I'm old. I went to a Catholic School in San Francisco, taught by actual Nuns in floor-length medieval habits. 50 kids to a class. One Nun.
I first learned Latin in 1st grade singing Adeste Fidelis. And then the Latin mass that we had to translate to English so we knew what God was saying. If Mary has 3 prayer books and Joseph as 4, how many prayer books in total? And, no, we weren't smacked with rulers or paddled by Sr Mary Euphrasia, but Sr Mary Carmela would take exceedingly unruly boys into the auditorium to play basketball. There was definite discipline.
We learned cursive with fountain pens. Fortunately, we had advanced from quills and had cartridges. I still write cursive with a fountain pen, today.
Writing cursive is much more than the ability to read old documents - let's face it... those old documents are all online in print. It's about art - the flow of ink across paper, creating letters that become words - that become the foundation for critical thinking. There's no backspacing with a fountain pen - and ink erasers suck, if you've ever had the misfortune to need one. Spelling was critical. You really need to try and get it right the first time. It takes a bit longer, but you do need to think about what you're putting on paper.
Math... I still do basic math in my head. At 49 years of age when I first started at Trader Joe's, we had manual cash registers and no barcodes on products. I could easily count back change, but my special skill was being able to know how much cash back to enter when a customer had a $53.72 total and wanted a $100.00 total debit. ($46.28)
It was simple repetition by Sister Mary No-No day and day out for those seven years of torture I endured. Same with reading and everything else - repetition.
The beauty of grammar school back then, was the Nuns could take days on one simple subject - math, science, art, history, whatever - and really delve into it. Yes, too much stuff was glossed over, but we were given the foundation to figure out how to learn more. I could read a Library Card Catalog.
We had homework, but it was repetition of what we had learned in class that day. Repetition = Recollection = Retention. And it was age-appropriate and minimal.
Jr & Senior High Schools were different stories altogether. When I transferred from Catholic to Public school in the middle of the 8th grade, I was put in all honors classes. Math, however, baffled me. Where I had learned arithmetic at St Gabriel's, "New Math" was all the rage at AP Giannini. Instead of doing work in base 10, we were doing work in base 3 - or whatever newfangled concept was thought up that day. In 7th grade I could balance a checkbook, understood angles, and could easily find the volume of a circle. By 9th grade I hated math with a purple passion - and no amount of homework was going to make me understand what they were trying to teach me. It was when I started to hate school.
By the time I was in Senior High School (K-6 -grammar, 7-9 Jr High, 10-12 Sr High) homework became all-consuming. I was assigned more homework hours than hours I spent in class. Hours of math homework trying to 'show my work' on problems I didn't understand in the first place.
Homework became a burden - and more often than not, a cop out for teachers who were overwhelmed with too many kids in class and not enough time to properly teach. 50 kids in a class with a Nun in front telling you that God is watching you and will punish you for talking in class ain't gonna cut it in a class of 40+ high school kids.
Education, today, is a lot different than when the dinosaurs were roaming the earth. I agree that phones should not be in class, but I also believe that active shooter drills should not be necessary, but as long as they are, kids deserve the right to be able to call for help. Tough call...
The internet has become the public library I loved so much. - my Tredyffrin library card has finally expired but I have my Washington County card here - but it is rife with misinformation. I totally agree that the ability to critically think is paramount to fighting the barrage of misinformation spewing from social media.
I don't believe that homework is necessarily the answer. Maybe teaching basic academic concepts - those things drummed into me by Sr Mary No-No all those years ago - is.
You spoke of learning the trajectory of cannon balls... Music does that, as well. Music is all math - beats, timing, how notes go up or down the scale and how they blend.
Art is like that - spatial placement of object on paper, how to show distance, shadow...
All of it makes a mind think.
Maybe less standardised tests - we're not standardised humans - and more creative ways of looking at things is...
As an aside... I flunked most of the 11th & 12th grades. I went to adult summer school and got a GED. My military placement exams had me in the 97th percentile. I never went to college. I did attend Hotel Restaurant school after the Navy, but did not graduate. To this day, I am not a good student. I love to learn - and am constantly learning - but not so much in a classroom. It's a standard joke that someone says something or disagrees with me and I immediately pull out my phone to fact check. Not to prove myself right or someone else wrong - but to know the correct answer.
