I like your examples and thoughts here. Do you have more thoughts on how to put these into action on a grande scale? In this class we are being taught how to fight the system with everyday things, to change our classroom. But what is our lawyer equivalent? What can we do to get schools, states, and eventually countries to give a damn about education instead of numbers?

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Meredith, I think we need both the past and the future. Take a look at past failures, see how we’ve fixed them for today, and then apply that kind of thinking to today’s problems. Can students identify what conditions could cause critical failures or higher than expected wear? How can they use today’s tools to look for signs of future problems? Maybe they really need a tool that can do X and Y, but it doesn’t exist yet. Can the students figure out what disciplines would also benefit from that tool or could help create it?

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I think the departmental side of this is really important. In Engineering, ABET accreditation is this looming cloud that professors and departments are terrified of. They believe they need excessive testing and quantification to satisfy the ABET Evaluators. From my perspective, this testing comes at the cost of students actually learning things in a reliable long term manner. But if professors try to curb testing and introduce critical thinking (rather than rote memorization), they get scolded by the department for not having enough quantification.

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Bravo on your use of memes, I tried and failed to do this on our post and ended up with political cartoons instead. You did a good job capturing the array of emotions that I think both teachers and students feel during a class.

I do have mixed feelings about this comment though:
“Susan – School is failing to teach us the necessary skills to function once we become an adult. Instead, most of the topics that are taught are important, but may not be important later in life. ”
I think the word “may” is critical here. There is only so much that we can teach in grade school, and almost every subject is important later in life to a handful of students in every class. I didn’t care to learn art, and it’s not really important to me now. However, I also had artists in my statistics class that probably felt the same. We need both classes to be offered, and not every class can be perfectly tailored to every student, but every student needs some exposure so they can find their passions. And giving choice isn’t perfect either, because I’ve seen people that figured they’d never learn how to properly use a computer become amazing coders once they were forced to learn. Now they love coding, but without that forced learning, they probably wouldn’t have touched MATLAB or R with a ten-foot (virtual) pole.

Higher ed can be a little more student-centric because you probably won’t have an unwilling history major in a fluid mechanics class. However, at the same time, balancing a budget is hardly relatable to something like fluid mechanics. There is only so much tailorability for a given class.

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Hearing about that talk and his bullsh*t studies made me red in the phase. It’s just so disgustingly misinformed while purporting to be an expert in the scientific method. I hadn’t realized the promotion part was personal, which is an even larger red flag! Thank you for that infuriating tidbit. Do you know if they ended his talk early when they realized what he was saying? I have been meaning to look into this more and always forget when I have the time.

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My thoughts are that reward is the approach of Do This -> Get That. It’s guaranteed and expected. The worker knows that they are just a horse chasing a carrot.

Recognition is not promised, and not necessarily expected. It feels more like gratitude and appreciation. You aren’t going to miss out on a reward if you take a risk and don’t deliver something you were expected to provide. If anything it fosters a community of taking risks because if you happen to make a big improvement in any area, you are more likely to be appreciated.

Does that make sense?

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For me, the sentiment of grades not being in the “real world” is what really drives home the foolishness behind grades. There are very few jobs that mimic something like a grade scale. People are generally accessed on how well they “play” with others and whether or not they have a minimum output. If anything, a pass/fail grade scale would be more representative of “real world” scenario.

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I love your last example. It’s so easy to feel inadequate when you read about great people/discoveries/works of art. I wish we learned more about the thought process of great thinkers. How many Nobel prizes came from genius and how many from a pure accident? Is it better to look at data until epiphany happens or to throw out crazy ideas and see which ones you can develop? These are things that would be good to ponder.

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Haha, no worries about the TMI, I’m in a similar boat. I have a disease that makes my body (generally intestines or hands) swell when I’m overly stressed so I’m used to being in tremendous pain or barely able to write during exams and such. So I’ve gotten really good at ignoring my body. I’m still aware of what’s happening, but I don’t let it distract me, so I found that section of the survey interesting.

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Depending on the individual school you can start to specialize as early as the first year of high school. At least at my school, we had a lot of opportunities to choose special art, science, or math classes pretty early on. We aren’t nearly as locked in as you describe Indian students being though.

You’re right about it being rough to be locked in so soon, especially if you haven’t had the privilege of a great teacher or group of teachers to really inspire you in one direction or another. But, at least in the US, you can often change course later on. In my program there is an artist who went from something like traditional clay sculpting to glass working to a graduate degree in plastics and rubbers. Right now she’s excelling in our MACR program despite not having a STEM undergrad. So there is hope, at least in the US.

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