Education

Crikey...everytime I get on here, its for a long winded mish mash update...but really, since I am, by nature, long winded and mish mashy, I really can't be much suprised.

So, report cards are done, one more final for school, and one more week until Christmas Vacation. Wowzers. Unbelievable. Time flies. All that jazz...

I am really not liking my job. I know, you hear that all the time. But it is so dissapointing becasue I thought I would love my job. But I don't. I don't feel like I am teaching, I am reading a script. I can't do thematic units or literature circles. It is very frustrating. Let's just say that I know I can be a good teacher, but education, right now, isn't about teaching children, providing them with experiences (which everyone knows are a lot more memorable and impressionistic then everyday school lessons...think back to when you were in school...what do you remember? What left the lasting impressions. I can pretty much guarentee that those experiences, by and large,are not happening in public schools these days)

Thanks to a beuracratic educational system, National Laws trying to control schools (which are suppposed to be run state and locally), there needs to be numbers...quantitative data....unfortunatly, these are children, and no situation is ever the same, and no set of numerical data can express what true learning and understanding is taking place.

Sometimes, education has immediate effects...more often then not, the big lessons are learned far in the future, and these effects can't be measured on a written test. Unfortunatly, we are not teaching...we are preparing students to take tests.
For a positive view of this line of thinking, it gives state and national governments data, however unimportant in the large scheme of things, to work with to try to "improve" education, unfortunatly, int he wrong direction.

In the middle of the continuam, if education continumes in this manner, adults in our next generation will now how to fill out multiple choice tests, but have little experince in real world problems, critical thinking, multiple perspective thinking......

worse case senario, the government is forming education to train people to be what they want of their next genreation of citizens, not radical free thinkers who will try to change and possibly improve our world (like great thinkers in the past...Jefferson, Franklin, King...) but little lemmings trained to not think or question, but to fill out forms and tests....scary.

Well, that was much more than I had anticipated saying! I even had to go back and change the beginning of the post, becasue I had said at one point, "I am not going to get into it, but..."

Anyways, that is the tip of th ice berg of how a LOT of people are feeling about education these days. I read an article the other day that commented on the same ideas. I should find it and quote it for you. In the mean time, well, arg!