#Education reform

[alwaysbewoke]

[lennielou444]

parents: *worried the schools will turn their kids gay and trans and liberal*

schools: *grooming children to be compliant and conformist and prepared for either prison or factory work*

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[commonsensecommentary]

This is, obviously, a deeply disturbing injustice and abuse of power. However, I suspect a lot of citizens would end up handcuffs if they started questioning the pay of the many overpaid—and blindly incompetent—administrators in their local public school systems. You’re being scammed, folks.

[politijohn]

Source

[eso-studies]

no single task should be worth more than 35% of your grade. I will die on this hill

[chilli-talks-a-lot]

School Continues to Make my Blood Boil

When I was a little goody-two-shoes seven-year-old I was friends with a lot of the "bad" kids. Usually, they got in trouble for not being able to focus, or being too loud, or moving too much. Which is dumb (they probably just had adhd). And then, they were scrutinized and excluded, and labeled as "the bad kids" even though they were really nice. This just pushed them to be worse. To give in. I really wished there was something I could do, but I was 7.

I remember I was sent to go pick up one of my "bad" friends from a teacher's classroom because he wasn't allowed to go to recess. I stood in the doorway, trying to get his attention by saying his name, but the teacher (who still works there, years later) yelled at me for interrupting her class. Scared the shit out of little me. I didn't go back after that.

I remember seeing that same "bad" friend stab himself in the forehead with a participation medal he got from karate class.

I never really saw him after that. I would still hear his name get called on the intercom, but we never got to talk again. I wonder how he's doing now.

I've had a lot of friends who've had ADHD, and seeing them struggle makes me so angry. The school system has failed them.

I feel like, school, from a young age, has made us forget that people, even if they deviate from the normal, are still people. Witnessing this, in real time, has made me realize how bad schools are when it comes to reinforcing conformity and perpetuating ableism.

People at my school make jokes saying the r-slur or making fun of sped kids or saying things in a "sped voice" and hitting their chests all the time. Hell, even a teacher did that today. They don't deserve this.

[ms-macklemore]

If I asked you how old this child is, how old to you think they are and what do you think this word is?

[audhdnight]

Anyone else really fucking sick of the whole edgelord “we don’t need school it’s all bullshit when will I even need to know any of this” crowd who will also immediately turn around and violently shame and attack anyone who says something misinformed or asks a question that they deem to be “common knowledge”???

Like yeah, I remember highschool. It sucked, but not because of what I was learning. It sucked because teachers are overworked and underpaid/under supported, and the school system doesn’t give half a shit about disabled kids or kids with different neurological conditions or really any of the kids.

We do need schools. Whatever issues the system as a whole has, it needs to be reformed, not done away with. You cannot sit and gripe about how we don’t need any of these history classes because it’s all stuff you don’t want to know anyway, and then go absolutely batshit insane when someone doesn’t know about Pearl Harbor.

Because those people aren’t stupid. They are being intentionally misled, neglected, misinformed, or all three. They are ignorant, not because they chose it but because someone else chose it to further their own desires.

Ignorance leads to harm. Ignorance leads to manipulation. Ignorance is why we have slews of people in the US who are so scared of autism (which IS NOT SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF) that they refuse to vaccinate their children, which is a form of medical neglect. They are actively endangering people they care about because they have been lied to by political parties and religious leaders who benefit from uneducated mobs.

Ignorance is how you get cults. Ignorance is how people get taken advantage of. Ignorance is how you get genocide. ONE person decides they want power and they use the lack of education to amass followers who will support them blindly because they don’t know any better.

Everyone is appalled when ex-Mormons get on the internet and talk about all the things they had to learn as adults, who by all accounts should have known those things by the time they were fifteen. People lose their fucking minds when ex-Mormons mention they didn’t know how babies were made until after they got married at like thirty. I saw someone make an entire six minute video about how he’s pretty sure all these deconstructers are lying for clout online, because how could they possibly not know?

They don’t know because they were intentionally kept in the dark. That is how high-control religions and cults operate. That is how you keep people under your thumb.

You ask how Christians could possibly think that evolution isn’t real? As someone who was raised that way, I’ll tell you.

From the moment my education started, I was fed misinformation. In kindergarten I learned about how God made dinosaurs, but they all died in the flood and the earth was too damaged afterward to support such big species even after they came off the ark. In middle school I watched Ken Ham and Kent Hovind videos about how carbon-dating is all bogus and if any scientist tries to use it to debate you, you can say “Aha! I knew you were wrong!” and end the discussion there. In highschool I took apologetics, where we learned how to “defend our faith” by constantly moving the goalposts when we spoke to atheists. We were taught that “What happened to the Missing Link?” is a gotcha that no scientist would ever be able to dispute, and so obviously we were the ones in the right. I was told at every possible opportunity that Bill Nye is literally the antichrist, that he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about, and that any Creationist (Christian “scientists”) could debate him into the ground because he’s so stupid.

I didn’t question any of it because that wasn’t an option. It was *literally* all I knew. I had such a fundamental misunderstanding of science as a whole that when I was exposed to true scientific facts and processes and studies for the first time, I could scoff and say “Don’t they know that’s not even a real thing? How ridiculous that they’d think I would believe it!”

I’m doing the work now to re-educate myself. I have learned so much in just two years that I genuinely can’t speak to half of my family because it makes them so angry. And when I hear people talk about anything happening or existing “billions of years ago”, my knee-jerk reaction is still “The earth is nowhere near that old! That’s how I know they’re lying!” I have to intentionally reprogram my thinking every. single. time. that I engage with scientific literature or media.

