I have a beef with the common grading systems in US education. My smallest issue is that we are continuously allowing it to slip. Originally, the grade of a C represented a satisfactory understanding of a subject, while grades of B or A represented an exceptional understanding of a subject. In oriental countries, this is still true, but not in the US. If you perform only to the expectations of a class in the US, you get an A. To get a C, you must perform well below expectations. Recent "reforms" in education have made the situation worse. Teachers in public schools now must advance poorly performing students, even if they barely understand the subject at all. This is destroying the already poor reputation of the US public education system. My primary problem though makes this one pale in comparison.
Would I be wrong to say that the intent of grading is to represent the proficiency a student has in a particular subject? When you apply for a major in a college, especially when that major is for a post graduate degree, they look at your previous transcript. If the major is especially competitive, they look at your grades in specific classes related to that major. A student attempting to enter a post graduate math program might have a strict review of grades in previous college math classes. The reviewers make the assumption that the grades listed on the transcript represent the student's proficiency in those areas of math and in math in general. This is the same for any subject. There is, however, a problem with how our education system gives grades and how it interprets them.
While it is assumed, when looking at a grade, that it represents proficiency, it is not actually true. Teachers and professors may take any number of things into account when giving grades. Class grades are generally composite grades from all of the assignments given throughout the course of a class. This means that a student that takes an extra two weeks to understand something which is taught, but then catches up, will have a poorer class grade than a student who has identical proficiency at the end of the semester, but who did not have difficulty early on. A student who has some special circumstances which cause homework to be late, but who understands the material quite well will end up with a class grade that under-represents proficiency. A professor might burden a student with excessive, unnecessary busy work that the student does not have time for, which would also cause the class grade to misrepresent proficiency. In addition, some college professors like to give assignments which are not related to the subject at all, but which may help some students learn better. Again, missing these assignments may not affect a student's proficiency, but the student will still be given a grade that indicates a lower proficiency than actually exists.
I have dealt with many of these situations. I once took a physics class that required weekly workbook assignments, in addition to regular homework. The workbook assignments were generally ten pages or more and often took two hours a day, five days a week to complete. The weekly homework required only two to three hours a week. The workbook assignments were excessive and unnecessary, especially given that this was my second time taking physics (the first class did not transfer, but I had gotten an A). I was also taking several other quite difficult classes, so I chose to forgo the workbook assignments so that I would have time to study the other subjects, which I was not so proficient in. Ultimately, I got a class grade of C in the physics class. When you look at my assignment grades for the class though, it is obvious that a C did not accurately represent my proficiency in the subject. I had many scores of zero, where I had not turned in assignments, however, regularly interspersed between the zeros were grades between 93 and 100. There were no grades lower than 90 for anything I had completed. As I had missed only a very few homework assignments, and the tests and homework assignments were fairly comprehensive, my proficiency in the subject was quite well represented by the grades of the assignments that I had completed, but my class grade indicated that my proficiency was similar to that of a person that had learned only a little over half of the material.
My first two physics classes were very different. My professor gave final grades either as composites of all assignments including tests, or only the grade of the final, which was comprehensive. He would choose whichever grade was higher. The reason he chose to grade this way is that it more accurately represents the proficiency of a student than just the composite grade. When he explained this, he also pointed out that the occurrence of a final grade higher than a composite grade was very rare. My second semester of physics, my composite grade before the final was a B. During the last two tests, I had kept careful track of the things that I did not know well, and spent extra time studying them. I scored a full 100% on the final, showing high proficiency. Instead of getting a B, or B+, which would have indicated only moderate proficiency, my class grade was an A, which accurately represented my proficiency in the subject.
Now, I am not saying that all classes should be graded like my first physics professor chose to grade. That system also has its flaws, though not nearly as bad. First, I think that teachers and professors need to carefully consider how to grade so that the grades accurately represent proficiency, with as few taints as possible. I realize that it is impossible to grade entirely accurately, but some effort should be expended to minimize inaccuracies. If a school feels that it is important to also keep track of a student's dedication, work ethic, and punctuality, then maybe a second grade should be given and tracked, but this should not be allowed to taint the representation of proficiency of the class grades.
I propose, however, a system that makes such changes entirely obsolete. A less formal milestone based system would far more accurately represent proficiency than a class based system. Instead of collecting letter grades and then using them to compose a GPA, progress could be tracked more directly. Each subject would be divided into a collection of significant milestones. The subjects of a single class would be divided into at least 5 milestones, though some classes might be divided into 10 or more milestones. Instead of using a GPA for gauging progress, progress would be determined as a function of milestones over time. A full time student might be expected to complete at least 25 milestones in the time of a normal semester, or 50 milestones a year. There might be a requirement that a certain number of those milestones be related to the student's major, or other required classes. A student could exceed that number by any amount. Using milestones, letter grades would be meaningless. Each milestone test would be pass or fail. A failed milestone test would not show up on a transcript, because the lack of a passed milestone test already indicates a lack of proficiency. Accurate grading is not the only benefit of a milestone based system.
A milestone based system allows students to work at their own pace. A milestone system does not even need regular semesters. A milestone system would be ideal for those with jobs, who do not have time to attend school full time. A milestone system would also dramatically benefit people like myself, who are already quite proficient in the subject of their major. I could easily finish all of the milestones associated with the first two years of my major, in only a few months. This would reduce the cost of my schooling by nearly half. I am sure there are plenty of others in a similar situation. A milestone system would also help those who have difficulty with certain subjects, since they would have longer to study and would be able to spend more time on the parts they find difficult and less on the parts they find easier.
A milestone system would also be easier on teachers and professors. Instead of regular classroom sized lectures on a series of subjects in succession, ignoring the needs of the students, professors could give lectures to larger groups, spending more time on subjects that need attention. Instead of a class schedule, professors would have lecture schedules. Any student could sign up for a lecture and attend, and if there was room, additional students could attend without signing up. If no students signed up for a specific lecture, the professor could instead do a question and answer session. Since professors would be doing larger lectures less often, they would have more time for one on one work with students who need it. Also, in a milestone based system, students would be more responsible for their own learning. This means that there would be almost no graded homework. Students could ask a professor for feedback or help on a specific assignment, but automated systems could be used for basic feedback. The only real graded work would be milestone tests, which could be graded by paid graders, leaving professors more time for helping students who need it. This would allow professors to have much more time for teaching by reducing the task of grading and placing what is left on less skilled workers, who do not need the expertise of the professors to grade.
I believe this sort of system would dramatically improve the performance of our educational systems. It would reduce the workload of teachers, giving them more time to do their primary job, teaching. It would remove the inherent discrimination against slow learners and the learning impaired that exists in an arbitrarily timed class based system. It would also remove the discrimination against fast learners and those who are already self educated, by allowing them to complete milestones at as fast a pace as they desire. In addition, it would overhaul our current grading system to accurately represent proficiency in each subject, because each milestone would be verified for each student. I also believe that it would dramatically improve education, because no student would graduate without having passed each individual milestone required for their major. No student could get by just barely.
The primary argument I have heard against this sort of system is professors who say that because they had to work through the current system, everyone else should have to. This is a lie. By this argument, I can show that those very professors should be doing hard labor in the fields of a farm for the own survival (or even hunting and gathering naturally occurring foods), without any modern tools or other conveniences. Those who claim that the next generation should have to work just as hard as they did do not deserve the conveniences of modern technology and medicine. The progression of the human race requires advances in education. Even very specialized fields require more knowledge than the average human can learn in only 4 or even 8 years of schooling. As technology and science continue to advance, this will only increase. If we do not find ways of increasing the speed and efficiency of learning, we will find that technology and science advance ever more slowly. Eventually, learning enough to continue to advance will take a lifetime, and at this threshold, humans will no longer be able to continue advancing, because people will die before they have learned enough to advance further. Computers have already expanded that threshold, but the advancement of computers itself is subject to that threshold. If we do not improve education, the human race will eventually reach a technology cap, and cease to progress any further. Improving education, even a little, may allow us to create technology that further extends that threshold, and may even allow us to extend it indefinitely. If we choose not to improve education, because "it was good enough for us, so it is good enough for them," then we are taking an enormous risk. Let us not lie to ourselves. The current US eduction system is terrible. It does not fulfill its purposes. A milestone based system would allow students to prove their merit by their rate of learning, instead of being forced to conform to a rate of learning that is optimized only for the most average student, and that makes fast learners hate school for the boredom and slow learners hate school because they can never learn fast enough to understand anything.
