teach them the basics (plenty don't even see reading to their children as particularly important) and teachers don't have the time thanks to large class sizes or the ability to sit down and dissect a subject for students because most are only capable of reading lesson plans out of a book.

If you want to somewhat cheaply improve the education system you could round up a bunch of starving college students and pay them minimum wage to tutor to groups of 6 students at a time. Let students hear from a normal teacher for an hour, then go to group help for an hour to make sure they understood the lesson and get caught up. At $8/hr to help 6 kids at a time, the same efficiency is reached as paying a normal teacher $40/hr to teach to 30 students but with much better results. I'm not sure how the teachers union will react to attempts like this though.

RE: US school system
By wordsworm on 7/6/2011 9:10:32 AM , Rating: 2
Or, better yet, hire regular folks with BAs and BSs to come in and work at schools for about $20 an hour off the union rather than hiring those $40+ an hour BEdu teachers on the union. That's what they do in Korea. That's probably why Koreans have such high IQ scores.

I'd wager that if all teachers working at $40/h were replaced with teachers working at $20/h, you could halve the classroom sizes and the students would benefit.

RE: US school system
By lagomorpha on 7/6/2011 1:00:52 PM , Rating: 2
You make a valid point, for some reason most people that decide to get a degree in education seem more interested in being overpaid babysitters than actually being interested in the material they're supposed to be teaching. Even at 15 students per classroom it would be difficult to give students the individual attention to get them through rough spots where they get confused without interrupting the whole class.

Ken Robinson has also made the excellent point that we focus too much on the manufacturing date of the child rather than what they are capable of. Classes should be broken up based on material so that those capable and motivated enough to get ahead can be in classes with more advanced material alongside older students instead of being forced to do repetitive arithmetic years below their level with other students their age.

RE: US school system
By wordsworm on 7/7/2011 4:20:54 PM , Rating: 2
You're right in that 15 students is not a perfect number. But it's an awful lot better than 30.

My classrooms are limited to 10 students. Even with that number of students, I notice a major difference between 8 and 10. I might very well be teaching at a public school next year with 30 students simply because the pay is better. It will be interesting to see if I feel as effective as a teacher at that point as I am now.