It’s hard. It’s frustrating. And it all could’ve been avoided if my own parents hadn’t also been misled their whole lives. I’m not going to make excuses for them as adults, because learning and doing better is your own responsibility once you’re not a kid. But I will say that if their parents hadn’t also been misinformed, they wouldn’t have learned the same lies that they later went on to teach me and my siblings. It’s a vicious cycle, one that is designed to keep people ignorant. It is purposely designed not to have an out.

So yeah, I don’t really know how to end this post but please for the love of god, have some empathy for people who don’t know “common knowledge” facts about science or history. Most likely, it’s not their fault. And the way they push back at you with nothing but misinformation and a dream has been programmed into them probably since birth. This is why we need education, why we need schools, and why it is so vitally important that we as a society do the work to reform our education system.

[eliias-bouchard]

why is it such a common practice for schools to send students to isolation as punishment. like: “... more than 200 pupils spent at least five consecutive days in isolation booths in schools in England in 2018. Alongside this, more than 5,000 children with special educational needs also attended isolation rooms at some stage.” (via the BBC) how fucking insane is that. five consecutive days is pretty much the entire school week. you can’t see your friends. you can’t talk to anyone. school is the primary socialisation area, and you’d have to make plans on the weekend when you’re already dealing with homework and household duties. what the hell.

[travelinglibrariansdesk]

Two Awesome Picture Books Rather Different in Nature

Another terrific title I could not resist when circulating books today: Dan Santat's The Adventures of Beekle, the Unimaginary Friend. The story opens on the Island of Imaginary Friends (not to be confused with the Island of Misfit Toys!), and this grabbed me immediately - what a lovely idea! Plus - "Beekle". What a perfect name for an imaginary friend. The story is otherwise fairly predictable, the illustrations pleasant, but in a few places, like the whale-filled ocean over which Beekle sails to find the real world, the dazzling sea monster and the glorious tree he eventually climbs to look for "his" friend, the art is dazzling. Likewise, the text is somewhat uneven. Beekle and his friend Alice get to know one another through a series of funny, awkward and creative moments, yet Santat also employs sentences like "He sailed through unknown waters and faced many scary things.". Ugh. Lazy writing frustrates the heck out of me as a teacher of literature. "Many scary things" just begs for elaboration. No decent editor just lets such a sentence sit there, and no harm would have come to the story in a few more pages! Beekle himself reminds me of an adipose - a creature from the "Partners in Crime" episode of Doctor Who - sweet face, the body of a soft rubber squeaky toy, waddling movements. I would choose this book for shyer kids, especially if they already have imaginary friends, because it endorses proactive behavior: if there's something you want, don't wait for it to come to you - go get it!

Kabir Sehgal and Surishtha Sehgal's book The Wheels on the Tuk Tuk takes the familiar song "The Wheels on the Bus" and adapts it for India (though it could be almost anywhere in the developing world - most of them have tuk-tuks of some sort). The fun in this book is the details of the adapted song, though I enjoyed the art as well. But lines like "People on the street jump on and off", "Tuk tuk walla says squish in together" and "Tuk tuk walla sips-sips chai" just created a happy feeling, reminding me of all the tuk tuks I've jumped on and off of. Even if this book is alien to your own (American) culture, the song is practically an earworm, and songs are a terrific way to teach anything, including the details of another culture.

There's one other book I'm going to comment on today: Bettina Love's Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal. I haven't read an education book for a while because it seems fruitless and painful to fill my head with ideas (which is what happens when I read books on education) of how to improve my teaching when I'll never see the inside of a classroom again. However, since I agree with the premise, I snatched the book. Since probably the majority of school reform ideas come out of the heads of white, reasonably well- or over-educated politicians, they very often don't take into account variables well-known to the teachers of underprivileged, black, brown or simply poor rural white students. This mismatch leads to thousands of misspent dollars and hours on ideas that had no hope of affecting the students they (possibly) intend to help. I'm looking forward to Love's new ideas, even if I can't implement any of them myself.

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[commonsensecommentary]

“The current model of higher education, one featuring runaway spending and punitive intellectual rigidity, cannot survive.”

[sub-at-omicsteminist]

When people go online they really need to think is this worth my time?

Being a blog that uses tags like feminism, science, education and fact a lot tends to attract a few people that get pissed off about it. And it’s a very small amount it’s about 1 person every 2 weeks just loosing their mind over a queer person talking about education and science.

But I think is this person worth my time? can I change their opinion? Probably not, how will one thing I write change someone’s opinion when their entire blog is filled either conspiracies or hate. A lot of things aren’t even opinions their facts people deny.

So while I’m on my please support education rants I’m going to say this, the education system is far from perfect. Gifted kid burnout, exams anxiety and depression over school shouldn’t be a thing. People who go online sharing false information and hate seem to be people who have had an unfortunate education.

There’s people on here who are going to hate teachers, I’ve seen posts from American tumblr users talking about how if you’re ex military you can teach with a 2.5 GPA and no formal teacher training. No wonder kids hate their teachers. I love maths and I don’t think I’m even qualified to be able to teach it. I’m lucky because education wise a lot of my teachers were fantastic, I had 2/3 I came across that were up themselves but I’m so grateful that I had the teachers I did.

Education needs more funding everywhere, if there was more money people who like their subject and who have a deep and good understanding of it will teach. I spoke about math teachers where I work quitting, they’re quitting for accountancy jobs and work like that because it’s better pay in this crumbling economy. We’ve got music teachers teaching maths and that’s not fair on the kids who are now missing out on core understanding, theirs only so much you can teach from a text book.

And people argue kids can just use the internet to learn??? These kids can’t tell fact from fake yet, they come in every day asking about whether a video they saw on YouTube was real or not and most of the time the videos are things like “This potion can turn you gay at 3am” How do you expect the majority of kids to just teach themselves when they can’t tell that video is ridiculous.