<p>I was wondering, where do you teach? I’m interested in getting a degree in mathematics with emphasis on teaching and going on to do grad school so I can get a job teaching mathematics at the college level (dream school for that would be Trinity College of Dublin), I was wondering where you teach that is full of such unmotivated students?</p>
<p>I think this kid has a point.</p>
<p>It was complete culture shock for me to switch from my private k-12 prep school to a “good” local k-6 public school in the sixth grade and probably not for the reasons you’d imagine. The biggest one for me was the fact that doing well in class was seen negatively and you were instantly hated. At my private school, it was opposite. If you didn’t do well academically, you were under constant judgement by your peers. While I had no problems adjusting to the classwork (it was extremely easy), the diversity, and the new environment, I had a terrible time stomaching the attitude that every student had towards academics. It made me not want to do well or succeed.</p>
<p>
No offense, but if my professors did that, I would stop caring about their class too.</p>
<p>@salander. Sounds like you’re teaching at one of those “lower tier universities” that are looked down upon on forums like this (At least I hope the problem is spreading to schools that are supposedly a bit better than most). It’s rather unfortunate, but inevitable, that a low quality secondary education system is starting to affect our tertiary education system, which is still considered by many to be the best in the world. You’re dealing with adults that are acting like bratty children and they should continue to be treated as adults. I applaud professors and teachers that don’t pander to slackers. Quit showing them movies or trying to get them interested in some sort of new agey way. Do what you do best and teach. If you just have an approach in which you expect hard work and you simply teach as you’ve done in the good old days, you’ll probably be surprised at how much your students will respect you. It’s better that those who don’t care simply fail out. We’ve effectively taught our kids that they are entitled to their A and it’s really unfortunate that you really even need to take attendance. They have to figure it out themselves. </p>
<p>I’ll be a freshman in college next year and I’ll feel pretty offended if I have to deal with a professor who assumes I’m still a kid.</p>
<p>I agree with what this kid in the article is saying. At my school, a lot of students just don’t care. But I wouldn’t say students don’t care because the teachers aren’t teaching the way they should, aren’t trained the way they should be, or simply don’t teach. Sure, there are bad teachers out there, but many of these students come from homes where education is not valued.</p>
<p>This has been an ongoing problem that the Board of Education in my town has been facing for a few years now, and a couple of the cities around us are facing the same issue but on an even wider base.</p>
<p>What is rarely talked about is the parents’ role in a student’s education. Sure, some may believe that the want to learn should be an intrinsic thing, but it’s not like for many. When kids grow up in homes where adults, simply put, don’t care, they won’t care.</p>
<p>Connecticut recently tried to figure this whole education thing, and while what is now in law is a good law in my opinion, it puts too much emphasis on the teachers. As I said, there are some bad teachers out there, and teaching is not for everyone. But at the same time, there was nothing in the legislation that said things about the parents. It’s as if the focus is solely on teachers and their apparent inability to get their students to learn. It’s wrong. The students should have more of a responsibility. The parents need to take responsibility for their children. There is so much more to education reform and the unwillingness to learn than teachers.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Maybe not – even at more selective schools, there are plenty of students who just want to slide by with the minimum work and learning needed to get the credential of a degree.</p>
<p>Then again, there is no need to take attendance. If the class skippers do poorly, well it is their own fault.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>“Starting to”? Hasn’t it always, in that large numbers of entering freshmen need to take remedial (high school level) English composition and math courses? Indeed, it may be that increasing selectivity (due to population growth faster than spaces in colleges) may be masking this problem at the more selective colleges (in the 1980s, more than half of Berkeley freshmen needed to take remedial English composition courses; now, with Berkeley selectivity much higher, fewer than 10% need to).</p>
<p>I took a community college class the fall of my senior year and it was pretty much the class I hated the most. I would always try to leave as early as possible, and if I could do it again, I would probably leave it earlier. The only reason I came was pretty much the attendance grade. However, I don’t think it meant that I was disengaged in learning. I actually was the only person who spoke up. It was just that I felt bored with the class because I basically learnt nothing. So I don’t think being bored with the material is a problem only in highschool. It’s a problem in any classroom.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Boo hoo cry me a river. Advising sucked at my school too. </p>