About math and music -- there is something called the Fibonacci Sequence which is a math thing -- but it has a lot of application to music, especially scales and chords, and Mozart was a big fan.
I wonder if you would have had a different experience if you hadn't attended Catholic school.
As for pens -- I remember having several Scheaffer cartridge fountain pens in junior high. One was ALWAYS a medium point with peacock blue ink. The I had one that was always a fine point black, and one that I changed (yeah, messy) -- I liked the different colors and point sizes to say various things in letters, as well as fiction and poetry that I wrote. We lose so much by typing -- the extra force when you're angry, the little hearts: cursive is SO MUCH MORE EXPRESSIVE.
I honestly don't believe that "book learning" and "academics" are right for everyone - nor that learning cannot occur in other situations. I have always known you to be smart.
When I was in high school they had different tracks - and one of them was vocational. Those kids would leave at noon for a regional Vo-Tech where they learned automotive repair, carpentry, electric and plumbing (I don't remember if culinary arts was an option.) Point is that people have different wants and needs - and that impacts the right career for them.
While you say you hated math -- you learned ARITHMETIC! And that's the most critical of all the math skill levels. My dad took a part time job teaching integral calculus at the collegiate level (he needed a second job to buy my mom the Steinway baby grand she wanted.) He used to say that when his students didn't understand integral calculus (which he said was easy) it WASN'T that they had a gap from calculus, geometry or algebra -- it was that they hadn't learned basic arithmetic.
LOL! I had to look Fibonacci Sequence up and then had a PTSD moment flashing on it and probabilities from 9th grade Algebra! Were it not for a girl named Laurie Hidekawa, I would have flunked that class, for sure!
The path definitely would have been different had I started in public school and went all the way through - or had stayed with the Catholic school and continued through high school with them. I think my own personal issue was transferring mid-stream. I was mercilessly bullied in Catholic school and just had to get out. (My grandmother finally intervened and let my parents know that I really was miserable.) But, at the same time, I went from a system I completely understood to a completely alien environment.
The one thing I did get from Catholic school was my foundation for learning. Surprisingly, it was very strict in one respect, but also very liberal in another. We were taught to think. Granted, questioning religious dogma had me in the Rectory a couple of times for crossing the line, but those few times allowed for some very interesting conversations with some very liberal priests of the day.
And that bullying had a side benefit... it gave me my love of books. I was a shy little boy who could lose myself in a story. I think I had read the entire Oz series by the time I was 9 years old. I read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy in Jr High and have read all four books every couple of years, since. (Currently watching Rings of Power on Prime...)
And I still stop and look up words I don't remember or don't know. Interestingly, I have a penchant for 1930s books - mysteries and the like. The vocabulary used almost 100 years ago is so much more colorful and descriptive.
You're absolutely correct that learning and education happen in other situations. We all learn differently. It's why standardised testing - just like polls - doesn't always tell the whole story. It's trying to homogenize and create a one-size-fits-all curriculum that really doesn't fit anyone but the corporation creating and selling the test.
How many colleges have dropped SATs?!?
There will always be kids who thrive on academics - who want to immerse themselves in academia in all its glorious subjects. There will also be those who have no desire to book-learn, but learn outside of the classroom. It takes a totally different skillset to build a nuclear reactor than it does to design one.
Which brings us back to homework...
Who is it benefitting? And would some type of independent study - be it science, music, art, job or vocational skills - or any other topic of the student's choice - be a wiser use of time?
I think another huge problem is parents pushing kids. What roll are for-profit tutoring companies playing into parents' insecurities about their child's popularity or ability to get into the 'best' schools? And don't even get me started on charter schools and vouchers!
I am the girl who liked Beowulf? In high school I loved to read Biographies of the people in my History book ,understanding the character who they actually were ,their life. I also enjoyed writing essays on how I understood different classes .English, History Geography and Earth Science were my favorites I failed Home EC. I love to read characters coming to life .My problem was I was not good at taking tests,I’d get nervous and wonder , I was amazed I got a high and passing grade on the SAT’s. Friend’s schools are in my opinion , helping students understand themselves creating an atmosphere of creativity and critical thinking.
