After reading Diane Ravitch's interesting article about the education sytstem, I started to think about our school system. I could see the reason why she would argue that many schools are very standardized test-oriented because it is actually true. I feel like sometimes schools get a little too carried away with tests and homework that they forget about actually getting kids to learn. From my experience in the past, (for example last year) I did not learn much. It got to a point where all I cared about was passing instead of learning so much. While I might've gottent he grades I wanted by doing that strategy, I realize that it I didn't get much out of school. I thought that all I did was hard work and homework.
Have you guys had any similar thoughts and/or experience? Do you think we need less working and more learning in school?
I can relate to your experiences. For example, I barely learned anything in history last year. Besides the fact that my teacher rarely taught, I passed that class by mindlessly completing tasks and memorizing study guides for painfully easy tests. Yes, I was required to read from the text book and write notes, but I barely comprehended anything I was reading-- I just saw it as a small task to complete in order to get the homework points. If my teacher had passionately taught us about world history, rather than making us take notes on our own, I probably would have taken in a lot more than I did. In fact, the notes that we took were close to useless when you consider this fact: More likely than not, our teacher would let us use our study guides when taking the tests. The study guides practically had all of the answers.
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