Eventually some country is going to adopt this system. That country will very quickly begin to excel in technology and science at rates never seen in human history. We are already behind nearly every other 1st world nation. Shall we allow Japan, or China to beat us to the punch, and become the new greatest power in the world, or will we do it first, and reclaim our dominance in technology and science?
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Literacy
Back when I was in high school (10 years ago), I regularly heard statistics quoted on how many students graduate from high school with little or no ability to read. The statistics showed that this was far more common than most people are comfortable admitting. I forget the exact numbers, but I seem to recall something around 5% to 10%. (If these numbers are not accurate, please correct me.) Frankly, even 1% would have been appalling. How does a student complete 12 years of schooling and not even know how to read well?
That was 10 years ago. I have not seen more recent statistics and I don't feel they are necessary, as I have plenty of evidence that this is still a common problem. First, no significant reforms have been made to education to fix this problem. Second, I know two people that graduated from high school in the last 1 to 2 years who can barely read. Admittedly, one was home schooled and his education was not well maintained. The state that he was home schooled in requires regular standardized testing to make sure that home schooled students are progressing at a satisfactory rate, but obviously failed in this duty. The other went through the public school system, was recognized as having problems and still somehow managed to graduate almost entirely illiterate. I find it pathetic and frankly almost criminal that the educational system takes our tax money to teach our children and does not manage to perform even a barely decent job.
One of the major goals of the public school system in the US was to increase literacy of the public. The goal was to make sure that every adult was literate. It seems that we have reached some sort of cap. This cap is not because we do not have the resources. It is because we do not, after 200 years of experience, know how to effectively educate.
One problem, which I have mentioned before, is that many schools in the US choose to use reading programs that have been shown inferior in various studies. This, really, is a minor problem though. If a student graduates from elementary school without good reading ability, the school system is not doing its job. Now, I am not just saying that they should have worked harder to make sure the student would be able to read by that time, I am also saying that graduating a student from elementary school without the ability to read is totally irresponsible. Some students do have learning disabilities that make reading difficult (I have a brother who is dyslexic, for instance). Instead of just sending these students to a class for people who are behind, for the hour that is spent on reading in the regular classroom, these students should be given more time to learn it, even if it is at the expense of other subjects.
Schools teach children a variety of subjects. Most of these subjects are only important in the sense that they must be learned at some point during schooling. Many of these subjects become easier to learn as the brain matures, good examples are math and language (what we often call English in schools). Reading is different. The more the brain matures without learning to read, the more difficult it becomes. Math is based on counting logic, which most people will inherently learn given enough time and experience. More advanced math requires learning new logic, but again, once the logic is learned, any problem using that logic can be solved, without the need to memorize every possible permutation. Reading is pure memorization. Logic is easier for a more mature brain to learn. Memorization of symbols and sounds is far easier for a very young brain to learn (some of the best and most effective reading programs recommend starting between 3 and 4 years old). This is why older people who have never learned a second language often have a much more difficult time learning a new language than children or teens.
My point here is that reading is more important than any other subject that a school can teach. I agree that math, language, etc... are very important, but without the ability to read, these subjects will be nearly useless. The early grades should focus on reading more than other subjects, because the students will have an easier time catching up in those subjects than in reading. If a student is not progressing in reading, that student should be put into a program that ignores other subjects and teaches solely reading until the student can read satisfactorily. Reading is that important.
To further make my case, no other skill can give a person access to as much knowledge as reading. This was true 50 years ago, when the internet was not even a dream. Now, it is many orders of magnitude more true. A person who can read well but has no math skills can find Khan Academy and learn math from the ground up. They can start with elementary math and work up through linear algebra (high level college math). They can continue on to chemistry, physics, computer programming, and much more. Many colleges are beginning to post educational materials online, including lecture videos, which can also be found and used for free (MIT has quite a good selection). Wikipedia is a vast repository containing huge amounts of knowledge, and the one skill that is required to gain access to this knowledge is reading. Nearly all high school classes and many elementary school classes require that a student read various learning materials. If that does not show how important literacy is, nothing will.
Literacy is more important than any other skill. To get a job, you have to be able to read and fill out an application. To keep that job, you have to be able to read training materials and other information. Even a job at McDonald's requires some amount of reading ability. In the US, it is nearly impossible to get and keep a job if you cannot read well. And these jobs are the lowest jobs available. If you want a good job, reading is even more important. Being able to read just enough to get by is not enough. You have to be able to read and understand complex documents, often using fairly large words. You also have to be able to write well and spell well. Many of these students that graduate from high school without having good reading skills will never be able to make enough money to support a family and will probably not even make enough to support just themselves without relying on welfare. Reading is the most important things that schools can teach.
My wife and I will be home schooling our children. The first thing they are going to learn is reading. My daughter is almost two and very soon we are going to start teaching her the sounds various letters make. Two years old might be a bit young for this, but as I said, memorizing symbols and sounds comes more naturally at younger ages. It is likely that she will have a difficult time pronouncing all of the sounds at this age, but she will be able to pronounce some. She is too young for gamefication to work, but we can give her more substantial rewards (small pieces of candy, extra trips to the park, etc...) for good performance until she is old enough to understand immaterial rewards. Our goal is for her to be able to read fairly well by the time she is ready to start learning more complex subjects, so that she will be able to use resources such as Khan Academy and Wikipedia effectively.
I know how important literacy is personally, because much of what I have learned was learned using the internet. I have learned many programming languages from the internet (when I began programming, the internet in its present form did not exist, so I ended up learning using the help file included with MS QBasic). I learned two years of college classes worth of electrical engineering from the internet. I learned amature rocketry, blacksmithing, techniques for manufacturing plastics and composites, basic chemistry, and all sorts of other things, all from the internet. Even 20 years ago, I would not have had access to any of this, but more importantly, if I were not literate, I would not have been able to learn any of this regardless of whether the internet existed or not. Literacy is the most important skill a person can have. Our educational system needs to be changed to reflect that.
Lord Rybec
That was 10 years ago. I have not seen more recent statistics and I don't feel they are necessary, as I have plenty of evidence that this is still a common problem. First, no significant reforms have been made to education to fix this problem. Second, I know two people that graduated from high school in the last 1 to 2 years who can barely read. Admittedly, one was home schooled and his education was not well maintained. The state that he was home schooled in requires regular standardized testing to make sure that home schooled students are progressing at a satisfactory rate, but obviously failed in this duty. The other went through the public school system, was recognized as having problems and still somehow managed to graduate almost entirely illiterate. I find it pathetic and frankly almost criminal that the educational system takes our tax money to teach our children and does not manage to perform even a barely decent job.
One of the major goals of the public school system in the US was to increase literacy of the public. The goal was to make sure that every adult was literate. It seems that we have reached some sort of cap. This cap is not because we do not have the resources. It is because we do not, after 200 years of experience, know how to effectively educate.
