32 replies to this topic

[anubis]

Here is a small exceprt from the work sheet my brother returned with from school yesterday. It's really hillarious.

pyramid : a shape in which one face is a polygon and the other faces are triangles with a common vertex.
a polygon is a 2 dimensional shape consisting of straight sides that meet only at their ends.
architectural examples of pyramids include the transamerican building in san francisco, the temple of the sun in peru, and the pyramids in egypt.

sphere : a shape with a curved surface that is, at all points, the same distance from its center point.

So what is so hillarious about that you may ask ? In general nothing... except that my little brother is in the first grade, not Midschool. Is this the no child left behind initiative gone insane ? Additionally many school here seem to have canned recess.

I find this totally unbelievable. In fact i feel that it is abuse of children.

[geon]

Sounds like something that belongs in highschool. With illustrations.

[SpreeTree]

Maybe they are trying to find the next nobel peace prize winner, and weeding them out at an early age?

Seriously though, is he actually meant to understand that, and is it on par with the rest of the work he brings home?

On a good note though, as least its not like the dribble they teach here in England, that producing a generation of muppets without a clue how to live and work in the real world.

Spree

[DracheHexe]

Sounds like the next great 3D artist to me!:w00t:

How are his 3dsmax skills?

[anubis]

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Sounds like the next great 3D artist to me!

yeah... he'll make a great game programmer, too.

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Seriously though, is he actually meant to understand that, and is it on par with the rest of the work he brings home?

I'm not sure how they organize the day in school, but juding from what he brings home it is totally not on a childs level. i'm not even saying that a child shouldn't know about geometry, it's just that it's presented to them in this weird fashion. His worksheets look more like they are meant for the parents, so that they understand what their child is doing.

Well... If your public school system is on the level of Cuba, you maybe just feel that you have to catch up :)

[Nils Pipenbrinck]

anubis said:

Well... If your public school system is on the level of Cuba, you maybe just feel that you have to catch up :)

*Must resist not to make jokes out of this and post links to the health care index of cuba and the states*

[anubis]

Or the infant mortality rate for that matter

[Nils Pipenbrinck]

I must confess - it wasn't such a good idea to post the previous comment. Sorry for everyone I offended. It wasn't my intent. Just a cynical comment that is very misplaced here...

[CobraLionz]

ok you say you're from germany and your brother lives in New jersey. I'm not picturing this. Anyway, that seems perfectly acceptable for a 1st grade. What you presented was nothing more than a list of definitions defined in terms even a 1st grader should be able to understand.

[anubis]

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ok you say you're from germany and your brother lives in New jersey. I'm not picturing this. Anyway, that seems perfectly acceptable for a 1st grade. What you presented was nothing more than a list of definitions defined in terms even a 1st grader should be able to understand.

I'm german and my brother lives here... yes. What is strange about that ? My mother moved here. I could go into the story but would rather not.

As for the appropriateness. Maybe you should dig up some first grade material of yourself. As for me I learned addition and substraction in first grade. And believe me, it goes on like this at this school. I'm glad to have a discussion about what is good for a child and what's not if you want. In fact I'm very much interested to know if this is standard here. I admit i was kind of presupposing that anybody would find this a bit strange for a first grade.

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I must confess - it wasn't such a good idea to post the previous comment. Sorry for everyone I offended. It wasn't my intent. Just a cynical comment that is very misplaced here...

One need not make fun of it. It's just a fact that's out there, whether people are offended by it or not.

[Methulah]

I find it strange. I wouldn't teach that to first graders. Aren't they meant to be six-ish?

[DracheHexe]

I'd say that's pretty standard for 1st grade. My son is learning pretty much the same in his 1st grade class. I think most schools teach the same, just how they present it is different. My son has never had a report like that, but he did come home one day and tell me why a bubble looks the way it does.

So don't worry, I don't think he's getting too much.

[kariem2k]

They are preparing him to be a vertex shader programming expert :) .

IMO it is the best way of teaching,The period of general education is about 14 years it is relatively short so to make the children walk with this fast evolving world of technology they must teach them things are beyond the basics that have been teached before.

[TheNut]

My philosophy is, if you can learn it now, why wait? If the future is to have any hope of technological breakthroughs, you’re going to have to get people up to speed, and there’s a lot of material out there.

[anubis]

My philosophy is that it's probably best to finally turn to pedagogics and pyschology. It seems to me that's it's much more important to cater to a childs needs and desires than teach it as much as possible. I don't believe that your remember all of this very good if it's just thrown at you like this (I'm not turning down the schoolsystem here... it may likely be that particular school). It would be much better to teach a child how to obtain this knowledge itself. And at any rate I pretty sure that you learn nothing, if what you are learning is not somehow of interest to you personally. At least that's how it's been for me. What, or more how, they are being taught at this school is in a complete disconnect from a childs world. To me it all seems to be focused on "knowing" these things instead of actually learning them, or understanding any of it.

