quote: It taught me that knowing the answers, or being able to figure them out, wasn't what school was about. It was obeying orders.
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Funny...it taught me that knowing all the answers wasn't teh only thing that mattered...that I had to be able to apply them in the proper manner in order for my knowledge to be useful.
Sounds to me that the problem may not have been the test, but that you "assumed" you knew why the test was given that way and assigned motives to it on your own, regardless of the actual intent of the testers.
I was given that test a few times, and only failed it once, when it was a varient...it said the instructions half way through rather than all the way at the end, as in "Don't answer any of the odd questions...
Seems to me that they might have been showing you one of your flaws, in that you didn't take enough time to actually do what you were asked to do, huh?
BTW, I hate that test too, because half the people who passed it were just lazy and didn't fill any of it out because they didn't care if they failed. Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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I think that the schools are a very important place to learn socialization skills, BTW, and those skill are very bit as important as most of the three R's...
Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Kwea: I think that the schools are a very important place to learn socialization skills, BTW, and those skill are very bit as important as most of the three R's...
And you're okay with the government controlling the type and content of the socialization?
quote: I have mixed feelings on dividing kids into groups by ability level--but I recognize this as an issue that reasonable people can disagree upon without assuming evil motives in those with other opinions. My school did not segregate by ability level, and I believe that in general, that pushes lower achieving kids to try harder. (To be clear, I believe ability grouping in general benefits gifted students, and no grouping benefits average to low-average students.)
My experience of dividing kids according to their ability is that it harms more than it helps.
I went to school in an area where we were tested at 11 and the top 25% went to a grammar school. I was one of those that got in to a grammar school. While some people benefited from selection I think the majority didn’t. The expectations for those who did not get to the grammar school seemed to be low, although I had little experience of those schools, so I’m basing my comments of the experience of a friend who joined our school for the sixth form (age 16 – 18) and the exam results from the non grammar schools.
I was part of the group who would be expected to benefit from selection. After one year at secondary school we were divided up into 3 streams according to our results over the first year. The impression was that those in the bottom stream would not do well (12 year olds). That is a third of a group tested a year before as being in the top 25% already being treated as failures. I was in the B stream, which was OK as we were still expected to do well academically. Where the system failed me is the assumption that to get into that school everything must be great and any difficulties you have must be down to laziness. In my case dyslexia was causing me problems, but it was never identified, I was just told I was sloppy and lazy and how could anyone spell a word two different ways in the same paragraph. It wasn’t until I got my final exam results and went to university that I realised I was reasonably intelligent after all. Many of my friends also suffered from the constant feeling of not being good enough.
On the other hand, some kids thrived in the highly competitive atmosphere. This included my sister who did brilliantly there, was always top of her year, then went on to medical school where she continued to be at the top of the group. She is also considering sending her son to the school we went to. However, I think she would have done well whichever school she went to.
The standard of teaching was no higher in the grammar school than in comprehensives, we had some excellent teachers but also many who were poor, but sustained good results because the students were highly motivated (with high expectations from their parents) so if the teacher didn’t teach then the kids would do whatever they could to find out what they needed for the exam.
Posts: 169 | Registered: Aug 2005
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(And if I seem to contradict myself there it's because there wasn't ability grouping in my school most of the time, but there was an entrance exam to get in, so in a sense we all were in a "high achieving" group. But having been segregated, about a third of us (including me) got to experience low grades and feel like failures despite the fact that we would have been very high achieving in most other schools.
And yeah, I always felt that the school took a lot of credit for student accomplishments that were easily explained as simply the result of barring the door to all but the best and brightest students in the first place.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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