One problem, which I have mentioned before, is that many schools in the US choose to use reading programs that have been shown inferior in various studies. This, really, is a minor problem though. If a student graduates from elementary school without good reading ability, the school system is not doing its job. Now, I am not just saying that they should have worked harder to make sure the student would be able to read by that time, I am also saying that graduating a student from elementary school without the ability to read is totally irresponsible. Some students do have learning disabilities that make reading difficult (I have a brother who is dyslexic, for instance). Instead of just sending these students to a class for people who are behind, for the hour that is spent on reading in the regular classroom, these students should be given more time to learn it, even if it is at the expense of other subjects.
Schools teach children a variety of subjects. Most of these subjects are only important in the sense that they must be learned at some point during schooling. Many of these subjects become easier to learn as the brain matures, good examples are math and language (what we often call English in schools). Reading is different. The more the brain matures without learning to read, the more difficult it becomes. Math is based on counting logic, which most people will inherently learn given enough time and experience. More advanced math requires learning new logic, but again, once the logic is learned, any problem using that logic can be solved, without the need to memorize every possible permutation. Reading is pure memorization. Logic is easier for a more mature brain to learn. Memorization of symbols and sounds is far easier for a very young brain to learn (some of the best and most effective reading programs recommend starting between 3 and 4 years old). This is why older people who have never learned a second language often have a much more difficult time learning a new language than children or teens.
My point here is that reading is more important than any other subject that a school can teach. I agree that math, language, etc... are very important, but without the ability to read, these subjects will be nearly useless. The early grades should focus on reading more than other subjects, because the students will have an easier time catching up in those subjects than in reading. If a student is not progressing in reading, that student should be put into a program that ignores other subjects and teaches solely reading until the student can read satisfactorily. Reading is that important.
To further make my case, no other skill can give a person access to as much knowledge as reading. This was true 50 years ago, when the internet was not even a dream. Now, it is many orders of magnitude more true. A person who can read well but has no math skills can find Khan Academy and learn math from the ground up. They can start with elementary math and work up through linear algebra (high level college math). They can continue on to chemistry, physics, computer programming, and much more. Many colleges are beginning to post educational materials online, including lecture videos, which can also be found and used for free (MIT has quite a good selection). Wikipedia is a vast repository containing huge amounts of knowledge, and the one skill that is required to gain access to this knowledge is reading. Nearly all high school classes and many elementary school classes require that a student read various learning materials. If that does not show how important literacy is, nothing will.
Literacy is more important than any other skill. To get a job, you have to be able to read and fill out an application. To keep that job, you have to be able to read training materials and other information. Even a job at McDonald's requires some amount of reading ability. In the US, it is nearly impossible to get and keep a job if you cannot read well. And these jobs are the lowest jobs available. If you want a good job, reading is even more important. Being able to read just enough to get by is not enough. You have to be able to read and understand complex documents, often using fairly large words. You also have to be able to write well and spell well. Many of these students that graduate from high school without having good reading skills will never be able to make enough money to support a family and will probably not even make enough to support just themselves without relying on welfare. Reading is the most important things that schools can teach.
My wife and I will be home schooling our children. The first thing they are going to learn is reading. My daughter is almost two and very soon we are going to start teaching her the sounds various letters make. Two years old might be a bit young for this, but as I said, memorizing symbols and sounds comes more naturally at younger ages. It is likely that she will have a difficult time pronouncing all of the sounds at this age, but she will be able to pronounce some. She is too young for gamefication to work, but we can give her more substantial rewards (small pieces of candy, extra trips to the park, etc...) for good performance until she is old enough to understand immaterial rewards. Our goal is for her to be able to read fairly well by the time she is ready to start learning more complex subjects, so that she will be able to use resources such as Khan Academy and Wikipedia effectively.
I know how important literacy is personally, because much of what I have learned was learned using the internet. I have learned many programming languages from the internet (when I began programming, the internet in its present form did not exist, so I ended up learning using the help file included with MS QBasic). I learned two years of college classes worth of electrical engineering from the internet. I learned amature rocketry, blacksmithing, techniques for manufacturing plastics and composites, basic chemistry, and all sorts of other things, all from the internet. Even 20 years ago, I would not have had access to any of this, but more importantly, if I were not literate, I would not have been able to learn any of this regardless of whether the internet existed or not. Literacy is the most important skill a person can have. Our educational system needs to be changed to reflect that.
Lord Rybec
Nerd Stigma
Another major problem with education in the US is that though who are gifted are often treated as freaks. In schools, they are teased and often bullied. In the workplace, they are often ignored as distasteful things that are only there because the company cannot get by without them. Businesses that cannot afford to staff people like this often treat them like demi-gods when they are contracted to fix a problem. In short, people who are very good at one or more technical subject are often marginalized and treated as people with abilities that are unattainable by "normal" people. I believe that this is a self perpetuating problem.
I believe that most people who are not extremely intelligent are that way because they choose to be. I will admit that some people really do have "super natural" talent. I don't think that most people fit into this category, even to include many engineers, computer techs, and scientists. Many people who appear to have unnatural talent in a subject started studying that subject when they were very young (10 year old or younger). It is entirely natural to be extremely good at a subject that you have spent 10 years studying. Most people can become experts in a subject with only 5 years of dedicated study, so it should be obvious that a person who started computer programming at 12 years old and studied and practiced it regularly for 10 years will be extremely good at it at 22 years old, and even better at 30 years old (ok, I am not quite 30 yet, but you get the point). This is not "gifted", this is being interested in a subject, having the resources to study it, and choosing to study it regularly for a long period of time. (I am not saying that I am not gifted, but that being extremely good at a single subject after 10 years of dedicated study is not at all unusual.)
I have watched other people learning the same subjects as I am. Those who do poorly do not seem to be naturally bad at the subject. They do seem to believe that they are poor at the subject and thus spend less effort on that subject. Other students spend all sorts of effort on subjects they believe they are poor at and still do poorly. Observing these people, I often notice that they unintentionally do things that make their work more difficult. When a person believes that a problem is going to be extremely difficult, they often unconsciously choose the most difficult solution. Then they often fail because of the difficulty of the solution. If these people, instead of fearing the problem, stopped and looked for the easiest solution, they would have a much easier time, and might even find that they enjoy the work.
This leads to problem solving, which I will cover in more depth later. In short, problem solving is an extremely important skill in education and especially in any kind of technical work. People who do not develop this skill, cannot work effectively in jobs where they are required to make their own decisions.
A great example of problem solving skills is how I do complex math in my head. My wife recently asked what 2.5 times 60 is. Instead of trying to do that problem in my head, I multiplied the 2.5 by 2, to get 5, a whole number which is much easier to work with in my head than a decimal number. Then I divided the 60 by 2 (to make up for multiplying the 2.5 by 2) to get 30. Then, I had 5 times 30. This problem is very simple. I easily multiplied the 5 by the 3, getting 15, then added the 0 from the 30 back on to get 150. This might seem like it is more complicated, but I know very well what kind of math my head can handle better and very quickly converted the numbers to fit that. The result is that I was able to quickly multiply two numbers that normally seem like a more complex problem, by reducing the problem to something simple. This is good problem solving skills. Of course, this example is very simple when compared to common problems found in programming or engineering, but without this basic skill, people will end up stuck in fast food or cashiering jobs for the rest of their lives. People without good problem solving skills will not be among those to improve society. They will probably spend most of their lives being a burden to others.
