quantumnerd

November 02, 2009 at 10:36am

Personally what I think students need is just a different teacher attitude. Don't get me wrong- computers are great. They teach you to think outside of the box (menu hunting instead of blankly staring like a "special" person, troubleshooting, organization, etc). Later, coding and rich content creation like digital art and 3d modelling is very good. However, it won't turn the kids into super humans, it'll just help.

The attitude of the teachers is what's killing kids. Teachers and kids think that kids will learn by LISTENING to a teacher rant on about something, then do a million repetitive drills in a row. It works, but  very ineffectively. The human brain works by recalling, and a string of drills uses RECENT memory (which means that the kids won't be recalling it, and learning will take longer and be less effective).

Secondly, both sides of a topic are not usually presented in schools. In Canada, we're taught in textbooks that the conservative (right wing non-extremists (extremists would be reformists)) party of Canada believes that anybody who doesn't conform exactly to the mould should be punished. D'oh. It's from the left-wing point of view, but includes no right wing point of view.

We're also taught that Indians and women are continually discriminated against and should almost be treated as super-human (don't get me wrong, they should be treated equal but the way they put it in the books is just extreme). Again, includes the femenist/minority point of view but doesn't really provide the other point of view (eg: people are different, not everybody's the same, and you can't expect all women to behave exactly like guys do and yell at the TV about sports).

Lastly, teachers squashed thinking outside of the box. They wasted several weeks of my life forcing me to draw something and color an entire 8.5' by 11' page with a pencil crayon just because it was what the other kids did and I wasn't allowed to use coloured paper cutouts to be a million times faster. So much for "be creative". Once I told the teacher that putting my freind Dean ( a kid who was a bit different) with the group of girls would hurt him because they would shun him and scar him for life (I should know). She told me to go to the office. I asked her why she was telling me to go to the office. She told me I shouldn't be talking. I asked her why, if she was talking, she didn't have to go to the office. I was again told to go to the office. I pretty much wanted to run away at that point but I had a dream of develloping video games, which kept me in school until I came to my senses and realised I had to put up with the BS. 

-=[The name's Quantumnerd, and if you mock my name you're clearly missing the point]=-