<p>And yes, I was a bad student. I’m not sure how I can prove it to you. But it was true. I think I got into Vandy and other schools through luck and the generosity of other people to help me during class.</p>
<p>Anyways, you should try to transfer to Vandy. I heard it is not very hard for transfers to get in, and the transfer acceptance rate is about 1/3.</p>
<p>I do worst in English Literature because it doesn’t feel like it is worth reading:
There’s some satisfaction to getting the author’s message and how he uses symbolism to get there but… What’s the point after that? That’s all my class does in English and we don’t apply it to life or use any of the cause and effect or how things work thinking. Is it worth reading whole novels just to get the point that the author is trying to convey and receive temporary satisfaction? Plus in a fiction sense, what is being said often isn’t necessarily true or what I feel I should believe.</p>
<p>The non-fiction on the other hand gives a better understanding to reality and what can actually happen. Within are expert style and rhetorical strategies to study.</p>
<p>Ibopartsan: No, I teach at a university that is ranked in the top CC universities (and top 20 in US News) and many people here would give their right arm to attend. Sorry to break your bubble.</p>
<p>There is no way to look at this issue without thinking about how much our world has changed in the past generation. First, most students have 24-hour access to entertainment of their choosing. With iEverything, video games, cable/satellite/Internet television, they don’t have to wait for anything. Do you remember when movies came out in the theater and disappeared for years before they were shown (if at all) on TV? That kind of postponed gratification in media is something our children have never experienced. (Even we older people get frustrated if our Internet connection isn’t lightning speed.) Patience and attention span are lacking. Why sit through a lecture (or even class discussion) for an hour or more when there might be something more entertaining to do? Don’t like it? Change the channel – or just tune out.</p>
<p>Second, our definition of “necessities” has changed. My generation’s parents provided us with food, clothes, books, and some toys. Anything beyond that (records, tapes, jewelry) was either a Christmas/birthday present or had to be bought with our own (limited amount of) money. Now parents routinely provide their children with cell phones, iPods, and video games. Many students have never had to work for these things; they just expect to get them because they always have – an entitlement mentality that often extends to their feelings about education. For some, education is just another thing to get without working for it.</p>
<p>Education should not be entertainment, and it involves work on the part of the student. I know many wonderful young people who are dedicated to their education and who work very hard. However, I do think that the explosion of electronic media and games has had an impact on how many students view education.</p>
<p>I think you HAVE to instill a love for learning from a very, very young age…AND, equally important, your kids have to SEE that the parents are “life long learners”…reading for information, reading for pleasure, learning, learning, learning.</p>
<p>@PJLloyd100
Your argument seems to be “I was terrible at math, therefore, don’t teach me any math or science.” School isn’t made to teach you what you want to learn. It’s there to teach you what goes on, whether you like it or not. Err, I remember everything I studied in Math and Science; as a matter of fact, I taught myself the Math and Science. I was an Arts student in school. You are an apt representation of the student that is not interested in education beyond what it is YOU want to learn. But school isn’t made for YOU it’s made for education. If you don’t like it, drop out. I’ve noted before and I’ll note again, The entire educational system is a mess, and guess what, students are a part of that system too. You can get good teachers, but what good is a teacher to students who do not want to learn the material, or students who are only willing to do as much as it takes to get a certain grade? The fact that you say “unneeded knowledge” alone signifies that you are the one more concerned about cramming as opposed to learning. The fact is, if you understand the concept, then you don’t need to cram. The problem with people like you is you talk so much about the problem, well what do you do to fix it? If it’s that you truly wanted to learn, then school would be nothing more than a building, particularly in a society that has so many other avenues for education. Seeing as you’re such an iconoclast, why didn’t you take any of the alternative avenues, as opposed to the “if I don’t go to school, I’ll fail out of life” route, and challenge the view. You chose just to say “I don’t like it so I don’t want to learn it.” When I went to school I went just to punch in. Most of my education I gave myself so don’t give me that crap about the difference between cramming and learning. The fact is as much as there are children who want to learn but aren’t being served well by the teachers(as was my case) there are twice as many students who just do not want to learn, short of getting a grade or whatever incentive it is that they give people to go to school these days. I read somewhere last year that a corps of teachers were sent to Finland to see what makes their education so great, but really it’s a no-brainer. In Finland, the schools work with the parents to help instill the