One solution I have to this is to try to get rid of this stigma that being smart carries. If being smart was seen as a generally desirable thing, more people would choose to be smart. The US government has, in the past, run campaigns to encourage people to think or act differently. These campaigns encourage good behavior by making it appear honorable or something of value. I think our government should run a campaign encouraging people to learn new things and to pick up hobbies that are productive and useful. This might include encouraging people to join the hoard of people doing amateur science in their back yards (mostly astronomy), it might encourage people to pick up skills like basic programming or web design, or blacksmithing. Many people in the US are currently un, or under employed. These people should be encouraged to use the extra time this provides to learn useful skills that may or may not be useful at a regular job. Besides helping the general advancement of science and technology in the US and the world, this will also encourage people to gain skills that they may eventually use to create their own small business, potentially creating new jobs (well, at least one). Long ago, people that owned their own business were honored, while people that worked for others were seen as low class grunt laborers. This attitude encouraged people to gain useful skills that they could use to support themselves regardless of how large businesses were doing. I think this would be very beneficial in our country, given the current economic situation. Anyhow, I think that our government could have spent the money used for the various bailouts much more effectively encouraging the people of the United States to start picking up useful, productive hobbies. If nothing else, they could have ran a campaign to bring more honor to being a nerd, to make people have less fear of being seen as smart.
Lord Rybec
I believe that most people who are not extremely intelligent are that way because they choose to be. I will admit that some people really do have "super natural" talent. I don't think that most people fit into this category, even to include many engineers, computer techs, and scientists. Many people who appear to have unnatural talent in a subject started studying that subject when they were very young (10 year old or younger). It is entirely natural to be extremely good at a subject that you have spent 10 years studying. Most people can become experts in a subject with only 5 years of dedicated study, so it should be obvious that a person who started computer programming at 12 years old and studied and practiced it regularly for 10 years will be extremely good at it at 22 years old, and even better at 30 years old (ok, I am not quite 30 yet, but you get the point). This is not "gifted", this is being interested in a subject, having the resources to study it, and choosing to study it regularly for a long period of time. (I am not saying that I am not gifted, but that being extremely good at a single subject after 10 years of dedicated study is not at all unusual.)
I have watched other people learning the same subjects as I am. Those who do poorly do not seem to be naturally bad at the subject. They do seem to believe that they are poor at the subject and thus spend less effort on that subject. Other students spend all sorts of effort on subjects they believe they are poor at and still do poorly. Observing these people, I often notice that they unintentionally do things that make their work more difficult. When a person believes that a problem is going to be extremely difficult, they often unconsciously choose the most difficult solution. Then they often fail because of the difficulty of the solution. If these people, instead of fearing the problem, stopped and looked for the easiest solution, they would have a much easier time, and might even find that they enjoy the work.
This leads to problem solving, which I will cover in more depth later. In short, problem solving is an extremely important skill in education and especially in any kind of technical work. People who do not develop this skill, cannot work effectively in jobs where they are required to make their own decisions.
A great example of problem solving skills is how I do complex math in my head. My wife recently asked what 2.5 times 60 is. Instead of trying to do that problem in my head, I multiplied the 2.5 by 2, to get 5, a whole number which is much easier to work with in my head than a decimal number. Then I divided the 60 by 2 (to make up for multiplying the 2.5 by 2) to get 30. Then, I had 5 times 30. This problem is very simple. I easily multiplied the 5 by the 3, getting 15, then added the 0 from the 30 back on to get 150. This might seem like it is more complicated, but I know very well what kind of math my head can handle better and very quickly converted the numbers to fit that. The result is that I was able to quickly multiply two numbers that normally seem like a more complex problem, by reducing the problem to something simple. This is good problem solving skills. Of course, this example is very simple when compared to common problems found in programming or engineering, but without this basic skill, people will end up stuck in fast food or cashiering jobs for the rest of their lives. People without good problem solving skills will not be among those to improve society. They will probably spend most of their lives being a burden to others.
One solution I have to this is to try to get rid of this stigma that being smart carries. If being smart was seen as a generally desirable thing, more people would choose to be smart. The US government has, in the past, run campaigns to encourage people to think or act differently. These campaigns encourage good behavior by making it appear honorable or something of value. I think our government should run a campaign encouraging people to learn new things and to pick up hobbies that are productive and useful. This might include encouraging people to join the hoard of people doing amateur science in their back yards (mostly astronomy), it might encourage people to pick up skills like basic programming or web design, or blacksmithing. Many people in the US are currently un, or under employed. These people should be encouraged to use the extra time this provides to learn useful skills that may or may not be useful at a regular job. Besides helping the general advancement of science and technology in the US and the world, this will also encourage people to gain skills that they may eventually use to create their own small business, potentially creating new jobs (well, at least one). Long ago, people that owned their own business were honored, while people that worked for others were seen as low class grunt laborers. This attitude encouraged people to gain useful skills that they could use to support themselves regardless of how large businesses were doing. I think this would be very beneficial in our country, given the current economic situation. Anyhow, I think that our government could have spent the money used for the various bailouts much more effectively encouraging the people of the United States to start picking up useful, productive hobbies. If nothing else, they could have ran a campaign to bring more honor to being a nerd, to make people have less fear of being seen as smart.
Lord Rybec
Monday, August 22, 2011
Gamefication
Gamefication is the process of turning something that is generally considered a tedious or difficult task into a game, at least in the minds of the people participating in the activity. Examples suggested or tried in literature and research I have read on the subject include using a leader board to keep track of water usage during rationing (specifically, the lower the per person water usage in a home, the higher that home scores), or putting video games in urinals that encourage users to aim better (ok, this is mildly distasteful, but it has actually been done with great success). The greatest benefit of gamefication is that it gives people incentives to perform better, even if that incentive is only bragging rights, and the research that has been done with gamefication has been extremely successful.
I would like to see gamefication added to education. In some small areas this has already been done, for instance spelling bees, academic decathlons, and the college I attend even does integration bees. These are generally limited to students that seem to have natural talent in these areas and are thus seen as "nerd" clubs. Most students are either not allowed to enter because they are not very skilled, or choose not to enter because they believe that they do not posses the skill (or because they fear the teasing that often comes with natural talent). What I want to see is all of education gamefied.
Wholesale gamefication of education may seem like a very difficult task. I do not believe that it is. Actually, it has already been done, for a limited range of subjects. I have previously mentioned the badge system used by Khan Academy. When a student performs at a satisfactory level in the exercises for a particular milestone, the student receives an electronic "badge" for that milestone. Again, as I have mentioned, Khan Academy notes that some fifth graders have begun to competitively learn on the website, in an effort to collect more badges. Some of these students have completed subjects equivalent to entire college level courses in order to increase their collection of badges. Khan Academy has already begun gamefying education. As the site continues to grow, we will have more and more subjects that are gamefied. As educational research, Khan Academy's results with its system are showing that gamefying education has great potential in encouraging students to educate themselves. I doubt wholesale gamefication of our education system would have less dramatic results.
Given the success of Khan Academy's gamefied education system, and the success of games in general, I believe that gamefying education could, by itself, dramatically improve the average education of US citizens. Admittedly, our education system does need other things as well, but the experience from Khan Academy shows that at least some students will educate themselves if they have even mild incentives. Our current system works entirely by forcing education down the throats of the students. Admittedly, some students adapt more quickly than others, but when the system is made into a game, many students will become proactive about their own education. It is true that they may be doing it for credit and bragging rights more than for the value of the education, but these students will remember what they learn far better than those who only work hard enough to barely get by and then forget everything at the end of the semester.
Gamefication of our education system, I believe, is an essential step in becoming the best education system on the face of the planet. I believe that this could even help us beat the education of oriental countries, if done promptly and correctly.
Lord Rybec
I would like to see gamefication added to education. In some small areas this has already been done, for instance spelling bees, academic decathlons, and the college I attend even does integration bees. These are generally limited to students that seem to have natural talent in these areas and are thus seen as "nerd" clubs. Most students are either not allowed to enter because they are not very skilled, or choose not to enter because they believe that they do not posses the skill (or because they fear the teasing that often comes with natural talent). What I want to see is all of education gamefied.
