This summer, when I haven’t been handed unhappy distractions, I’ve been working on a new course for the fall. I’m looking forward to it; it’s about the history and science of evolution, but it’s shaped by the requirement that courses in its category are equally focused on developing the discipline of writing in our students, so it’s going to be a combination of me lecturing briefly on the history of evolutionary theory, students discussing what they understand, writing exercises, and students explaining back to each other and me with essays. It’s not just a STEM course, it’s a STEAM course where the liberal arts pedagogy is folded into science content, and it’s all built around an epistemological approach to understanding where our ideas come from.
And now Angela Collier puts out a video about STEAM. It’s very good, especially since the last half or so is about how conservatives are openly trying to destroy progressive education and return us to the era of authoritarian instruction, where it’s so much easier to insert propaganda and lies into the curriculum. “Memorize this” is a much more useful tool for authoritarians than “question everything”, and it also would demolish good education.
This is not.a new problem. It’s clearly an issue since Reagan, the creature who corrupted everying about America, or at least, interpreted all the pustules of corruption as fashionable beauty marks for the fash.
There is a good German film titled “NaPoLa” after the nazi elite college schools intended for the children of the ruling elite (I do not know the Merican film title, even if it was ever translated) showing the experience through the fictional eyes of two teenage boys.
Someone out west must have thought it was an instructional film.
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The most serious trouble I got into at school was continuing to contradict a teacher who interrupted a conversation between me and some friends(during register when we were allowed to chat), to insist that “all teachers are more intelligent than their pupils”. My offense was not that I was wrong, but that I persisted in stating that this was statement was obviously untrue, even when the discussion expanded to include the whole class, and refused to back down. I got sent to the deputy head who hectored me, without letting me get a word in until I was so ANGRY I started crying because I had to let it out. This was taken as agreement with his untenable position and I was allowed to attend assembly. I never did make the apology in front of the class that was demanded which was “I am sorry, I was wrong”, I squirreled out with “I’m sorry I was so loud”; that this was accepted merely confirmed in my eyes that the teacher involved was more stupid than me! Both of those teachers had joined the school after a major shake up and I was not used to teachers that would not admit either that they were wrong or that they might not know something, as the longer serving teachers very much encouraged thinking for ourselves.
I recently played a couple of games in Stellaris as a Machine Intelligence with the “Obsessive Directives” civic called “Widgets Unlimited.” Essentially, a paperclip maximizer that went interstellar. Decided to take a break after I had a gray goo nightmare.
Treating education as job training strikes me as similar. Once it becomes about getting a job, it’s ceding control of what gets taught to billionaire vanity projects instead of cultivating the individual. And billionaires don’t care about much beyond making number go up. Republicans want cogs for their corporate machines. I want people who can look at problems broadly and come up with actual solutions.
You have more patience than I with long videos. It takes much longer to listen to a video than it takes to read the same content. She is likely a teacher and she is leaning heavily upon the fact that students must listen to her. So bored. skip skip skip
What she is appearing to talk about is Common Core? The Pedagogy of Education is not scientific, it is authoritarian and ‘those studies’ she refers to are not repeated or rigorous. Reading those papers is wading through argle bargle. Yes they are scammers. Because that’s where the actual money is. STEM is where the money is and so the A people are trying to steal it instead of advocating for increasing the size of the pie. My sister taught science and Rick taught math. The scammers she talks about is literally what STEAM is in their experience with the pedagogy of education system and it is where their job evaluations come from.
At this point I am 21 minutes in and she’s still ranting without proposing anything. As if Common Core doesn’t address all of her issues so far. So so~oo bored. From there up to 30 minutes in a political rant. I’m done.
She talks about American students feeling bad about their liberal arts choices. It’s because so many have already made those choices for decades and are teachers and because that is okay that we have to import our engineers. Which is what Bush was talking about.
As usual for her type she is more political than anything and appears deeply contemptuous of those who have a science degree. She has arrogant body language and voice for science that she does not use when she talks about buzzwords. Her ‘A’ is for asshole.
“Teaching to the test” became the goal for the entire district in which I taught. Every core subject teacher was required to drill their students on those tests daily, sacrificing the rest of their curriculum. There were benchmark and practice tests being administered throughout the school year.
I breathed a sigh of relief that Latin was not tested and not considered a “core subject”. The administrators weren’t smart enough to realize that a grasp of any foreign language, but especially Latin, was core to many of the subjects that they were testing.
I just kept teaching my students my curriculum, challenging them, drawing connections to their other classes and teaching them to think, write and present about ancient languages and culture. (I threw in a little ancient Greek, too.)
The hurtful thing was that during teacher prep week, we were required to partner with teachers from two other disciplines to create a lesson plan that we could teach to our combined classes. I had a lovely joint lesson plan with a science teacher in which she would explain the science involved in the eruption of Vesuvius and I would teach about Pompeii and Herculaneum and the history and Roman culture that the study of those two cities have revealed.
The second lesson plan was the obvious one of partnering with an English Lit teacher when she was teaching about Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”
I kept those lesson plans and contacted those teachers at appropriate times. In both cases, they told me that they would love to do it, but were too busy with benchmark tests.
I folded those plans into my own curriculum. Luckily, I’m married to a scientist who gleefully helped me with the science of volcanoes.
I had the last laugh, since my students were often considered geniuses by their other teachers because they understood the connections between those classes and what I had taught them. Most of them also did well on the standardized tests!
seachange @5:
She’s an astrophysicist. According to you, a self-hating one?
Whatever criticisms I’ve had of Collier, she’s spot on here. The conservative hatred of public education is quite understandable. An educated electorate spells death for them
Another channel worth checking out is Dr Fatima, who’s also an astrophysicist.
Recent video touches upon aliens:
@1 English title is Before the Fall.
I’m fortunate in that I have a lousy memory. So I can’t do the “cram and forget” thing a lot of students do. I actually had to learn stuff.
Before the Fall (2004 film) – Wikipedia
“NaPoLa – Elite Fur Den Fuhrer”
OK, here is the optimal education by the standards of Project 2025.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Fall_(2004_film)
Robert@10
I have a sort of photographic memory, although I didn’t realize what it was when I was in school.
If I was taking a history test, I could imagine the textbook in my mind. I would remember that I had seen the answer to the question in front of me under a certain picture. I would go to that page in my mind, think about the paragraphs under that picture, and there it was, the correct answer! I’m also very adept at reading and remembering maps.
I met my father when I was 34, and he told me about his photographic memory. He had been tested by the army and used it for some missions, which he refused to talk about. When I described my test-taking method, he laughed and said that I had inherited it from him.
My son inherited the map skills. He was in a boy scout orienteering group. Several teams would be dropped off in a forested part of Camp Bullis. Each team was given 5 minutes to study a map, then the first team to make it back to the headquarters with the most flags won. My son was always the only one in his group who needed to study the map, and would lead his team out quite easily. He pointed out the flags, and his team collected them quickly.
He told us recently that his son is freaking out his pre-K teacher because of his amazing memory.
Our family has noticed several of our grandkids with freaky memories as well.
My father’s legacy lives on!
seachange @5:
Dude, I know people with ADHD who are less impatient than you, goddamn. Also, the fuck’s up with your presumptuous attitude? She’s not a teacher, she has a PhD in physics, and you’re bringing up pseudoscientific “body language analysis” crap that’s otherwise used by YouTube grifters.