Saturday, September 18, 2004
"Have a nice doomsday."
Thus reads the blurb for my current read: "Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I should be asleep right now (I take my sleep very seriously; trust me, you do NOT want to be around me when I'm tired. I get cranky. VERY cranky.) but instead I'm reading this book.
It's absolutely hilarious. It is also, of course, the type of humor for which the word 'sacreligious' was invented.
Ah, God'll forgive me.
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It's absolutely hilarious. It is also, of course, the type of humor for which the word 'sacreligious' was invented.
Ah, God'll forgive me.
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Friday, September 17, 2004
Blah
Right now I'm sitting in Introduction to Historical Research. Today we're learning (gasp!) how to use the library's online catalogue! Hooray!
That was sarcasm, just in case you're a bit slow.
Dr. Fairbanks is a nice guy, but this class is a complete waste of my time. The textbook explains arcane secrets of the discipline like how to prepare for an essay test or how to read a history book. I figured this stuff out in... sixth grade? Maybe seventh?
Which reminds me of one of my favorite rants: how the American school system panders to the lowest common denominator. Take, for example, my high school health class. In health I learned that vegetables are good for me. The semester before in AP Biology I'd figured out WHY vegetables are good for me: what each vitamin and mineral does to the human body, various diseases associated with a lack or overabundance of certain nutrients, etc. Health class, in short, was a complete and utter waste of my time. That time could have been better spent taking, say, Calculus 3 or Japanese 4: a class where I might actually *learn* something!
But no! Because some students (the lowest common denominator) did not know that fried food = bad, ALL of the students had to sit through health class. The same goes for speech, P.E., government, and this research class.
My question is, why do we do this? Say everyone takes a health class. Say 70% of the class already knows that drugs are bad*. Maybe 10% learn not to do drugs. And the remaining 20% don't learn anything at all, because they came to class ON the drugs. So only 10% of the class benefitted from it.
On the other hand, say no one is required to take health class. The 70% that already knew everything can spend that class period studying something useful, like physics or Latin. The 10% don't learn that drugs are bad, but 10% is less than 70%. The remaining 20% were already hopeless anyway. So on the final balance, more people learn something valuable.
If a teacher has 15 minutes of free time, he's encouraged to spend it with a student that's just barely failing and try to help him pass. But imagine if a teacher, instead of trying to pound some sense into an uninterested little punk, spent 5 minutes apiece with the three brightest students in the class. Those students would genuinely be grateful for the help and would flourish under the attention. On the whole, more would be learned.
I'm one of the brighter students, so of course I'm all for anything that helps the brighter students. :P But I genuinely think that teachers are mostly wasting their time trying to get failing students over the passing mark. After all, most of those kids are failing because they don't care. Instead, why don't teachers spend more time with the ones who DO care? There are two ways schools can improve test scores: raising the scores of the poorest students, or raising the scores of the best students. Which do you think would be easier to do?
*All these percentages are, of course, completely made up.
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That was sarcasm, just in case you're a bit slow.
Dr. Fairbanks is a nice guy, but this class is a complete waste of my time. The textbook explains arcane secrets of the discipline like how to prepare for an essay test or how to read a history book. I figured this stuff out in... sixth grade? Maybe seventh?
Which reminds me of one of my favorite rants: how the American school system panders to the lowest common denominator. Take, for example, my high school health class. In health I learned that vegetables are good for me. The semester before in AP Biology I'd figured out WHY vegetables are good for me: what each vitamin and mineral does to the human body, various diseases associated with a lack or overabundance of certain nutrients, etc. Health class, in short, was a complete and utter waste of my time. That time could have been better spent taking, say, Calculus 3 or Japanese 4: a class where I might actually *learn* something!
But no! Because some students (the lowest common denominator) did not know that fried food = bad, ALL of the students had to sit through health class. The same goes for speech, P.E., government, and this research class.
My question is, why do we do this? Say everyone takes a health class. Say 70% of the class already knows that drugs are bad*. Maybe 10% learn not to do drugs. And the remaining 20% don't learn anything at all, because they came to class ON the drugs. So only 10% of the class benefitted from it.
On the other hand, say no one is required to take health class. The 70% that already knew everything can spend that class period studying something useful, like physics or Latin. The 10% don't learn that drugs are bad, but 10% is less than 70%. The remaining 20% were already hopeless anyway. So on the final balance, more people learn something valuable.
If a teacher has 15 minutes of free time, he's encouraged to spend it with a student that's just barely failing and try to help him pass. But imagine if a teacher, instead of trying to pound some sense into an uninterested little punk, spent 5 minutes apiece with the three brightest students in the class. Those students would genuinely be grateful for the help and would flourish under the attention. On the whole, more would be learned.
I'm one of the brighter students, so of course I'm all for anything that helps the brighter students. :P But I genuinely think that teachers are mostly wasting their time trying to get failing students over the passing mark. After all, most of those kids are failing because they don't care. Instead, why don't teachers spend more time with the ones who DO care? There are two ways schools can improve test scores: raising the scores of the poorest students, or raising the scores of the best students. Which do you think would be easier to do?
*All these percentages are, of course, completely made up.
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