Wholesale gamefication of education may seem like a very difficult task. I do not believe that it is. Actually, it has already been done, for a limited range of subjects. I have previously mentioned the badge system used by Khan Academy. When a student performs at a satisfactory level in the exercises for a particular milestone, the student receives an electronic "badge" for that milestone. Again, as I have mentioned, Khan Academy notes that some fifth graders have begun to competitively learn on the website, in an effort to collect more badges. Some of these students have completed subjects equivalent to entire college level courses in order to increase their collection of badges. Khan Academy has already begun gamefying education. As the site continues to grow, we will have more and more subjects that are gamefied. As educational research, Khan Academy's results with its system are showing that gamefying education has great potential in encouraging students to educate themselves. I doubt wholesale gamefication of our education system would have less dramatic results.
Given the success of Khan Academy's gamefied education system, and the success of games in general, I believe that gamefying education could, by itself, dramatically improve the average education of US citizens. Admittedly, our education system does need other things as well, but the experience from Khan Academy shows that at least some students will educate themselves if they have even mild incentives. Our current system works entirely by forcing education down the throats of the students. Admittedly, some students adapt more quickly than others, but when the system is made into a game, many students will become proactive about their own education. It is true that they may be doing it for credit and bragging rights more than for the value of the education, but these students will remember what they learn far better than those who only work hard enough to barely get by and then forget everything at the end of the semester.
Gamefication of our education system, I believe, is an essential step in becoming the best education system on the face of the planet. I believe that this could even help us beat the education of oriental countries, if done promptly and correctly.
Lord Rybec
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Milestone Based Education
Our current education system has divided subjects into sections that are intended to be taught by semester. The division is entirely arbitrary. No one went to any effort to determine how much information is reasonable to learn over a given amount of time, they just decided where to cut based on personal preferences and opinions. The result is that some classes are excessively difficult in the time given and some are excessively easy.
Because classes are divided into semesters, the subject matter must be taught at a set rate, otherwise the class might get behind and will not have learned all the subject matter by the time they are expected to. This system expects all the students to learn at the same rate. It also expects each student to learn each sub-section of the subject at the same rate as all the other students. This causes two problems. The first is that some students learn faster than others and this system holds them back. This can make a student become tired of a subject that they are extremely good at, making them dislike that subject. The result is that a student that could be a great asset to industry and technological advancement ends up in some job that does little for society, because they don't like the things they are good at (or worse, they don't even know they are good at it in the first place). Second, and much more common, a student may struggle with some principle partway through the semester. Unfortunately, the teacher and the rest of the class will go on without that student. This student learns the rest of the subject perfectly fine, but that one thing they missed can result in a poor grade or even failing the class entirely. One extra day covering that missed principle might have prevented the problem, but with 20 or more other students in the class, the teacher cannot afford the time to give an extra day to every student that needs it.
The problem here is that in most classes, many of the students have difficulty with various principles of the subject. Some manage to figure it out on their own, but others do not. Many students come out of their classes with Bs, Cs, and Ds, or even Fs, because they missed something simple early on, that made the entire rest of the class impossible. Many of these students have to retake the classes, wasting an entire semester because they missed something simple that could have been resolved in only one or two days. In high school, this results in late graduation. In college, it results in additional costs to the student as well as potential risk of loosing scholarships and grants. The overall cost of these problems is enormous, to individual students as well as to the taxpayers. This also destroys the many students' confidence in their abilities, making them hate subjects that they might be good at and causing more difficulty the further they get in school.
This can be solved with a milestone based learning system. This sort of system does not have a formal semester based class structure. Students are allowed to learn at their own pace, so long as their rate of progress does not become too low. Subjects are divided into small milestones that should generally take less than a week to complete (but more complex ones may take more). Once the student provides sufficient evidence of understanding of the subject material of the milestone, is it passed off and they can continue to the next. Some students may find that they can pass off what would have been an entire semester class in only a week or two. Others (or the same student in a different subject) may take more than a semester for a particular subject. Students that are doing well in a subject may need little or no attention from a teacher, while slower students may need extra attention. This allows teachers to teach where needed and stay out of the way where they are not needed. This allows students that are good in a subject to complete that subject extremely quickly so they can spend more time on subjects where they need it.
Khan Academy is doing research using a milestone based system, with a lot of success. BYU Idaho is also experimenting with a milestone based system. So far evidence has shown that most students have a number of subjects that they will do enough faster than a semester based system requires that they can learn more in less time than a semester based system allows, using a milestone based system instead. In short, most students perform better and learn faster in a milestone based system than in a semester based system.
Another major benefit of a milestone based system is that it can be gamefied very easily. This helps to encourage students to work at as fast a pace as they can handle. Khan Academy has gamefied its system by keeping track of milestones with "badges". Many students have started to learn competitively in an effort to accumulate as many badges as possible. Learning has become a game, and thus fun, for these students. Doing something like this with our entire education system could dramatically improve the education of high school graduates in the US, not because the education system has improved itself, but because the students will be treating learning as a competitive game, where they are rated by how much they have learned (ie, how many badges they have accumulated). Many students will come out of high school with a deep knowledge and understanding of subjects that many college students are currently struggling with. I will discuss gamefication of education in more depth later, but this is quite possibly one of the greatest benefits of a milestone based education system. Making education into a game will encourage the students to become proactive in their education, which is more valuable than any other single improvement we could make to the education system.
Lord Rybec
Because classes are divided into semesters, the subject matter must be taught at a set rate, otherwise the class might get behind and will not have learned all the subject matter by the time they are expected to. This system expects all the students to learn at the same rate. It also expects each student to learn each sub-section of the subject at the same rate as all the other students. This causes two problems. The first is that some students learn faster than others and this system holds them back. This can make a student become tired of a subject that they are extremely good at, making them dislike that subject. The result is that a student that could be a great asset to industry and technological advancement ends up in some job that does little for society, because they don't like the things they are good at (or worse, they don't even know they are good at it in the first place). Second, and much more common, a student may struggle with some principle partway through the semester. Unfortunately, the teacher and the rest of the class will go on without that student. This student learns the rest of the subject perfectly fine, but that one thing they missed can result in a poor grade or even failing the class entirely. One extra day covering that missed principle might have prevented the problem, but with 20 or more other students in the class, the teacher cannot afford the time to give an extra day to every student that needs it.
The problem here is that in most classes, many of the students have difficulty with various principles of the subject. Some manage to figure it out on their own, but others do not. Many students come out of their classes with Bs, Cs, and Ds, or even Fs, because they missed something simple early on, that made the entire rest of the class impossible. Many of these students have to retake the classes, wasting an entire semester because they missed something simple that could have been resolved in only one or two days. In high school, this results in late graduation. In college, it results in additional costs to the student as well as potential risk of loosing scholarships and grants. The overall cost of these problems is enormous, to individual students as well as to the taxpayers. This also destroys the many students' confidence in their abilities, making them hate subjects that they might be good at and causing more difficulty the further they get in school.
This can be solved with a milestone based learning system. This sort of system does not have a formal semester based class structure. Students are allowed to learn at their own pace, so long as their rate of progress does not become too low. Subjects are divided into small milestones that should generally take less than a week to complete (but more complex ones may take more). Once the student provides sufficient evidence of understanding of the subject material of the milestone, is it passed off and they can continue to the next. Some students may find that they can pass off what would have been an entire semester class in only a week or two. Others (or the same student in a different subject) may take more than a semester for a particular subject. Students that are doing well in a subject may need little or no attention from a teacher, while slower students may need extra attention. This allows teachers to teach where needed and stay out of the way where they are not needed. This allows students that are good in a subject to complete that subject extremely quickly so they can spend more time on subjects where they need it.
Khan Academy is doing research using a milestone based system, with a lot of success. BYU Idaho is also experimenting with a milestone based system. So far evidence has shown that most students have a number of subjects that they will do enough faster than a semester based system requires that they can learn more in less time than a semester based system allows, using a milestone based system instead. In short, most students perform better and learn faster in a milestone based system than in a semester based system.
