Don't stay in school

burlington6

Slightly off topic but I have a problem with teachers who teach subjects they have no experience in.

My granddaughter is taking business studies. The business studies teacher is a local woman who is well known.

She's 24, has a degree in English Language and then obviously took her teacher training. Her parents paid for her to get through uni but she has never had a job. Not even part time.

What a woman of 24, with no experience of the working world is doing teaching business studies in a high school is beyond me.

Delia_Cardei

Flyonthewall wrote: »

Not everyone has a parent or adult in their life to teach them that though. Plus, not all parents know the answers themselves.

Agree, so that's the point of school education. We need it even it's usually wasted by those kids. Do you miss a lot the school days? School nurtures kids not only from education aspect but also the aspect of learning to be a decent man. I believe that lots of people enjoyed their school days though they had to face lots of homework stuff.

Flyonthewall

ViolaLass wrote: »

Genuine question, what would you drop?

I know this wasn't aimed at me, but looking back at school there were so many subjects I would have happily dropped. However, I get why they're taught. PE, for example. Although as far as that goes it wasn't so much the subject as the teachers lol.

I think for most, I'd have been happier had I not had to do so many lessons on certain things or if certain parts of subjects had been cut out. Like did I really have to learn what types of clouds there are? We spent at least an entire lesson on that, may have been more than one. It wasn't in any test, never mentioned again and I've never needed to know since leaving school. There are far more important (and interesting) things I could have been taught in that geography lesson.

I think for some lessons certain things need to be cut and then other things added. So, as I said in a previous post, add finance stuff to maths. You could teach first aid in science or PE. Teach voting when talking about the history of voting.

We did do PSHE (Personal, social, health and economic) which is the perfect time to talk about numerous adult things, but no. Spent many many lessons going through different drugs and why you shouldn't take them and talking about STIs (covered odd basic other things relating to that but not much). I didn't need years of being taught that. We didn't do anything regarding social or economic. If there's going to be a lesson designed to teach the stuff they should actually teach it.

Flyonthewall

Delia_Cardei wrote: »

Agree, so that's the point of school education. We need it even it's usually wasted by those kids. Do you miss a lot the school days? School nurtures kids not only from education aspect but also the aspect of learning to be a decent man. I believe that lots of people enjoyed their school days though they had to face lots of homework stuff.

No. I hated school lol. I miss seeing my friends daily at break times, but nothing more. I didn't get to see them during lessons so can't even say I miss lessons for that reason.

I never liked homework, but it's not top of my list for having disliked school.

theoretica

Flyonthewall wrote: »

I think for most, I'd have been happier had I not had to do so many lessons on certain things or if certain parts of subjects had been cut out. Like did I really have to learn what types of clouds there are? We spent at least an entire lesson on that, may have been more than one. It wasn't in any test, never mentioned again and I've never needed to know since leaving school. There are far more important (and interesting) things I could have been taught in that geography lesson.

Yes, but how did your 30 or so classmates feel? There was probably someone who preferred clouds to whatever you would have found more interesting.

When I think back to facts I learnt in school before I was about eight two come to mind - don't feed hedgehogs bread and milk, use cat food instead, and the eye of a Tyranosaurus rex was the size of a football. These haven't been very useful in my life, but dinosaurs were a topic I was probably more willing than others to write about and practice my messy handwriting and spelling long words correctly. This was presumably the real point.

Flyonthewall

theoretica wrote: »

Yes, but how did your 30 or so classmates feel? There was probably someone who preferred clouds to whatever you would have found more interesting.

They spent a lot of time talking to each other. I don't remember anyone seeming interested in the clouds, but even so it was still something that was made far longer than it had to be and for no reason. I'm sure it wasn't related to another topic we'd be doing later on or just done, it wasn't for a test...nothing. So why was it taught at all?

At the very least if you're going to spend so much time on something like that at least make it interesting. Staring at a few pictures in a book and writing down basically what the book said isn't fun for anyone.

When I think back to facts I learnt in school before I was about eight two come to mind - don't feed hedgehogs bread and milk, use cat food instead, and the eye of a Tyranosaurus rex was the size of a football. These haven't been very useful in my life, but dinosaurs were a topic I was probably more willing than others to write about and practice my messy handwriting and spelling long words correctly. This was presumably the real point.

I remember writing a poem when I was young. The idea behind that is fine - creative writing, thinking about structure, thinking about words etc. However, it had to be about someone I'd never even heard of and we weren't told anything about them because they just assumed we'd all know. So something that should have been useful just became something very stressful.

Sometimes schools have the right idea, but it's not done in the right way or there's something missing for some people. I think the same can be said for numerous lessons. Even if it's not a topic you think will ever be of use in life just adding something or the way it's done can make all the difference. You found the dinosaur thing useful for skills, others may not have. I hated writing that poem, others liked it.

I think choice and time are really key. Choice of subjects and even choices within those subjects as well as careful consideration about how much time actually needs to be spent on that subject. Everyone is different and sometimes we spend a lot of time on things when there are better things we could be doing, however interesting the subject may be.

missbiggles1

Flyonthewall wrote: »

I learnt about the Victorians, but not about advances in technology or engineering as far as I remember.

I never learnt first aid at school either.

I think Brownies and possibly Guides do that (like Scouts do), sure there's a badge for first aid, but I went to Brownies for years and I never did that. So even with groups like that it all depends on what they happen to do in the time that you're there.

You must've been asleep - it's virtually impossible to study the Victorian era without covering the Industrial Revolutions

pollypenny

Nah, it's not important to learn for the sake of learning, of finding something interesting.

Just train kids to do the basics.

This thread does not ring true for me. Touch of the student phils here, methinks.

Flyonthewall

missbiggles1 wrote: »

You must've been asleep - it's virtually impossible to study the Victorian era without covering the Industrial Revolutions

Gee, thanks...

I did a bit on it, but it was quite a long time ago so can't remember exactly what we did. From what I remember it was on living and working conditions. Not any advancements, just this is how it was, they used a machine that looked like this for this purpose. I don't remember going into much detail about the Industrial Revolutions.

I may have papers with information on it, but that doesn't mean I ever read them or had to do anything on it lol. Or maybe I've been happy to forget how much I had to suffer through such boring lessons lol.

Anatidaephobia

I was taught first aid at school (not that I can remember most of it, to be honest) and we were also taught about voting. We had a mock election where we were split into parties, had to campaign, one candidate in each party had to give a speech, then everybody voted.

I agree that for most things school teaches you how to learn which should therefore give you the tools to work out how to deal with things in adult life.

However, I do think that tax should be taught in school.

ViolaLass wrote: »

Apparently he also doesn't know 'how to pay tax'. For most people, this is not an issue as your employer sorts it out for you.

Thinking "my employer sorts out my tax" is the primary reason that people do not educate themselves about paying tax and also do not keep HMRC informed of changes ("but my employer does that for me!") and therefore they only discover that they are responsible for paying the correct amount of tax when a letter arrives on their doormat telling them they've underpaid.

We had a class at school called "Guidance" which was one hour a week and generally involved things like writing CVs, sex ed/periods, talking about bullying, etc. Most of the time, the things we were supposed to be doing in Guidance were not sufficient to fill the whole hour and the class was a bit of a skive. They could have easily used some of that time to teach a few basics about the tax system to ensure that everybody understood they had to take an active role in ensuring they paid the correct amount of tax, had to actually look at the breakdown on their payslip and check the tax code was correct, and wouldn't just look at the bottom line and assume the employer deals with everything else for them.