And if these changes in public education become pervasive, where will there be teachers able to teach and what?
On a personal note, so that's how your Mom ended up at CCNY and met my brother Allen and all the rest that followed. Also, you brought back a fond memory or your Rabbi Dad, who was also a mathematician and professional statistician. Also, that you had the benefit of learning mathematics from Allen, your Dad, a mathematician whose theories are still taught in mathematic master programs.
Confession: my math knowledge stopped at Stuyvesant HS; Allen went on from there to CCNY all the way to a PHD in math at NYU; frrom that point on I never really understood what he was talking about.
Dad had a Masters in Pure Math, and one in Applied Mathematics. His PhD was in Operations Research, and I have TRIED to get through his thesis on queuing theory MANY TIMES and failed.
It wasn't just that I learned math from him....remember, my mom couldn't do basic math - couldn't balance a checkbook, and my ex-younger brother had all sorts of limitations as a kid. So I was the person he insisted learn math. (And a bunch of other things.)
He hustled pool when I was really little. Mom did NOT approve - so he'd take me to the pool haul and put me on an orange crate at a pinball machine and leave me a handful of nickels. Later, he taught me pool looking at angulations related to where to put the ball.
Once AND ONLY ONCE he was called to school for me. It related to math, so he went. I was in 6th grade and our math program involved getting a single sheet of math problems from a shared bank out in hallway for all the classes. The bins were blue, then pink, then green and so on, ending with gold, and finally goldenrod. He was called in because I was on a single blue page, and had been for a while.
My father looked at the page, and I remember it to this day - it involved bundles of 10 pencils, with loose ones on the side - you had to say how many pencils there were. He said "do it." And I did the page, and then the last sheet from all the colors. I ended up being unable to do the goldenrod one, but therefore could skip everything in between - because he had taught me math at home.
He asked why I hadn't done my work -- I told him that I sat across from Herbie, who taught me this football game using a folded up piece of paper and that was more fun. He told my teacher I was now in goldenrod, and he told me he better NEVER get called to school again...
I'm old. I went to a Catholic School in San Francisco, taught by actual Nuns in floor-length medieval habits. 50 kids to a class. One Nun.
I first learned Latin in 1st grade singing Adeste Fidelis. And then the Latin mass that we had to translate to English so we knew what God was saying. If Mary has 3 prayer books and Joseph as 4, how many prayer books in total? And, no, we weren't smacked with rulers or paddled by Sr Mary Euphrasia, but Sr Mary Carmela would take exceedingly unruly boys into the auditorium to play basketball. There was definite discipline.
We learned cursive with fountain pens. Fortunately, we had advanced from quills and had cartridges. I still write cursive with a fountain pen, today.
Writing cursive is much more than the ability to read old documents - let's face it... those old documents are all online in print. It's about art - the flow of ink across paper, creating letters that become words - that become the foundation for critical thinking. There's no backspacing with a fountain pen - and ink erasers suck, if you've ever had the misfortune to need one. Spelling was critical. You really need to try and get it right the first time. It takes a bit longer, but you do need to think about what you're putting on paper.
Math... I still do basic math in my head. At 49 years of age when I first started at Trader Joe's, we had manual cash registers and no barcodes on products. I could easily count back change, but my special skill was being able to know how much cash back to enter when a customer had a $53.72 total and wanted a $100.00 total debit. ($46.28)
It was simple repetition by Sister Mary No-No day and day out for those seven years of torture I endured. Same with reading and everything else - repetition.
The beauty of grammar school back then, was the Nuns could take days on one simple subject - math, science, art, history, whatever - and really delve into it. Yes, too much stuff was glossed over, but we were given the foundation to figure out how to learn more. I could read a Library Card Catalog.
We had homework, but it was repetition of what we had learned in class that day. Repetition = Recollection = Retention. And it was age-appropriate and minimal.
Jr & Senior High Schools were different stories altogether. When I transferred from Catholic to Public school in the middle of the 8th grade, I was put in all honors classes. Math, however, baffled me. Where I had learned arithmetic at St Gabriel's, "New Math" was all the rage at AP Giannini. Instead of doing work in base 10, we were doing work in base 3 - or whatever newfangled concept was thought up that day. In 7th grade I could balance a checkbook, understood angles, and could easily find the volume of a circle. By 9th grade I hated math with a purple passion - and no amount of homework was going to make me understand what they were trying to teach me. It was when I started to hate school.