Another major benefit of a milestone based system is that it can be gamefied very easily. This helps to encourage students to work at as fast a pace as they can handle. Khan Academy has gamefied its system by keeping track of milestones with "badges". Many students have started to learn competitively in an effort to accumulate as many badges as possible. Learning has become a game, and thus fun, for these students. Doing something like this with our entire education system could dramatically improve the education of high school graduates in the US, not because the education system has improved itself, but because the students will be treating learning as a competitive game, where they are rated by how much they have learned (ie, how many badges they have accumulated). Many students will come out of high school with a deep knowledge and understanding of subjects that many college students are currently struggling with. I will discuss gamefication of education in more depth later, but this is quite possibly one of the greatest benefits of a milestone based education system. Making education into a game will encourage the students to become proactive in their education, which is more valuable than any other single improvement we could make to the education system.
Lord Rybec
Khan Academy
There are a few things you should be familiar with if you are going to read this blog. One particularly important one is Khan Academy.
Khan Academy is a website with over 2,000 educational videos on a large number of subjects ranging from elementary school levels to higher college levels. Khan Academy is a non-profit organization that creates and provides these videos free to the public. In addition to videos, the site has a coaching section that can be used to keep track of the progress of users. Many of the videos also include exercises for practicing and evaluating the progress of users. The coaching section can be used by teachers to keep track of any number of students. The system even tracks which specific exercises students have difficulty with, so that teachers can offer focused help to each student, exactly where it is needed. I hope this becomes the standard education system of the future.
The benefits of the Khan Academy teaching method are great. Instead of sitting through a 30-45 minute lecture on a subject in class, then doing the homework on their own at home, the students watch the 10-15 minute videos at home (which allows them to rewind and rewatch sections where needed, which cannot be done in a lecture setting), work on the exercises at home, then they do the "homework" in the classroom, where they can get help from the teacher as needed (and as I mentioned, the coaching section allows the teacher to know exactly where each student needs help based on their performance on the exercises). Salman Khan, the owner and producer of Khan Academy describes his system, the benefits, and the results of ongoing research using his system in this video.
I mentioned that the website can keep track of student progress. Each student can register a free account that will track their progress in the exercises. The progress is tracked with a "badge" system. This is essentially a milestone based system (which I will discuss more in a future post) that awards badges as milestones are completed. Milestones are completed by completing exercises with satisfactory scores. This allows a teacher to determine the overall progress of a student by look at what badges that student has earned. More important though, this turns education into a game, where students are encouraged to learn new subjects more thoroughly so that they can earn these badges. According to the website, they have fifth grade students competitively completing college level material in order to earn more badges.
The overwhelming success of this system is more evidence that our current education system is deeply flawed. I would like to see this type of system entirely replace how our current education system currently works. Khan is working with at least one school to research the viability of this system (see the video I mentioned above for details) with great success. I hope the US public education system will see how well this works and care enough about actually educating to use it.
Lord Rybec
Khan Academy is a website with over 2,000 educational videos on a large number of subjects ranging from elementary school levels to higher college levels. Khan Academy is a non-profit organization that creates and provides these videos free to the public. In addition to videos, the site has a coaching section that can be used to keep track of the progress of users. Many of the videos also include exercises for practicing and evaluating the progress of users. The coaching section can be used by teachers to keep track of any number of students. The system even tracks which specific exercises students have difficulty with, so that teachers can offer focused help to each student, exactly where it is needed. I hope this becomes the standard education system of the future.
The benefits of the Khan Academy teaching method are great. Instead of sitting through a 30-45 minute lecture on a subject in class, then doing the homework on their own at home, the students watch the 10-15 minute videos at home (which allows them to rewind and rewatch sections where needed, which cannot be done in a lecture setting), work on the exercises at home, then they do the "homework" in the classroom, where they can get help from the teacher as needed (and as I mentioned, the coaching section allows the teacher to know exactly where each student needs help based on their performance on the exercises). Salman Khan, the owner and producer of Khan Academy describes his system, the benefits, and the results of ongoing research using his system in this video.
I mentioned that the website can keep track of student progress. Each student can register a free account that will track their progress in the exercises. The progress is tracked with a "badge" system. This is essentially a milestone based system (which I will discuss more in a future post) that awards badges as milestones are completed. Milestones are completed by completing exercises with satisfactory scores. This allows a teacher to determine the overall progress of a student by look at what badges that student has earned. More important though, this turns education into a game, where students are encouraged to learn new subjects more thoroughly so that they can earn these badges. According to the website, they have fifth grade students competitively completing college level material in order to earn more badges.
The overwhelming success of this system is more evidence that our current education system is deeply flawed. I would like to see this type of system entirely replace how our current education system currently works. Khan is working with at least one school to research the viability of this system (see the video I mentioned above for details) with great success. I hope the US public education system will see how well this works and care enough about actually educating to use it.
Lord Rybec
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Education Reform
I am writing this blog because there is a big problem with education in the US. The US public education system was created to educate people so that they would be qualified for entry level jobs in skilled labor professions. It was (and still is) called "primary education" because it was intended to be all the education strictly needed to get a job that paid enough to make a living. When it was originally created, the US public education system served it purpose fairly well. Just teaching students to read and do basic math was enough to qualify them for any number of entry level skilled labor jobs. Now though, this is not the case. High school graduates in the US often have a difficult time even getting a job at McDonald's or WalMart, which are not skilled labor jobs.
There are many reasons for this. Not all of them are entirely the fault of our education system. The amount of education required for entry level skill labor jobs has increased. It has been over 200 years since the inception of the US education system and really the only major change has been scale. Little useful education research has taken place. Admittedly, until recently, research on the scale required has been impossible, but with the instant communication and wide spread use of the internet, this is no longer the case. Some may think that the knowledge required for entry level skilled labor jobs is impossible to learn in the 12 years of primary education that the US public education system provides. This is not true.
The first problem here is that we really don't know significantly more about education than we did 200 years ago when this started. Large amounts of research has been conducted, but with entirely inconclusive results. The primary issue is that until the last decade, we did not have the communication, record keeping, and analytical abilities to handle large samples of students (something that computers and the internet have fixed). The result is that all research has been done on samples too small to yield results that are accurately representative of the entire US population. In application, this has resulted in many schools using different teaching techniques based on the opinions of the teachers, not on scientific research. An example is teaching reading. Many schools in the US teach reading by teaching phonetics (how various letters are pronounced in particular situations). This allows people to easily pronounce words that they are unfamiliar with, however, many English words follow the rules very poorly, so students that do not learn all the exceptions to phonetic rules may mispronounce unfamiliar words until they are corrected. Many other schools in the US teach reading by wrote memorization (memorizing entire words, but not the pronunciation of individual characters). This circumvents the problems with phonetics, but introduces more problems that are worse. If a student is not familiar with a word, they will be entirely unable to pronounce it.
I once helped a kindergarten class in Utah as a service project. The particular school used the wrote memorization method (we discovered this as we were working with the students). A friend and I were helping a group of five or six children learning to read. Most of the children were having a very difficult time reading the three and four letter words generally used in a kindergarten reading curriculum. My friend helped one student with words that were difficult for a while, but quickly realized that the student did not even know how to pronounce the individual letters. He spent ten minutes teaching the students in our group how to pronounce the common consonants and a few of the vowels. After that, all of the students in the group had a much easier time reading the words. He demonstrated how to "sound out" an unfamiliar word and this further helped the students. In the one hour that we were there, the reading ability of all the students in our group improved dramatically.
Not all students learn best with phonetics, but what little research has been done has indicated that more students learn better with phonetics than with memorization. Programs like Hooked on Phonics have provided more strong evidence that most students learn better with phonetics, though to my knowledge this is considered business data, not viable research. Still, many schools in the US religiously use only the memorization method. This decision is generally made by individual teachers or the administration of each school and are based entirely on opinion, not on verified scientific facts.
