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Showing posts with the label teaching

Marginal Revolution University

Rather touchy-feely for some people from George Mason, don't you think? But I've started their first course and I'm optimistic.

Finished!

Today my Grade 4, 5, and 6 classes took their final exams for maths.  This means I am done teaching in South Africa.  (Imagine me being jubilant right now.)  What better way to celebrate than the Onion : The U.S. Department of Education released a comprehensive, nationwide evaluation of American schools Monday indicating that attempts to teach absolutely anything to these little shits is just a huge waste of everybody's time... "When I first started teaching, I would see the smiling faces in my classroom and get excited about nurturing their young minds," said Melanie Whitman, 35, a first-grade teacher quoted in the report. "Now I can't look up from my desk without wanting to puke at the sight of all those little psychopaths." Secretary Duncan said the study is the first to provide detailed evidence in support of the theory that third-grader Scott Kriesel is a complete fuck-up and perhaps even the living incarnation of Satan.

Learning styles

This article was an interesting bit on how to learn, but mostly I was glad to learn that a lot of the information that people laid down at my training last year was complete crap, as I suspected: “We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles . “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.” Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack...

Correction

In the comment thread of this post I rather glibly stated that Teach for America had a dropout rate of ~50% (n.b. that I was defending TFA at the time). Turns out it's more like 15% for two years, though it gets a bit murky after that . Regardless, I still believe that TFA is a worthwhile program with a limited scope. The dropout rate for Peace Corps in South Africa, on the other hand, is actually about 50%. This is higher than average--according to this Peace Corps wiki , the overall rate is about 33%. I find this discrepancy unsurprising.