By the time I was in Senior High School (K-6 -grammar, 7-9 Jr High, 10-12 Sr High) homework became all-consuming. I was assigned more homework hours than hours I spent in class. Hours of math homework trying to 'show my work' on problems I didn't understand in the first place.
Homework became a burden - and more often than not, a cop out for teachers who were overwhelmed with too many kids in class and not enough time to properly teach. 50 kids in a class with a Nun in front telling you that God is watching you and will punish you for talking in class ain't gonna cut it in a class of 40+ high school kids.
Education, today, is a lot different than when the dinosaurs were roaming the earth. I agree that phones should not be in class, but I also believe that active shooter drills should not be necessary, but as long as they are, kids deserve the right to be able to call for help. Tough call...
The internet has become the public library I loved so much. - my Tredyffrin library card has finally expired but I have my Washington County card here - but it is rife with misinformation. I totally agree that the ability to critically think is paramount to fighting the barrage of misinformation spewing from social media.
I don't believe that homework is necessarily the answer. Maybe teaching basic academic concepts - those things drummed into me by Sr Mary No-No all those years ago - is.
You spoke of learning the trajectory of cannon balls... Music does that, as well. Music is all math - beats, timing, how notes go up or down the scale and how they blend.
Art is like that - spatial placement of object on paper, how to show distance, shadow...
All of it makes a mind think.
Maybe less standardised tests - we're not standardised humans - and more creative ways of looking at things is...
As an aside... I flunked most of the 11th & 12th grades. I went to adult summer school and got a GED. My military placement exams had me in the 97th percentile. I never went to college. I did attend Hotel Restaurant school after the Navy, but did not graduate. To this day, I am not a good student. I love to learn - and am constantly learning - but not so much in a classroom. It's a standard joke that someone says something or disagrees with me and I immediately pull out my phone to fact check. Not to prove myself right or someone else wrong - but to know the correct answer.
And critical thinking has made me a good Liberal.
About math and music -- there is something called the Fibonacci Sequence which is a math thing -- but it has a lot of application to music, especially scales and chords, and Mozart was a big fan.
I wonder if you would have had a different experience if you hadn't attended Catholic school.
As for pens -- I remember having several Scheaffer cartridge fountain pens in junior high. One was ALWAYS a medium point with peacock blue ink. The I had one that was always a fine point black, and one that I changed (yeah, messy) -- I liked the different colors and point sizes to say various things in letters, as well as fiction and poetry that I wrote. We lose so much by typing -- the extra force when you're angry, the little hearts: cursive is SO MUCH MORE EXPRESSIVE.
I honestly don't believe that "book learning" and "academics" are right for everyone - nor that learning cannot occur in other situations. I have always known you to be smart.
When I was in high school they had different tracks - and one of them was vocational. Those kids would leave at noon for a regional Vo-Tech where they learned automotive repair, carpentry, electric and plumbing (I don't remember if culinary arts was an option.) Point is that people have different wants and needs - and that impacts the right career for them.
While you say you hated math -- you learned ARITHMETIC! And that's the most critical of all the math skill levels. My dad took a part time job teaching integral calculus at the collegiate level (he needed a second job to buy my mom the Steinway baby grand she wanted.) He used to say that when his students didn't understand integral calculus (which he said was easy) it WASN'T that they had a gap from calculus, geometry or algebra -- it was that they hadn't learned basic arithmetic.
LOL! I had to look Fibonacci Sequence up and then had a PTSD moment flashing on it and probabilities from 9th grade Algebra! Were it not for a girl named Laurie Hidekawa, I would have flunked that class, for sure!
The path definitely would have been different had I started in public school and went all the way through - or had stayed with the Catholic school and continued through high school with them. I think my own personal issue was transferring mid-stream. I was mercilessly bullied in Catholic school and just had to get out. (My grandmother finally intervened and let my parents know that I really was miserable.) But, at the same time, I went from a system I completely understood to a completely alien environment.