The first problem with the US education system is the lack of basis on scientific research. Our schools teach based on popular opinion of what techniques work. When there is conflicting research, educators pick the one that they like best. Even when there is strong evidence for one method over another, it is easy for educators to ignore anything they don't agree with because the small sample sizes of research make any results questionable. Colleges teach what techniques they think work best, with little or no evidence for the effectiveness of those techniques. Now that we have the means, we need to start conducting whole scale educational research and start requiring that the US public education system to use that information to improve.
The second problem is that technology and civilization have advanced and our education system has, for the most part, not. We are working with teaching technology that was originally created for classrooms of 10 to 15 students, not necessarily all in the same grade, with very small educational needs (in comparison). We are trying to teach 200 years of US history in the same time that we taught 100 years of US history 100 years ago. We are trying to teach 20 to 30 students per teacher, using the same techniques we used to teach 10 to 15, and in the same amount of time. In short, our educational system is very well equipped for educating students 100 to 200 years ago, but is very poorly prepared for educating students now.
One thing that can help fix this is research. If we can find techniques that will help students learn faster, then the larger amount of things they need to learn will not be such s hurdle. This will not solve the problem though. We will still be teaching students a bunch of stuff that will not help them get a decent job when they get out of high school. We need to evaluate the usefulness of the graduation requirements. Math is important in any job, but many jobs do not need any math beyond basic algebra. Requiring four math classes over four years (8 semesters) of high school is overkill for anyone not going into a technical profession. Instead of having an abstract requirement of four credits of math, a few specific classes should be required (advanced classes should still be provided, for those who want or need them). English has a similar problem, we require a bunch of English credits, when most jobs require little or no English skill. I agree that basic writing and reading should be covered, but that can be done in two classes. History classes should cover less dates and more time lines. They should also stick to things that are directly applicable to modern times and put much less value on things that are not. Instead of memorizing dates, students should be expected to have a reasonable idea of the chronological order of events. Admittedly, some time should be spent on general major events even if they do not directly apply to modern times, but requiring more than two classes on this is absurd. Most required subjects are like this; a small amount of each subject should taught, but only people planning on majoring in those subjects (or related subject) should need to take more.
I can see a lot of people disagreeing with this. It does seem a little extreme. This is because nearly everyone in the US grew up in the US public education system and many do not realize how poorly they were educated. Teachers might disagree with this because if it is true, it means that they are doing a very poor job. I don't blame most teachers for this. A poorly educated teacher is going to be a poor educator unless they change something. It is not their fault that the current education system is not capable of doing a good job. Yes, there are some teachers that are to blame, for resisting positive changes, but I do not think most teachers fall into this category.
I can also see a lot of people asking what should be done with all the extra time freed up if graduation requirements are reduced to the degree that I have suggested (though I feel the answer should be obvious). High schools should provide more classes that teach skills that will qualify students for entry level skilled labor jobs. Metal shop classes are nice, but are extremely general in nature. High schools should provide classes for teaching at least basic welding, which include all types of welding (metal shop generally only covers spot welding, which is barely even welding at all). Many high schools already provide basic computer programming and electrical engineering classes. They could add data structure classes for programmers and electronic logic classes for electrical engineers (equipment would include a computer lab, which they already have, and electrical simulation software, of which there are several quality applications that are free). Classes on basic accounting and bookkeeping would be very useful. In short, this extra time should be used for classes that will allow students to become educated in subjects that will qualify them for good jobs when they graduate. If nothing else, they will at least give students the ability to try things so they will know what they want when they start college (many students waste their first year or so of college taking random classes to decide what they want to do; high school would be a much better time for this).
Many people would probably argue that high school is not enough time to learn enough of a skilled trade to get a job. This is completely and entirely false. I started programming computers when I was 12 years old, in my spare time. (Note that computer programming is considered difficult enough to learn that the CS department at my college does not allow CS majors to have a minor.) When I graduated, I was skilled enough at programming to work any entry level programming job and many more advanced ones. The only problem I had was lack of any paperwork stating this fact. In the ten years since then, I have learned enough about electronics that a friend of mine (who was majoring in electrical engineering at the tine) told me that I was more advanced than second year students at his school (I have also learned enough more programming that there are things I know that a certain PhD in CS is not familiar with). Again, lacking certification, I am unable to get a job in this field. In the last year, I have taken two programming classes, getting very good grades in both (and learning very little) as well as two electronics classes, in which I also got very good grades (I did learn some new stuff in the second one). You might say that this is because I am gifted, which is very likely true (I was in the gifted programs when I attended public school), but I believe a majority of it was that I found a subject that I liked and was able to find resources for learning about it. Most students in the US public education system are not given an opportunity to find a subject they like and even those that do are not generally given the opportunity (or resources) to spend enough time on that subject to become good at it. The result is that students graduate hating work, because most of the work they were forced to do was not interesting to them, and they end up in college without having any idea why they are there. Two hundred years ago, most people knew what they wanted to do with their lives when they were twelve years old. Now, many college students have no idea what they want to do even after twelve years of primary "education" and a year of college. Our public education system is a travesty.
There are many other ways that we could improve our education system. The freeness of knowledge with the internet has almost made the formalness of our current education system entirely obsolete. I mentioned above that I have spent the last ten years learning electrical engineering on my own. All of the knowledge I have gained came from various resources on the internet. When I need information for some experiment, I use Google and Wikipedia. So much information that people twenty years ago had to memorize, I have at my fingertips. This is part of the reason that it is possible to learn useful skills during the course of high school, even though the time is limited. I have regularly used Wikipedia as a resource for finding properties of various chemicals. Twenty years ago, chemists had to memorize properties of common chemicals and refer to text books for uncommon ones. I don't even have to know the properties of the common chemicals to experiment with them, because I can just look them up. Learning chemistry can now be reduced to understanding reactions and knowing what properties specific chemicals have, because there are many free databases that can easily be found on the internet (Wikipedia being the least of these). We no longer need to spend eight hours a day in classrooms to learn and many colleges are starting to offer online courses, but these still follow the strict structure that makes school so difficult for those that don't learn as quickly as some of us.
The intent of this blog is to discuss different things that should be considered for improving education. I cannot promise that any suggestion I make will be better or worse than what we are doing now. I will try to avoid bad ideas, but the point here is to give new ideas that should be researched. I will begin with ideas that already have displayed a lot of promise, I will discuss what little educational research exists that is conclusive, and I will suggest some of the most promising things that are currently being tried. I hope that this will help our educators to improve our broken system.
Lord Rybec
There are many reasons for this. Not all of them are entirely the fault of our education system. The amount of education required for entry level skill labor jobs has increased. It has been over 200 years since the inception of the US education system and really the only major change has been scale. Little useful education research has taken place. Admittedly, until recently, research on the scale required has been impossible, but with the instant communication and wide spread use of the internet, this is no longer the case. Some may think that the knowledge required for entry level skilled labor jobs is impossible to learn in the 12 years of primary education that the US public education system provides. This is not true.
The first problem here is that we really don't know significantly more about education than we did 200 years ago when this started. Large amounts of research has been conducted, but with entirely inconclusive results. The primary issue is that until the last decade, we did not have the communication, record keeping, and analytical abilities to handle large samples of students (something that computers and the internet have fixed). The result is that all research has been done on samples too small to yield results that are accurately representative of the entire US population. In application, this has resulted in many schools using different teaching techniques based on the opinions of the teachers, not on scientific research. An example is teaching reading. Many schools in the US teach reading by teaching phonetics (how various letters are pronounced in particular situations). This allows people to easily pronounce words that they are unfamiliar with, however, many English words follow the rules very poorly, so students that do not learn all the exceptions to phonetic rules may mispronounce unfamiliar words until they are corrected. Many other schools in the US teach reading by wrote memorization (memorizing entire words, but not the pronunciation of individual characters). This circumvents the problems with phonetics, but introduces more problems that are worse. If a student is not familiar with a word, they will be entirely unable to pronounce it.
