Some of the Issues that Public Education Faces:Teaching Methods
The usual teaching method of question and answer has been used for longer than I’d like to imagine. The reason that I would rather not think about the time that this way has been used is because of how ineffective it has always proven itself to be. Being able to say everything has a definite answer or a small variety of answers with different wordings show that the system can be compromised. That’s why cheating works. Cheating only works if there is a definite answer or the answer that fits the best has already been created, for example, an online article being copied for a project.
Instead, teachers should be more of a participation discussion style format. When a student has to actually pay attention their mind is more active, thus causing them to learn more material more efficiently. Which at this point in history is what needs to be one of the main focuses. We need to focus on learning how to do things that need to be known in order to survive in the real world. That is the beginning of the next major issue, there needs to be a general survival class, a class where everything is put into the literal context of how it is used on a daily basis. In such a class there could be knot tying and survival skills, cooking and ironing, balancing checkbooks, and other things that everybody has to do as adults.
I believe that if a Generals class was required for all years of middle and high school, students would be able to see how the things that they are being taught in their other classes can be applied. This might be able to motivate the students to work and try to understand the material better, thus improving the economy after about a decade. In the past few election years, candidates for various government positions have used the method of stating what they will do ‘today’, but what they really need to be talking about how to fix the future, ads this is one future fix that I believe should be put into action. In today’s classrooms, students are graded mainly by assignments and tests, in many elective classes, they are graded mainly on participation. This way of evaluation is weak because of how in each individual class, there is too much consistency and not enough variety in the grading process.
If in every class there was a large vitiation of categories that each class had to be based upon. If there was a certain level of required papers that must be turned in, so many days of must have participation points, and a certain number of tests that every teacher must have every student do to pass classes. If students had to participate and be tested in order to pass a class, I predict that the GPA of most students would change 1. Quicker, 2. More dramatically and, 3.
Would better represent the students for colleges, work, and other things where one was looked at as a person. Plus, it would show which schools were better compared to those that are worse.
