[MD] school kills creativity

[Otto Zequeira]

P. S.

As I mentioned in the article which I linked earlier, one of the
inspirations for these experiments, of course, were Pirsig's experiments
with rhetoric instruction detailed in ZAMM.

http://mdcpsprofessionals.wikispaces.com/Overcoming+mediocrity+in+the+classroom

Also, for more information on current public school spending in my district,
please see:

http://teachdade.wikispaces.com/Effective+education+spending

Otto Zequeira
http://mdcpsprofessionals.wikispaces.com


On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 11:31 AM, Otto Zequeira <ozequeira at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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/
>>
>
>