I once helped a kindergarten class in Utah as a service project. The particular school used the wrote memorization method (we discovered this as we were working with the students). A friend and I were helping a group of five or six children learning to read. Most of the children were having a very difficult time reading the three and four letter words generally used in a kindergarten reading curriculum. My friend helped one student with words that were difficult for a while, but quickly realized that the student did not even know how to pronounce the individual letters. He spent ten minutes teaching the students in our group how to pronounce the common consonants and a few of the vowels. After that, all of the students in the group had a much easier time reading the words. He demonstrated how to "sound out" an unfamiliar word and this further helped the students. In the one hour that we were there, the reading ability of all the students in our group improved dramatically.
Not all students learn best with phonetics, but what little research has been done has indicated that more students learn better with phonetics than with memorization. Programs like Hooked on Phonics have provided more strong evidence that most students learn better with phonetics, though to my knowledge this is considered business data, not viable research. Still, many schools in the US religiously use only the memorization method. This decision is generally made by individual teachers or the administration of each school and are based entirely on opinion, not on verified scientific facts.
The first problem with the US education system is the lack of basis on scientific research. Our schools teach based on popular opinion of what techniques work. When there is conflicting research, educators pick the one that they like best. Even when there is strong evidence for one method over another, it is easy for educators to ignore anything they don't agree with because the small sample sizes of research make any results questionable. Colleges teach what techniques they think work best, with little or no evidence for the effectiveness of those techniques. Now that we have the means, we need to start conducting whole scale educational research and start requiring that the US public education system to use that information to improve.
The second problem is that technology and civilization have advanced and our education system has, for the most part, not. We are working with teaching technology that was originally created for classrooms of 10 to 15 students, not necessarily all in the same grade, with very small educational needs (in comparison). We are trying to teach 200 years of US history in the same time that we taught 100 years of US history 100 years ago. We are trying to teach 20 to 30 students per teacher, using the same techniques we used to teach 10 to 15, and in the same amount of time. In short, our educational system is very well equipped for educating students 100 to 200 years ago, but is very poorly prepared for educating students now.
One thing that can help fix this is research. If we can find techniques that will help students learn faster, then the larger amount of things they need to learn will not be such s hurdle. This will not solve the problem though. We will still be teaching students a bunch of stuff that will not help them get a decent job when they get out of high school. We need to evaluate the usefulness of the graduation requirements. Math is important in any job, but many jobs do not need any math beyond basic algebra. Requiring four math classes over four years (8 semesters) of high school is overkill for anyone not going into a technical profession. Instead of having an abstract requirement of four credits of math, a few specific classes should be required (advanced classes should still be provided, for those who want or need them). English has a similar problem, we require a bunch of English credits, when most jobs require little or no English skill. I agree that basic writing and reading should be covered, but that can be done in two classes. History classes should cover less dates and more time lines. They should also stick to things that are directly applicable to modern times and put much less value on things that are not. Instead of memorizing dates, students should be expected to have a reasonable idea of the chronological order of events. Admittedly, some time should be spent on general major events even if they do not directly apply to modern times, but requiring more than two classes on this is absurd. Most required subjects are like this; a small amount of each subject should taught, but only people planning on majoring in those subjects (or related subject) should need to take more.
I can see a lot of people disagreeing with this. It does seem a little extreme. This is because nearly everyone in the US grew up in the US public education system and many do not realize how poorly they were educated. Teachers might disagree with this because if it is true, it means that they are doing a very poor job. I don't blame most teachers for this. A poorly educated teacher is going to be a poor educator unless they change something. It is not their fault that the current education system is not capable of doing a good job. Yes, there are some teachers that are to blame, for resisting positive changes, but I do not think most teachers fall into this category.
I can also see a lot of people asking what should be done with all the extra time freed up if graduation requirements are reduced to the degree that I have suggested (though I feel the answer should be obvious). High schools should provide more classes that teach skills that will qualify students for entry level skilled labor jobs. Metal shop classes are nice, but are extremely general in nature. High schools should provide classes for teaching at least basic welding, which include all types of welding (metal shop generally only covers spot welding, which is barely even welding at all). Many high schools already provide basic computer programming and electrical engineering classes. They could add data structure classes for programmers and electronic logic classes for electrical engineers (equipment would include a computer lab, which they already have, and electrical simulation software, of which there are several quality applications that are free). Classes on basic accounting and bookkeeping would be very useful. In short, this extra time should be used for classes that will allow students to become educated in subjects that will qualify them for good jobs when they graduate. If nothing else, they will at least give students the ability to try things so they will know what they want when they start college (many students waste their first year or so of college taking random classes to decide what they want to do; high school would be a much better time for this).
Many people would probably argue that high school is not enough time to learn enough of a skilled trade to get a job. This is completely and entirely false. I started programming computers when I was 12 years old, in my spare time. (Note that computer programming is considered difficult enough to learn that the CS department at my college does not allow CS majors to have a minor.) When I graduated, I was skilled enough at programming to work any entry level programming job and many more advanced ones. The only problem I had was lack of any paperwork stating this fact. In the ten years since then, I have learned enough about electronics that a friend of mine (who was majoring in electrical engineering at the tine) told me that I was more advanced than second year students at his school (I have also learned enough more programming that there are things I know that a certain PhD in CS is not familiar with). Again, lacking certification, I am unable to get a job in this field. In the last year, I have taken two programming classes, getting very good grades in both (and learning very little) as well as two electronics classes, in which I also got very good grades (I did learn some new stuff in the second one). You might say that this is because I am gifted, which is very likely true (I was in the gifted programs when I attended public school), but I believe a majority of it was that I found a subject that I liked and was able to find resources for learning about it. Most students in the US public education system are not given an opportunity to find a subject they like and even those that do are not generally given the opportunity (or resources) to spend enough time on that subject to become good at it. The result is that students graduate hating work, because most of the work they were forced to do was not interesting to them, and they end up in college without having any idea why they are there. Two hundred years ago, most people knew what they wanted to do with their lives when they were twelve years old. Now, many college students have no idea what they want to do even after twelve years of primary "education" and a year of college. Our public education system is a travesty.
There are many other ways that we could improve our education system. The freeness of knowledge with the internet has almost made the formalness of our current education system entirely obsolete. I mentioned above that I have spent the last ten years learning electrical engineering on my own. All of the knowledge I have gained came from various resources on the internet. When I need information for some experiment, I use Google and Wikipedia. So much information that people twenty years ago had to memorize, I have at my fingertips. This is part of the reason that it is possible to learn useful skills during the course of high school, even though the time is limited. I have regularly used Wikipedia as a resource for finding properties of various chemicals. Twenty years ago, chemists had to memorize properties of common chemicals and refer to text books for uncommon ones. I don't even have to know the properties of the common chemicals to experiment with them, because I can just look them up. Learning chemistry can now be reduced to understanding reactions and knowing what properties specific chemicals have, because there are many free databases that can easily be found on the internet (Wikipedia being the least of these). We no longer need to spend eight hours a day in classrooms to learn and many colleges are starting to offer online courses, but these still follow the strict structure that makes school so difficult for those that don't learn as quickly as some of us.
The intent of this blog is to discuss different things that should be considered for improving education. I cannot promise that any suggestion I make will be better or worse than what we are doing now. I will try to avoid bad ideas, but the point here is to give new ideas that should be researched. I will begin with ideas that already have displayed a lot of promise, I will discuss what little educational research exists that is conclusive, and I will suggest some of the most promising things that are currently being tried. I hope that this will help our educators to improve our broken system.
Lord Rybec
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