Just saw this, gyp dear. This is why first class day, first semester freshman bio I saw so many duuh blank stares at the syllabus. And I thought: why are some of these folks here? But it was at least partly what you said -- many were shocked by what the workload expectations looked like.
At some point American public schools substituted "passages" for actual texts, and teachers became less and less capable of handling the latter. (It likely coincided with the entry of Big Education into the market in the 1960s. All you needed was a library before that--free; after, you were dependent upon the pablum coughed up the publishers--profitable.) I've seen a high school yearbook from a school in Texas which indicated that kids used to do work that would be considered advanced for college students today, and their extracurricular clubs couldn't be handled by grad students today. Palpable dumbing down that appears to have been no accident...
I never used a standard textbook in any course I taught, but rather gave students my "notes" and embedded in them questions for discussions via the TAPPS method I alluded to earlier. Standardized texts, in trying to be everything to everyone -- including performing to the satisfaction of the often prominent scientists on their advisory boards -- end up generally serving mostly publisher pockets. Never found a single one I l really liked. I'd put several on reserve in the library for students to reference, but no requirements to buy (some nervous ones did anyway). Re: what you describe, I'm not adequately familiar, so can't really comment, but I can see that many of my collegiate colleagues would have felt naked without a course textbook aligned with their syllabus.
Good for you, but then it sounds like you yourself got an actual education and so had the knowledge base to go outside the standardization model. I think that's key: that the more dumbed down the system gets, the less teachers who attended that system know and the more they have to lean into "guidance" from industrial sources. As for the scourge of "passages," I recall wanting to read my challenging library book in 5th grade in the 1970s (before the Department of Education was born) but being required to put it down to go do the SRA garbage from IBM. An unforgivable insult to my intelligence, it consisted of brain-dead passages (you'd have to TRY to make something so boring and meaningless) which I had to read and answer questions on. Utterly pointless, but...the district had signed a contract with IBM and so it had to put us all through this dumbed-down ordeal that stole many hours from actual learning from actual books. (If it's true that you value what you give attention to, kids are correct to take away from school that reading doesn't really matter: no time is given to it, no matter how much a kid just wants to curl up with a book.) It's one reason I caution against throwing more money at schools: they tend to waste it on admins and contracts for the corporations that fund the campaigns of our Congress critters. Kids? An afterthought on a good day. (The people who think the system was just GREAT before No Child's Behind Left are completely out to lunch, but then it does serve their political agenda, which appears to be the whole point.)
"the less teachers who attended that system know and the more they have to lean into "guidance" from industrial sources." -- Absolutely so. I once had an angry letter published in the journal Science contesting another letter-writer's opinion about teacher training -- by someone who thought grammar school teachers didn't need such rigorous understanding of scientific principles. You arrogant dimwit, I thought, although I was polite in my letter. That's where the misconceptions are frequently seeded that it's sometimes hell to unearth and undo. Educate those teachers well!
I confess that I'm older than you -- fifth grade, hmm that was late 1950s for me, so I guess I must've missed the specific scourge to which you refer, but your assessment of money thrown away on bogus corporate contracts is spot on.
Professionalization of teaching hasn't worked out very well. I wouldn't mind getting rid of teachers altogether and having real writers work with kids on writing, real scientists explore the natural world with them, people really knowledgeable about history hold forth on that, etc. There's a reason "Education" is a joke major in college, am I right?
Hi Jenny
My daughter attended what was considered a pretty good public school.
Thing is: she NEVER had homework. When I inquired about it, she said, Oh they give us time in class to do it.
Huh. Guess that’s why it’s called “HOMEwork.” Nd the teachers clearly didn’t want to spend the entire period actually, er, teaching.
It left her totally unprepared for the workload of college.
Just saw this, gyp dear. This is why first class day, first semester freshman bio I saw so many duuh blank stares at the syllabus. And I thought: why are some of these folks here? But it was at least partly what you said -- many were shocked by what the workload expectations looked like.
At some point American public schools substituted "passages" for actual texts, and teachers became less and less capable of handling the latter. (It likely coincided with the entry of Big Education into the market in the 1960s. All you needed was a library before that--free; after, you were dependent upon the pablum coughed up the publishers--profitable.) I've seen a high school yearbook from a school in Texas which indicated that kids used to do work that would be considered advanced for college students today, and their extracurricular clubs couldn't be handled by grad students today. Palpable dumbing down that appears to have been no accident...
I never used a standard textbook in any course I taught, but rather gave students my "notes" and embedded in them questions for discussions via the TAPPS method I alluded to earlier. Standardized texts, in trying to be everything to everyone -- including performing to the satisfaction of the often prominent scientists on their advisory boards -- end up generally serving mostly publisher pockets. Never found a single one I l really liked. I'd put several on reserve in the library for students to reference, but no requirements to buy (some nervous ones did anyway). Re: what you describe, I'm not adequately familiar, so can't really comment, but I can see that many of my collegiate colleagues would have felt naked without a course textbook aligned with their syllabus.
Good for you, but then it sounds like you yourself got an actual education and so had the knowledge base to go outside the standardization model. I think that's key: that the more dumbed down the system gets, the less teachers who attended that system know and the more they have to lean into "guidance" from industrial sources. As for the scourge of "passages," I recall wanting to read my challenging library book in 5th grade in the 1970s (before the Department of Education was born) but being required to put it down to go do the SRA garbage from IBM. An unforgivable insult to my intelligence, it consisted of brain-dead passages (you'd have to TRY to make something so boring and meaningless) which I had to read and answer questions on. Utterly pointless, but...the district had signed a contract with IBM and so it had to put us all through this dumbed-down ordeal that stole many hours from actual learning from actual books. (If it's true that you value what you give attention to, kids are correct to take away from school that reading doesn't really matter: no time is given to it, no matter how much a kid just wants to curl up with a book.) It's one reason I caution against throwing more money at schools: they tend to waste it on admins and contracts for the corporations that fund the campaigns of our Congress critters. Kids? An afterthought on a good day. (The people who think the system was just GREAT before No Child's Behind Left are completely out to lunch, but then it does serve their political agenda, which appears to be the whole point.)
"the less teachers who attended that system know and the more they have to lean into "guidance" from industrial sources." -- Absolutely so. I once had an angry letter published in the journal Science contesting another letter-writer's opinion about teacher training -- by someone who thought grammar school teachers didn't need such rigorous understanding of scientific principles. You arrogant dimwit, I thought, although I was polite in my letter. That's where the misconceptions are frequently seeded that it's sometimes hell to unearth and undo. Educate those teachers well!
I confess that I'm older than you -- fifth grade, hmm that was late 1950s for me, so I guess I must've missed the specific scourge to which you refer, but your assessment of money thrown away on bogus corporate contracts is spot on.
Professionalization of teaching hasn't worked out very well. I wouldn't mind getting rid of teachers altogether and having real writers work with kids on writing, real scientists explore the natural world with them, people really knowledgeable about history hold forth on that, etc. There's a reason "Education" is a joke major in college, am I right?