What subject/skill do you wish they had taught you when you were in school?
Applied Math.
Sure they taught us a lot of math back in school, but we were seldom taught HOW to use it in day-to-day situations.
Fractions. Everybody needs to know how to convert fractions back and forth so that they can then add them together or subtract them.
I really wish we'd been taught how to balance our checkbooks and figure interest. WHY ( Read more... )
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I have NO IDEA how this happened either. You are always as welcome as can be!
:^)
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Actually learning how to apply those math skills we worked so hard to learn would have cemented those math skills into our brains so that we never forgot them.
One radical concept that our teachers totally missed is that the subjects they were teaching us should never have been taught as separate things but rather as extensions of each other.
Where would the Renaissance have been had the great artists not snuck around and studied human anatomy in secret? Likewise, how would anyone ever have learned how to draw a landscape without studying some math first? Ratio and proportion are necessary if you're going to do any decent art.
And it's only after having studied some art that you can learn how to build the sorts of buildings they had back then. One subject definitely feeds the other and vice-versa.
The biological sciences badly need both Latin and Greek in order to name and describe things.... (I'll leave it here otherwise I'd be writing you a term paper.)
:^)
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In full agreement. I'd have have done better in a lot of subjects if I'd been told what the point of them was.
I spent many years learning Latin. Why? Actually, I'm not sure anyone- not even the teachers- had a convincing answer for that.
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My Latin teacher actually took a few minutes to explain to us WHY learning Latin was helpful.
After a few months with him, I agreed wholeheartedly because I kept noticing how many Latin words gave me the keys to "difficult" English words and their meanings. My English vocabulary which wasn't average to start with at the beginning of that year nearly tripled by the end of that year. The biggest mistake I made in high school was not signing up for a second year of Latin with him.
I greatly ENVY you your years of Latin classes. You don't realize it but your study of Latin shaped and strengthened your mind in ways you're simply too close to spot.
America is rapidly developing a class system that will soon be as rigidly in place as the caste system is in India and it will be based largely on where someone goes to school. The rich and powerful now all send their kids to private schools. The upper middle class have largely managed to "protect" their children by insisting, that the public school systems where they live, have AP classes or ( ... )
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Your education system is becoming like ours. The "public schools"- which are private and fee-paying- cream off the kids from wealthy families and the best teachers. It more or less guarantees that money and power and position are retained by the same few families....
Yes, Latin does help one with English. I often find I can guess at the meaning of an English word I've not come across before by identifying its Latin roots.
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Back when I was going to school, I'd have dearly loved to have been in classes with kids who had the same level of academic ability as I did. I hated being made fun of because I actually liked to read.
Money, power, and position are going to be retained one way or another, unfortunately. I just wish the private schools were forced to offer the same quality of classes as the public schools do.
And there's the real reason why the American school system has gone down in quality the way it has since the 1960's: The rich and powerful no longer send their children to public schools.
In America, the last American President to send his children to public school was President Jimmy Carter back in the 1970's. (He died recently.)
:^|
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I agree. Too many kids have been raising themselves for the past 40-50 years now and NOT having those adulting skills really hurts them once they age out of the public school system.
:^)
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how to actually retain and USE what they teach you would have been so much more valuable. in school, i grew up only having to know things long enough to pass the test. then we moved on and left it all behind to forget about. i am and have always been a why child. why do i have to know this? why do i have to do it THIS way and not THAT way? why why why? "because i said so" is a horrible phrase.
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BTW--"WHY" people are always SMART people.
I agree with you: "because I said so" REALLY is a horrible phrase.
It shows a total lack of compassion for the children's feelings who are forced to sit in that classroom for starters and for another, it shows just how damned LAZY the teacher or teachers are who said it.
There really ARE reasons why certain things are taught the way they are! Sometimes it's simply because it's the chosen "favorite method" for that year. And sometimes it's simply because it's an easier way to teach certain kids a certain "learning objective" (whether the rest of the kids in that class benefit by it or not). Yes. That really does happen. The "new math" that was forced on everyone back in the 1960's is a perfect example of this and it's happening again this past 2-3 years in early elementary math classes despite parents' outrage over it.
ANYBODY who's received a degree in education to become a teacher has encountered Bloom's Taxonomy for Learning Outcomes. Unfortunately for America's children, back around 1970- ( ... )
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"Just learn it. Later in life, you'll be glad you did."
That's another one, or a re-wording of the same-old same-old.
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