What is meant by "Curriculum"?

 I was really surprised by and never realized how long student spent in classroom. Students spend over 12,000 hours in school from childhood to graduation, which was a long period of time. Elementary and Highschool students attended school from 9:00AM to 3:00PM for classes as well as other afterschool programs or socializations in school. To these students, schools were their entire life from K-12. Students were pretty much socialized by the school system for their entire childhood. School was the environment that most people grew up with. Hence, school curriculum was incredibly important for the student's values, expectations, and behaviors. 

It was also worth noting that Grades were crucial in student's learning. Grades were a commodities for the students which gave them a sense of accompliations that reward them for their works. The whole points of grades were competitions. Students receive a sense of reward from beating their peers. Likewise, althetic league also teaches students in beating their peers.

Schools were important in shaping students' mindsets of the world. However, I learned that from Eisner's article schools teaching often emphasize logical, verbal, and rule-abiding thinking instead of non-verbal and imaginative information. Moreover, school rarely taught other important subjects like law, economics, psychology, and anthropology. They also don't teach important life skills like writing a job resume, preparing for interview, navigate society, paying taxes, or other important subjects. Schools also rarely teach students how to critically view mass media, advertising, or social media. This often leave young people vulnerable to manipulation by media.

Personally, the school curriculums were incredibly important for shaping the growth and development of a student. Yet, this school curriculum rarely teach students about navigating the society despite taking most of the student's childhood life. It taught them competitions and "beating their peers" in subjects like Math, English, Science but didn't teach them how to do taxes, write job resume, prepare for interview, navigate society, or critically read mass media. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

First Mathematics Puzzles

Image
 I solve this Mathematics puzzle using Python Jupyter notebook. Using a few lines of code that simulate the opening and closing actions of the lockers I found these lockers that would be closed, while the rest of the lockers would be opened.  Below are my codes for the problem:  I first make a list of 1000 entry in Python to denote each locker space. I denote 0 is open and 1 is closed.  Then, I wrote a double for-loop to simulate the actions of each student from 1 to 1000 opening and closing their respective lockers. The outer for-loop loop through each student from 1 to 1000. The inner for-loop loop model every student closing and opening their respective lockers. Then, we simulate the result and print out the lockers that are closed. The rest of the lockers would be opened. 
Read more

Skemp Reading Reflections

 The first thing which interests me is the differences between the  Instrumental Understanding and  Relational Understanding.  Instrumental Understanding is only knowing how to do a problem while relational understanding is learning why it works. In learning mathematics, even among University courses, many students only have instrumental understanding because there is simply too much concepts to cover and there isn't enough time.  What caught my attention is why instrumental understanding is commonly taught. Skemp mentions that Instrumental Understanding is commonly taught because i t is often easier and faster for students to grasp initially.  It provides immediate rewards for a struggling student's confidence. Moreover, i n specific, isolated scenarios, instrumental understanding can be a faster way to get a reliable answer. Instrumental learning taught you how you do it instead of why you do it.  However, Skemps also says the benefits to  ...
Read more

Battleground Schools

 Learning about the conflict between the Conservative and the Progressive Mathematics Education format were pretty interesting. North American Mathematics had shifted between the Conservative and the Progressive Perspectives. Traditionalist perspectives focus on rote memorization and standarized testings. The Progressive perspectives focus on conceptual understanding and inquiry-based learning. ' I was surprised by the "inquiry-based" learning methods where students face a mathematical problems, form hypotheses, and experiment to see if you can solve the problem. The student must approach a mathematics problem like a science problems.  However, it was interesting to learn that this movement fails because of the math phobia across society. This "math phobia" exists among Mathematics teacher as well. Many Mathematics teachers themselves are "secretly afraid" of math. Hence, they naturally resort to the conservative Mathematics formula, passing down this ...
Read more