The one thing I did get from Catholic school was my foundation for learning. Surprisingly, it was very strict in one respect, but also very liberal in another. We were taught to think. Granted, questioning religious dogma had me in the Rectory a couple of times for crossing the line, but those few times allowed for some very interesting conversations with some very liberal priests of the day.
And that bullying had a side benefit... it gave me my love of books. I was a shy little boy who could lose myself in a story. I think I had read the entire Oz series by the time I was 9 years old. I read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy in Jr High and have read all four books every couple of years, since. (Currently watching Rings of Power on Prime...)
And I still stop and look up words I don't remember or don't know. Interestingly, I have a penchant for 1930s books - mysteries and the like. The vocabulary used almost 100 years ago is so much more colorful and descriptive.
You're absolutely correct that learning and education happen in other situations. We all learn differently. It's why standardised testing - just like polls - doesn't always tell the whole story. It's trying to homogenize and create a one-size-fits-all curriculum that really doesn't fit anyone but the corporation creating and selling the test.
How many colleges have dropped SATs?!?
There will always be kids who thrive on academics - who want to immerse themselves in academia in all its glorious subjects. There will also be those who have no desire to book-learn, but learn outside of the classroom. It takes a totally different skillset to build a nuclear reactor than it does to design one.
Which brings us back to homework...
Who is it benefitting? And would some type of independent study - be it science, music, art, job or vocational skills - or any other topic of the student's choice - be a wiser use of time?
I think another huge problem is parents pushing kids. What roll are for-profit tutoring companies playing into parents' insecurities about their child's popularity or ability to get into the 'best' schools? And don't even get me started on charter schools and vouchers!
'Nuff for now... this could go on forever...
I am the girl who liked Beowulf? In high school I loved to read Biographies of the people in my History book ,understanding the character who they actually were ,their life. I also enjoyed writing essays on how I understood different classes .English, History Geography and Earth Science were my favorites I failed Home EC. I love to read characters coming to life .My problem was I was not good at taking tests,I’d get nervous and wonder , I was amazed I got a high and passing grade on the SAT’s. Friend’s schools are in my opinion , helping students understand themselves creating an atmosphere of creativity and critical thinking.
And if these changes in public education become pervasive, where will there be teachers able to teach and what?
On a personal note, so that's how your Mom ended up at CCNY and met my brother Allen and all the rest that followed. Also, you brought back a fond memory or your Rabbi Dad, who was also a mathematician and professional statistician. Also, that you had the benefit of learning mathematics from Allen, your Dad, a mathematician whose theories are still taught in mathematic master programs.
Confession: my math knowledge stopped at Stuyvesant HS; Allen went on from there to CCNY all the way to a PHD in math at NYU; frrom that point on I never really understood what he was talking about.
p.s. they met under a table in the cafeteria during a food fight.
Dad had a Masters in Pure Math, and one in Applied Mathematics. His PhD was in Operations Research, and I have TRIED to get through his thesis on queuing theory MANY TIMES and failed.
It wasn't just that I learned math from him....remember, my mom couldn't do basic math - couldn't balance a checkbook, and my ex-younger brother had all sorts of limitations as a kid. So I was the person he insisted learn math. (And a bunch of other things.)
He hustled pool when I was really little. Mom did NOT approve - so he'd take me to the pool haul and put me on an orange crate at a pinball machine and leave me a handful of nickels. Later, he taught me pool looking at angulations related to where to put the ball.
Once AND ONLY ONCE he was called to school for me. It related to math, so he went. I was in 6th grade and our math program involved getting a single sheet of math problems from a shared bank out in hallway for all the classes. The bins were blue, then pink, then green and so on, ending with gold, and finally goldenrod. He was called in because I was on a single blue page, and had been for a while.
My father looked at the page, and I remember it to this day - it involved bundles of 10 pencils, with loose ones on the side - you had to say how many pencils there were. He said "do it." And I did the page, and then the last sheet from all the colors. I ended up being unable to do the goldenrod one, but therefore could skip everything in between - because he had taught me math at home.
He asked why I hadn't done my work -- I told him that I sat across from Herbie, who taught me this football game using a folded up piece of paper and that was more fun. He told my teacher I was now in goldenrod, and he told me he better NEVER get called to school again...