Teenagers' mathematics and reading skills are in an unprecedented decline across dozens of countries and COVID school closures are only partly to be blamed, the OECD said on Tuesday in its latest survey of global learning standards.
Teenagers' mathematics and reading skills are in an unprecedented decline across dozens of countries and COVID school closures are only partly to be blamed, the OECD said on Tuesday in its latest survey of global learning standards.
Wow whole bunch of old man takes about computers and not a single one about public schools being systematically defunded, dismantled, and squeezed in every way possible.
I worked as a teacher for a while until quite recently.
99% of public discourse on education, is based on the (traumatic or positive) individual experiences of people who went to school years if not decades ago, not people who actually know much about what they're talking about.
But what about the LGBT agenda that's replacing math and reading education where children learn how to vote Democrat instead of learning how to read or multiply? /S
Sounds about right. I really do make an effort but when I am helping my kids with the New Math I am mentally screaming "why did they change this!?". I do like the sightword system however. So yeah if I am getting a bit annoyed there are probably parents who are getting less annoyed and other parents getting very annoyed. Bell Curve.
Let’s say “low performing” means you scored 20% or lower on the test. We’d write that as “25% scored 20% or lower.” But you could move the measure of “low” to whatever.
It’s not “the bottom 25% were in the bottom 25%.” It’s “25% met the criteria for low.” Those are different things.
…unless this is a /s that I’m too tired or socially inept to process. i’m trying to be helpful.
Kind of, but if you take a bunch of maths PhD students, the bottom 25% will still get decent scores. I guess this just meant the bottom 25% was performing poorly not just compared to the top 75%, but also compared to a fixed limit.
Though I'm loathe to admit it, I actually have found mathematics useful in my career (which I never believed I would when I was in school!). Although I worked in healthcare, I often had to calculate figures such as equipment costs vs. insurance reimbursements in my head. I was surprised so many of my younger colleagues couldn't do even simple calculations like 10% of a bill in their heads, I had to do it for them.
As for reading, I really believe you won't make it far without good reading skills. Maybe you can luck into being a mega-rock god or something where it isn't necessary, but otherwise I think I am more worried about people without reading and writing ability than people without math ability.
As for reading, I really believe you won't make it far without good reading skills.
I'm just going to point out the easiest way to help someone develop better reading skills even when they don't want to work at it: always leave the subtitles on on the television. Always. There's studies showing that reading speed and comprehension increase when subtitles are routinely left on.
Yeah I have to do that anyway, since I can never understand most of the dialogue and my hearing isn't what it once was. And god forbid they have an irish or some other accent, I can't make out a thing without the subtitles!!
Yeah we're fucked, meanwhile in China they're doing stoichiometry in third grade. I felt I would never use math too and then one day in law school the professor asked the class to do a quick calculation and called on a student who said "I'm not a math person, that's why I'm here." And the professor said something like "all law practice involves math and you could get sued or disbarred for getting it wrong, so you better become a math person while you're here." I've found it to be true, calculating damages, disbursing funds, accounting, sometines even physics questions, in the context of personal injury/medicine or products liability, even occupational health.
It's funny because I was one of those in school who always said, "I'll never NEVER use this stuff in my real job!" How wrong I was. And I wasn't terrible, I got good grades in math but it's never been my strongest subject. However it does come in quite handy in real life.
I don't really consider doing arithmetic to be important for lawyers.
If you can use a calculator, all you need to do is understand the very simple concepts. This applies to the vast majority of people who use math in their everyday lives.
I feel like kids (hell, I would also) have been smarter if they used platforms like Reddit/Lemmy etc to learn and discourse constantly. I learn way more in these environments than I ever learned in school. I write (not quite essays but still extended body of writing) just by willingly engaging here. You would have had to pull teeth most of the time to get anything out of me in any comparable sense back then. YMMV
Part of that may be just that you're older and more mature now than when you were a high schooler. Encouraging kids to go on Lemmy and Reddit would just lead to most of them screwing around and looking at memes, not learning.
While some of that is true, as a kid I got involved in online forums and the exposure to ideas there, I think, did help broaden my horizons and spark interest in topics that school would not necessarily have cultivated in me in the same way.
Nah, it was lack of awareness of it (like nobody ever "showed" it to me so I didn't know to look for it) and lack of a good 3rd party app to make it palatable. Apollo was revolutionary to me when I discovered it in that regard.
There's the underlying basis that, on Reddit etc, you're generally viewing and discussing topics that you're already interested in, which is a massive hurdle.
I'm presuming you haven't learned much about the Kardashians on Reddit. You could, if you cared about them. I don't see how it's meaningfully different for math or anything else.
Hard not to think that's intentional. Ruling elites don't need educated masses which are harder to condition and control. Populisms don't need people to have critical capacity.
Controversial take: Pay people what they're worth so only 1 adult in the house needs to work 1 job for 40 hours to provide for the family. This will free up that parent (in a single parent household) or free up 1 parent (in a dual parent household); to help with schooling.
It is absolutely true that increasing income can improve parenting and by extension the outcomes of kids, but there is also evidence that using computers too much can be detrimental for their education.
Really it's no different than how these things affect us adults: We all know that social media is trying to monopolize our attention, and that it's affecting our attention spans and mental health. Although arguably for kids it's even worse since their brains are still in development.
Controversial maybe, but true. Less screen time would benefit all of us and really I don't think kids NEED phones on them in school.
Of course I'm a Boomer and I'm on my soapbox, and here we go again with "back in my day..." we didn't have cell phones and it was actually nice to feel independent of having to check in with other people throughout the day. I still don't see the attraction, but I know that prying kids from their cell phones will be a Herculean task.
The problem is that a lot of (admittedly overstretched) parents use the phone as a pacifier and don't monitor use much if at all.
Tommy's being a little shit? Give him the phone so he's distracted.
Of course, if little Tommy's never learnt to deal with being bored, keeping quiet for half an hour, and never learnt to concentrate for longer than the length of a tiktok video, he's going to have trouble adapting to education.
I agree with this. However, I was more talking about the use of computers for everything. Reading, math, etc are done in computers now. Students retain more information when they have to write it out on paper.
It's not the first time I read something like this. But it's not always because of COVID, school closures and so on.
A lot of things depend on a student, and if they are not interested in education and do just the minimum, of course, such skills like reading, writing, math, and so on will become worse and worse. I'm at university now, and my brother is at school. His skills and knowledge at that age are worse than mine. And I don't know why it is so, but you know, if he doesn't know how to do tasks, he just skips them, and teachers are quite okay with that. But I can't do it. When I can't finish something, I'll do my best to do it. The hardest thing for me is writing something, but I look for examples, tips, and so on. Yesterday, I was working on my paper, and this site https://gradesfixer.com/essay-types/process-analysis-essays/ helped me out because I was stuck. That paper type is not that hard, but I had no idea what to write. I found some useful resources, and these examples helped me out.
I wonder if any of this can be attributed to global CO2 concentrations. We’re above 400ppm now, and IIRC that means it’s having some effect on our cognition.