So, I was reading this about some of the ideas rolling around to improve our educational system. Well, I am a little concerned. First off, I think Summer vacation is something kids need. At the same time, I know that kids lose a lot of what they “learned” over the extended break. The article brings up a good point about students in poverty who may fall behind during the summer months and how they do not have the luxury of camps, summer school etc. Then again, I was not wealthy enough to do that stuff either. The only time I went to summer school was when I risked dropping out. From what I recall, that did not cost my family anything. Even so, I do recall having a lot of trouble at that point. Even with all of these points, I think the problem is not that kids have an extended summer vacation. The article also mentions adding three hours to every school day.
I think what they need to do is start school later so kids are actually awake when school starts. Moreover, I think there needs to be a change in how students are taught. They need to be taught how to think critically and how to solve problems effectively. For instance, they should be taught to look at the problem and look for different solutions to it. This way they have a process that they can learn how to solve those problems, as opposed to simply searching for an answer. There is way too much process of elimination style learning in our current system. Seriously, tests and quizzes that are multiple choice encourage guessing! If we can focus on teaching kids how to find answers instead of how to figure out which answers work best, we may actually get at a decent point on the educational standings. Essentially, the answer is not to add more hours to learn the same things the same ways. That may work for a small improvement, but if we continue to teach the same way then students will keep learning how to find a particular answer than how to solve a type of problem. Case and point, how many of you will take a test and say “that sounds like the answer that would be right on this test”? Compare that to actually thinking about what the question is asking and how each item that could be an answer would fit into that category. We have all been taught how to look for the answer someone wants, but we do not know how to find an answer that someone may not have. If we want to solve issues like health care, this ruined economy and all other sorts of problems, then we need to start thinking of solutions that no one has thought up, yet. Let’s face it, nothing that these politicians are planning is going to solve the problems indefinately. We need to learn how to prevent and adapt!
