Thank you for the replies. Food for thought. On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 12:09 PM, ml <[email protected]> wrote:
> ... As has been stated in this forum, though maybe > not in exactly this way, education is something we > do to ourselves in spite of the institutional thrashing > about. Research shows that the way schools are run can create disparate results for students. Please see "The Manufactured Crisis" and "Foundations of Democratic Education". > The low priority of education leads to a low ability to > discriminate between students & the types of talents > and information processing styles they have. In > all fairness, it is too expensive a task, given the money > available to the school districts. Despite being 50th out of the 50 American states in education spending in the state of Florida, we still spend in Miami-Dade County Public Schools over 16K per student per year. I was fortunate to attend excellent public and private schools, and my private school, although not as good for me as my public school, spends 12-13K per student and has state of the art technology, chemistry labs, a football stadium, far superior to anything our public schools have. We have to consider alternatives to the current management structures we use now. Some additional ideas for school restructuring can be found in these websites: http://teachdade.wikispaces.com/School+improvement http://teachdade.wikispaces.com/Vouchers+pros+%26+cons > The only thing worse than a cookie cutter one-size-fits > all structure for education is the change-everything-for - > the-sake-of-creativity, when it is implemented from the > top down. It removes any hint of structure of knowledge > itself or the relationships between things. We are in agreement about this. > Oddly enough, one of the best education systems I > ever saw was in a Boy Scout troop. ... The 'expert driven' solution in > modern schools > precludes this precession of varied-ability- > teaching that penetrates to everyone. > > The passage of my years through school was a > contrast between mind-numbing lecture, which > was personally good due to good memory, and > split-up-into-groups-and-figure-it-out-for-yourselves, > which was heinous. It was unguided, structureless > playtime at any age from single digit to university. > > I agree with Sir Ken, but the how of it is the real question. > > thanks--mel We are in agreement about the importance of structural flexibility in the classroom for learning, and that education is not a game. The goal of the grammar games was to increase quality. Also, we were using a pragmatic approach to grammar, where grammar was not the end of the lesson, but the means with which we could arrive at better writing, editing, and student engagement with words. We focused on understanding the top 20 grammar errors or writing according to the book, "Under the Grammar Hammer". In addition to my instruction over the past couple of years to produce an original product with which to demonstrate the lesson, this year I gave the students a list of games from wikipedia which they could use to teach their grammar lessons. High school students have been grammar workbooked all their lives, which may explain their extreme aversion to the topic. We ended up teaching grammar to 9th and 10th graders at the highest level that I have ever taught it, at levels of application to the top 20 grammar errors, way beyond the basic lessons in which we languished in the past. Where I was lucky to get one or two teams to teach grammar over the past couple of years, this year all of the teams of three students in my classroom came up to teach, a 500 to 1000 percent increase. The students were encouraged, I'm sure, by their peers who kept asking, "When are we going outside? When are we going outside?" I had to keep reminding the students that the objective was to become better writers and editors, not to just go outside and play games. Hopefully we did both. Sincerely, Otto Zequeira > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "X Acto" <[email protected]> > To: <[email protected]> > Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2008 7:01 AM > Subject: [MD] school kills creativity > > > Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're > educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our > school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types… > > > http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity > .html > > > > Moq_Discuss mailing list > Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. > http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org > Archives: > http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ > http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ > > Moq_Discuss mailing list > Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. > http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org > Archives: > http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ > http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ > Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
