On 1/02/2014 3:24 PM, Russell Coker wrote:
Regarding restaurants and healthy food. This analogy could be taken as a reason for home schooling, healthier just like home cooked food.
True.
Regarding class size, I think that to a large extent the best class size is determined by the skill of the teacher. Some teachers are simply incapable of keeping order in a class of more than 8 or 10 students. Others can keep order and usefully teach 50 students.
Don't disregard that in a group of people (kids in this case), each has there own set of skills that are complimentary to others in the group. When one or more of the group is down on a subject, then there are one or more in the group whom could work with them and bring them up to the standard (without any direct teacher involvement). And given that the skills vary per topic, if the group is large enough, then the reciprocal can work for those helpers to become the helpees.
Regarding the violence in schools. The easiest way to improve things would be to make every teacher sit the PCL-R test. There's probably only a few psychopath teachers in each school (I know of two at the high school I attended) but it's enough to make a huge difference.
That seems to be quite an obsession of yours, perhaps you should seek counseling over it.
Another easy way of improving the school system would be to expell the students who have no hope of passing year 12 when they are 14 and make them work at McDonald's.
Everyone develops different skills at different rates. I had a best friend during primary and secondary school whom was a couple of years ahead of me when it comes to physical activity (read I was an uncoordinated kid), but that come together, just not quite as quickly as my friend (by about 2 years). Naturally I had other attributes that were ahead of my friend. We helped each other's weaknesses and we are both doing okay today -- no teacher was involved in any kind of one-on-one for either of us at any time. You cannot know for sure that a 14 year old that is behind the others is not going to make it later. Sometimes it is a matter of the light suddenly turning on and that can happen at a different age and then that kid goes forward in leaps and bounds. You can't just say, you're dumb, get out of here! Another problem with today's schools is that they they pass every student almost every year, when some students need to be held back at least once to help them get up to speed and not to be forever behind everybody else. Teachers are required to make it a priority, in order to give the school "a good reputation", to provide specific training towards getting excellent NAPLAN results and identifying students for exclusion if those students won't benefit this cause. That is, they teach how to do NAPLAN, but not so much in other areas of the curriculum that are not so heavily judged and therefore won't reflect on the teachers or the school itself!!!!! Cheers A.