[MD] school kills creativity

[Otto Zequeira]

Thank you for the replies.  Food for thought.

On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 12:09 PM, ml <mbtlehn at ix.netcom.com> wrote:



> ... As has been stated in this forum, though maybe
> not in exactly this way, education is something we
> do to ourselves in spite of the institutional thrashing
> about.


Research shows that the way schools are run can create disparate results for
students.  Please see "The Manufactured Crisis" and "Foundations of
Democratic Education".


> The low priority of education leads to a low ability to
> discriminate between students & the types of talents
> and information processing styles they have.  In
> all fairness, it is too expensive a task, given the money
> available to the school districts.


Despite being 50th out of the 50 American states in education spending in
the state of Florida, we still spend in Miami-Dade County Public Schools
over 16K per student per year.  I was fortunate to attend excellent public
and private schools, and my private school, although not as good for me as
my public school, spends 12-13K per student and has state of the art
technology, chemistry labs, a football stadium, far superior to anything our
public schools have.  We have to consider alternatives to the current
management structures we use now.

 Some additional ideas for school restructuring can be found in these
websites:

http://teachdade.wikispaces.com/School+improvement
http://teachdade.wikispaces.com/Vouchers+pros+%26+cons



> The only thing worse than a cookie cutter one-size-fits
> all structure for education is the change-everything-for -
> the-sake-of-creativity, when it is implemented from the
> top down.  It removes any hint of structure of knowledge
> itself or the relationships between things.


We are in agreement about this.


> Oddly enough, one of the best education systems I
> ever saw was in a Boy Scout troop.  ... The 'expert driven' solution in
> modern schools
> precludes this precession of varied-ability-
> teaching that penetrates to everyone.
>
> The passage of my years through school was a
> contrast between mind-numbing lecture, which
> was personally good due to good memory, and
> split-up-into-groups-and-figure-it-out-for-yourselves,
> which was heinous.  It was unguided, structureless
> playtime at any age from single digit to university.
>
> I agree with Sir Ken, but the how of it is the real question.
>
> thanks--mel


We are in agreement about the importance of structural flexibility in the
classroom for learning, and that education is not a game.  The goal of the
grammar games was to increase quality.  Also, we were using a pragmatic
approach to grammar, where grammar was not the end of the lesson, but the
means with which we could arrive at better writing, editing, and student
engagement with words.  We focused on understanding the top 20 grammar
errors or writing according to the book, "Under the Grammar Hammer".

In addition to my instruction over the past couple of years to produce an
original product with which to demonstrate the lesson, this year I gave the
students a list of games from wikipedia which they could use to teach their
grammar lessons.



High school students have been grammar workbooked all their lives, which may
explain their extreme aversion to the topic.  We ended up teaching grammar
to 9th and 10th graders at the highest level that I have ever taught it, at
levels of application to the top 20 grammar errors, way beyond the basic
lessons in which we languished in the past.


Where I was lucky to get one or two teams to teach grammar over the past
couple of years, this year all of the teams of three students in my
classroom came up to teach, a 500 to 1000 percent increase.  The students
were encouraged, I'm sure, by their peers who kept asking, "When are we
going outside?  When are we going outside?"  I had to keep reminding the
students that the objective was to become better writers and editors, not to
just go outside and play games.  Hopefully we did both.
Sincerely,

Otto Zequeira



>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "X Acto" <xacto at rocketmail.com>
> To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2008 7:01 AM
> Subject: [MD] school kills creativity
>
>
>  Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're
> educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our
> school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types…
>
>
> http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity
> .html
>
>
>
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
>
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
>