spirit of life-long learning, both socially and academically, in the children. Education isn’t about “OOO I want to learn history, but I can’t do math, so I won’t learn it and making me learn math is a waste of my time” My teachers were crap at Math. Couldn’t even explain why numbers changed sign when moved to the other side of the equation so I hated Math. But guess what, I later picked up that Math book and bought some better ones and learned the Math myself, and today I’m studying a Mathematical field, after only being formally trained in Social Sciences (which I switched to because I hated Math). So my point isn’t that there aren’t crappy teachers or anything else and if one read my comments, one could see that. My point is as much as you have bad teachers, you also have many students who simply don’t want to learn. Your generalization of the average student as one who is just dying to learn but is being limited by the teachers is absolutely null and isn’t even a remotely accurate representation of the general student body of America.</p>
<p>Could it be that every week someone (usually someone with an Ivy degree) writes some article talking about how college is useless and everyone should just go to trade school? Or maybe it’s just that people recommend going to community college to save money? </p>
<p>To most high school students, these suggestions sound like there is no point in putting any effort into school because ultimately, it won’t matter.</p>
<p>Hell. That has been around for decades. Richard Feynman famously pointed that out more than half a century ago: <a href=“http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education[/url]”>http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education</a> . It’s not just Brazil, it applies to America, even more so IMHO.</p>
<p>@hkem123
That is a small factor, though. I think it’s more akin to the logic that Bill Gates is a drop-out and he’s richer than Croesus, so one doesn’t need college to be successful. Very true. However, Bill Gates is also very educated and obviously very smart, but students don’t really take this into account. Instead they only take into consideration the part where he drops out. So really it acts more on the confirmation bias when someone with an Ivy degree says college is uselss (which I don’t think is entirely true, it’s just not as relevant to true education as we make it out to be) as opposed to inspiring students to think outside the school building.</p>
<p>There is a bit of a double standard, one is supposed to learn for learnings sake, yet that isnt encoraged. If I loved art history and got a degree in it I would be mocked, and most of the people advocating for learning for learnings sake would offer little sympathy</p>
<p>I am about to get on a soapbox or whatever they call it.
I am fairly young and graduated hs 3-4 years ago, so I may have an interesting view point. I graduated in the top 1% of my pretty competitive HS (was a top heavy school, intense competition between the top 10-20 students etc) and also got in the top 1% on my SATs. If you ask me what my greatest regrets in my life are so far, its doing well in school and caring. I lost 4 years of my life and in addition I am essentially doing the same thing in college. In college I ended up choosing one of the toughest majors, at a school that is prolly among the toughest in the country in that major. These are 8, 9 years of my life lost in my opinion, or atleast they have not been as great as so many people say these years were for them.<br>
The crux of the problem lies in why someone who did well regrets their decision to do well.
There are so many distractions in this country, so much fun to be had. Doing well and learning takes so much time. Learning US History or whatev is never as fun as so many other options we got. I sit and think I missed out a lot in HS and college because I wanted to learn. At the end of the day I don’t even use or remember any of the stuff I learned in HS except for calculus (which I took when I was like 15, so just imagine all those wasted years). Doin well does not get much respect from peers (it does not get disrespect from them either tho unlike what tv portrays, its more of a neutral affect)
No one cares what I did in high school. I always knew I was never elite school material. I was always a little too laid back, a little too immature and too “blue collar” (not intellectual elite) like 90% of the kids out there.
Sure I will probably be able to make a good salary sometime in the future but it will be working 60 hours a week and I will never be rich. Was it worth it? prolly not. I have a feeling for most normal average kids like me it is not worth it. just go enjoy their time, chill a bit. I do like what i am studying and my field but it may just not be worth it. Its not just an educational issue, but a cultural issue.
Aite thats my 2 cents. hope my view changes soon :). Peace out</p>
<p>As for me, I’m glad I didn’t put in more effort into high school and wasn’t a better student. I’m very, very happy with where I’m going. And I’m sure most people are too.</p>
<p>Like I said, there really isn’t an incentive to doing well in high school.</p>
<p>^I want to add to your point. I am from another country (well I moved to U.S at a young age, but my parents obviously lived outside US for a while) and part of the reason I pushed so hard is that my parents kept saying how important HS was. Thats a problem. In other countries theres incentives to do well in HS and kids learn a lot, not so much in America.</p>
<p>Wow kids these days T_T</p>