I'm sure that it's also not only me... Most people from Europe I've talked to about this find it totally outlandish.

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If the future is to have any hope of technological breakthroughs

I think that's exactly part of the issue. Why is it so important to always have progress. Are we really willing to put our children's mental health at risk for this ?
I wonder if a dramatic rise in alleged ADHD cases and the rise or drugs like Ritalin, to treat this mental deffects, and the deaths that result from it aren't somehow more worthy of attention than technical achievement.

I'm sure that changes in the society as a whole contribute to these increasing numbers of kids that are put on drugs similar to amphetamin. But given that a kid spends half it's day in school one can wonder if school has potential effects on children. Putting to much presure on them, to understand things that they don't connect to, for example.

[anubis]

I'm trying to get my head around what exactly makes me think that this form of school is not right.

Maybe the aim of the school system in the states is different. As I said, I have the feeling that the point of this system is to accumulate as much knowledge in the children as possible and not making them understand any deeper concepts. In part that might be related to the test they are supposed to take in third grade, which certainly puts a lot of pressure on the school.

My theory is that the main idea behin school here is to get your child into college, whereas in Germany there is this idea, that school and university are there for giving you the tools to you need, for whatever you want to do in life, with much less of a focus on jobs and economy. As a result there seems to be a bigger focus on doing what's good for the child (whether the current trends in pedagogics are actually good is another question) in psychological terms.

At any rate, I aplogize for the ridiculing tone of my original post.

[TheNut]

I’m looking at this from an evolutionary point of view. Life only serves to advance us. Most peoples’ grandparents have no where near the education of a toddler. Most of them learnt everything they needed to know by working the mill or in a factory. That’s only 2 generations ago (well, for me). In my day, learning basic arithmetic and the study of English & French was the thing to do as a kid. Now I see this as the next stage. Hell, I never even had a computer in school, my family had to go out and buy one for quite a heavy price. Now, most schools are equipped with such technology. It’s the future man. You should be proud of your bro, not discouraged.

[bladder]

Can't you guys see what's happening? The CIA/FBI is testing the kids for future recruitment. Once they find out wihch kids have the aptitude to be a spy they'll start tracking him/her and eventually start putting up all these obstacales (which parents/family will think is just coincidence). Then as the child grows and completes each obstacle successfully (which he/she has conveniently come to accept as part of life), they put in place one final extreme test from which the child (now aged around 10) comes out alive and finally meet them, or is never seen again.

After the first meeting the physical training starts. If the child doesnt want to join "them", then he is given a revolutionary form of electro-shock therapy which targets specific information inside the brain and literally fries the information relating to as far back as the start of the meeting.

The kid either lives his/her life happily ever after withough "them", or if s/he agrees to join up with "them", becomes a prisoner for life.

[anubis]

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I’m looking at this from an evolutionary point of view. Life only serves to advance us. Most peoples’ grandparents have no where near the education of a toddler. Most of them learnt everything they needed to know by working the mill or in a factory. That’s only 2 generations ago (well, for me). In my day, learning basic arithmetic and the study of English & French was the thing to do as a kid. Now I see this as the next stage. Hell, I never even had a computer in school, my family had to go out and buy one for quite a heavy price. Now, most schools are equipped with such technology. It’s the future man. You should be proud of your bro, not discouraged.

That is plainly assuming that we can feed more an more information to our brains, without any limits. Also i'm not objecting to what they learn (at least that is a completely other debate), I'm objecting to the way it is put to them. As I said. I think you need to have a connection to what you learn, or most people remember nothing of what they have learned. That's why children learn through game. They can not reason about what they learn as we do, hence can not find motivation in things by reasoning about them, so they pick up what is necessary by play. That seems to me is the nature of human learning.

Also if you have to put your kids on drugs so that they behave in school, i find it at least debatable to speak of an evolutionary process.

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If the child doesnt want to join "them", then he is given a revolutionary form of electro-shock therapy which targets specific information inside the brain and literally fries the information relating to as far back as the start of the meeting.

They should ask Ewan Cameron to head the project.

[roxtar]

I think that visual aids rather than the definition will be more educational. I mean you can show the kid that a ball is a sphere, and so is the sun and the moon. Similarly, you can use something like that to describe other 3D shapes. You really can't expect a kid to fully understand definitions, when he/she is just learning to read and write properly.