(no subject)

[tanaise]

From M'ris:
Series of questions, actually, about your schooling (at whatever levels). What were the biggest lies you were told in school? What were the biggest omissions from the curricula you were taught? And what were the biggest mistakes your teachers made?


What were the biggest lies you were told in school?

Hmm. I don't know lies. I tend to forget them. I think the closest thing that comes to my mind would be the idea that the teachers were right. or, rather, were automatically right. I caught on rather quickly that they weren't always right, but it took me longer to catch on to the fact that not everyone likes to be corrected, even if they are wrong. :)


What were the biggest omissions from the curricula you were taught?

We learned little to no European history in HS. We also learned no history past the end of World War II. Which means I have huge gaps in my history knowledge, and what I do know was mostly figured out on my own. I didn't realize that the Vietnam War was in 1972 until after high school. I have no clue what happened in other countries after world war two as well--you think I'm bad in the US, at least I've got a general timeline figured out. The rest of the world can fend for itself. Oh, except for "Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989" which was my modern history course in college, which means I know all about 8 soviet bloc type countries for that time period, and probably better than my US history knowledge, though I do tend to get the different countries mixed up when I'm working with the details. (And to be really cool, that was sophomore year, and the speaker at graduation that year was my mother's college boyfriend who had been in Czechoslovakia for the spring of 1968, the Prague Spring, that which got ended by soviet tanks.)

We were all good and multi-cultural, but it annoyed the heck out of me. I wanted in depth European, not surface non-western. Now, to some extent the lack of European stuff was a personal issue, but I am very bothered about the lack of more recent history, especially as I never cared about it later on, so I never got more than a very basic timeline of history. On the other hand, for a while in HS thanks to independent interest, I used to be able to list all french kings. And I can still get chunks of English kings in order. :)


And what were the biggest mistakes your teachers made?

Again, I don't remember these things. Mine are all like, silly things. Some teachers made the mistake of assuming I couldn't read a book and follow the class at the same time. A lot made mistakes in how they taught *me*, but I don't think it was a problem for other people. Some corrected me when they were wrong. :)

Oh, there was pre-calc in college. That was amazingly bad. This teacher made the mistake of teaching the course as though people were going to be continuing in Math, so we were taught basically the whole back ground to the proofs. like, instead of just giving us, oh, A^2+ B^2 = C^2, he would explain where the formula comes from. Which is fine if you tell people you're doing that, or if the people are ever in their lives going to need to know how to get that. Instead of just filling a math requirement. I think there were maybe a handful of freshmen, of whom one or two were going on in math. Everyone else was just getting their Quantitative Reasoning out of the way. (in my case, in my senior year, but bite me.) We'd sit patiently, watching him write incomprehensible things on the board for most of the period, and at the end of the class, I'd look at them and say, "Oh, it's X" where X equaled the proof as I'd been taught it the first time I took the class in HS, the one that actually made sense and could be used to solve things (and was in the book, for example), and when I wrote it down, the boy next to me (who was in my major and who I had a crush on for most of college and still loff) and his friend would copy it down, and likewise the people sitting by them and so on and so forth. I found it hysterical--it's not like I actually knew what I was talking about, but no one else there could even remotely translate him into anything useable. I think I slaughtered him on his class review. :)

Comments

[two-star.livejournal.com]

In Russian class on Tuesday, the instructor admonished me for reading the textbook instead of paying attention to her. A couple minutes later I corrected a spelling rule for adjective endings that she got slightly wrong, which I was able to notice because I was looking at the book. I think she was a little chagrined.