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Education in US

Well, one-off mistakes aren't the end of the world. I spell stupid things wrongly when I'm rushing an essay, too. I remember once I got an essay back with something to the effect of "WTF?" written at the top by my teacher because I'd spelled my name "Ganielle".
 
Oh my gosh, I know about the annoying homophone thing.
We were doing standardized test prep in English, and on the one worksheet (we're talking 8th grade here) you had to choose the correct homophone from the 2 on the sheet. They included:
See/Sea
Beet/Beat
Won/One
There/They're/Their
Nose/Knows

And there are still people in my grade making run-on sentences.
I want to cry sometimes.
 
There's stupid people in every grade.

Once, in math, on a test, (the most important test of the year), I wrote Vee on the top of my paper. I got it handed back to me with a huge question mark, and I was sitting there like "...My name is not Vee."
 
Heh, one of my friends once came up with "America, America, please shed some brains on thee!"

So, yeah. Education sucks here. I don't really have much else to say that hasn't already been said except, WHY do they allow sadists to be Gym Teachers? For instance, I was playing volleyball once, right? I have a massive phobia of balls, to the point where I flinch and run away from the ball, and if I get hit I'll shake and sometimes cry. Well, there were some people who were tolerant of it, and some who just ignored me, and some who teased the living crap out of me until I was literally in tears. When the teachers got to pick our teams for a forced tournament type thing, guess which sort of people were on my team? Also, for the entire three-week tournament, only one of them ever stopped to think about it once when he realized I was shaking after getting hit on the back by a ball... so glad that's over with. In other words, Physical Education sucks.

And I've actually spelt my own name wrong on papers before... I don't know how that happened, exactly ^^;
 
oh man my school is excellent for these

"Germany and Greece are right next to each other, so you could just live on the border!" "Uh, are you FAILING geography? Greece is an ISLAND."
"400 km? That's, like, around the world!"
"Yo, what's a program?" (second day of a computer programming course)
"That's going to give me an elliptical seizure."
"Aren't there no such thing as male lions?"
"Isn't France and Britain the same thing?"
"I wonder what Willy Wonka is like in real life."
"If God didn't create the world, then how's it all gonna end, HUH?"

Some stupid students aside, our school is (and schools around here in general are) absolutely awful. Lots of focus on memorization and mastering sets of steps to deal with problems; no praise or even attention for actual understanding and intellect. I guess the logic behind that is something like "not everyone has the same capacity, so we shouldn't make intelligence out to be a great thing."
 
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My only issue with schools here (I'm not sure if this is a New York thing, really) from my experience is that they put too much emphasis on memorization and testing in place of students actually gaining an understanding of the subject at hand.
 
My school educates based off memorization as well. They don't teach you to absorb the thinking behind the problem solving, more like... memorize these steps and you'll get the answer. They don't tell you /why/ you get the answer when you do those steps though.
 
U.S. schooling can best be summed up by the phrase "Standardized Testing". Some schools are worse about this than others, but generally the idea is not to allow kids to actually learn anything, but cram as much bullshit in their heads so they can pass the tests so the schools won't be shut down due to lack of funding. Some schools have even begun to do this at the KINDERGARTEN LEVELS. Yay No Child Left Behind. To put things in perspective, a good number of American schools don't even have air conditioning and still use asbestos for insulation. It's pretty damn pathetic, honestly.

Our colleges are pretty kick-ass, though.
 
One kid in my ROP school's morning class had respelled "umbrella" as "unbrella". And his paper was filled with so many spelling and grammar mistakes. D:
 
Leafpool said:
some kid in my science class today said:
Where's Africa?
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Yeah, a girl in my social studies class, while we were learning about WWII, asked "Oh, Japan is in Asia?"

But anyway, I'm quite fond of my public school education. The only thing I notice it lacking in is anything about basic grammar. It annoys me. I have no idea how I turned out knowing grammar at all. But maybe I just have a knack for remembering things, because I have no problems with the education here.
 
Someone in my Science class last year thought the capital of England was the United Kingdom.

And my then ten year-old sister actually didn't know the capital of England was London.

Some things are assumed by schools to be so obvious and basic that they don't need to teach it - and that's where they're wrong, because if nobody teaches them it, they'll NEVER know. I'm lucky my dad sat me down and taught me bloody good English when I was a toddler, otherwise I might be just as bad at spelling and grammar as any other person in my school. And if mine and my mum's idea of fun wasn't to say a country and get the other person to say the capital, I'd suck at geography too.

In geography you should learn about how the planet is set out before learning about things like tourism and how volcanoes are formed.
 
Cirrus said:
And if mine and my mum's idea of fun wasn't to say a country and get the other person to say the capital, I'd suck at geography too.
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Hehe, mine too! She used to come up with crazy ways of making me remember them, too. I'll forever associate Venuezuela with cream crackers @.@
But basic geography is so important and schools just don't teach it; people should at least know what continent each country is in (says the girl who thought Bolivia was in Europe until last year - it just sounds like it should hang out with Estonia and Latvia), and Cirrus is right; it's so much more important than knowing parts of a volcano or examples of metamporphic rocks.

My spelling, punctuation and grammar used to be appalling until I started writing my own fics and I had to actually pay attention to such things. We didn't do a lot of creative writing in primary school (as far as I remember, we just read the HP books during English because our teacher was obsessesed with them), which was a shame.
I remember our Spanish Philosophy teacher (as in, he was from Spain and taught us Philosophy) spent a few lessons teaching us the basics of grammar when we were in sixth form (age 17) because he just couldn't take how structurally awful some of our essays were.
 
Leafpool said:
The "where" in the kid's persuasive essay... was already there.
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Hm, I mean the kid made a typo in his essay. Sorry if I'm unclear.

U.S. schooling can best be summed up by the phrase "Standardized Testing".
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Yup. Our school is currently extremely focused on teaching things on the upcoming STAR Test (whatever that stands for), because the school gets ranked by how well the students score on the test. It's totally ridiculous, because, in my science class, the teacher just skipped a few interesting chapters just so we can learn about the things that are "required".
 
This kid also managed to misspell "Massachusetts" and "governor", and she also kept using sentence fragments in some thing we were working on.
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Okay I think you can forgive her Massachusetts.
 
Yes, standardized testing is pretty much what they drill us on.
"OMG, you must do good on the PSSA's or the TEACHERS WILL BE NEGATIVELY AFFECTED! Make sure to fill in the bubbles completely etc etc..."

Yep. Standardized tests suck.
 
okay okay I understand the rationale, however flawed, behind standardised testing. but I have to ask, why are there (based on the various acronyms floating around in this thread) so many different standardised tests?
 
In the US, at least, each state does their own set. There're a few repeats -- SAT, ACT, AP stuff -- but for the most part it depends where you live.
 
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