Posted on 04/25/2015 6:27:38 AM PDT by Republicanprofessor
When I left my 7th grade math classroom for my Fulbright research assignment in Finland I thought I would come back from this experience with more inspiring, engaging, innovative lessons. I expected to have great new ideas on how to teach my mathematics curriculum and I would revamp my lessons so that I could include more curriculum, more math and get students to think more, talk more and do more math.
This drive to do more and More and MORE is a state of existence for most teachers in the US….it is engrained in us from day one. There is a constant pressure to push our students to the next level to have them do bigger and better things. The lessons have to be more exciting, more engaging and cover more content. This phenomena is driven by data, or parents, or administrators or simply by our work-centric society where we gauge our success as a human being by how busy we are and how burnt out we feel at the end of the day. We measure our worth with completed lists and we criminalize down time. We teach this “work till you drop” mentality to our students who either simply give up somewhere along the way or become as burnt out as we find ourselves.
(Excerpt) Read more at fillingmymap.com ...
I wonder if they measured the average IQ of Finnish children as compared other countries...
Organizational theory says that large organizations can only do one task well. When they become too diversified with too may agendas they fail. The American education system is now a way of socializing (as in creating socialists) children and acclimatizing them to the new godless and non-moral society. It is also a means of financing useless eaters and giving jobs and retirement benefits to people who have paid their Democratic party dues. Nowhere on the list is educating in reading, writing and arithmetic. Those have become the cover story.
If life is so great in Finland, why do so many become alcoholics?
"This phenomenon"
- or -
"These phenomena"
please, teacher.
Probably for the same reasons Australians do: Because they can. Lots of leisure time, and enough income to keep one supplied...
Finland has a population of about 5 1/2 million people.
[...educational ideas. After all, education has been in the hands of the Democratic unions for decades.]
Worthless democrat unions who only indoctrinate mush minded children into the new slavery coming for sure.
We want astounding new discoveries from people forced into an education system that is focused on the lowest common denominator.
Our nation still hasn’t figured out the difference between education and training. It hasn’t figured out the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
The Finns are producing people who are good at school. OK. So show me the difference between that from say locking their kids up in prison until they are 18.
Make sure your name is on the paper, and put it in the basket when you are Finnish.
Average IQ Finland = 99. Average IQ USA = 96.
BTW, for whatever it’s worth there is only one country in the world where the students outperform US students of that ancestry.
That country is ... Finland.
And they don’t do so by much.
like most nations that far north, its dark, DARK, and cold much of the year. That would drive most to “self-medication”
Finland is white so IQs and culture play in the performance of students and teachers.
The US would never be permitted to pick people as teachers based upon real skills and abilities rather than race quotas and rage.
I don’t think the Fins are importing third world non Finnish faking illiterate third worlders and forcing Finnish children to dumb down to their level.
Alcohol consumption Finland 10.1 liters per capita, meaning it ranks 14, as compared to USA, number 22 at 8.6 liters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption_per_capita
Numero uno is Estonia, related to Finns, BTW at 12.3 liters. France, surprisingly, is #3 at 12 liters.
However, at the link you can see that statistics vary by source and methodology.
Quite interestingly, in 1776 American consumption of alcohol was a multiple of what it is today.
With the entrenched bureaucracy and the teachers unions I wonder how much can really be changed.
This constant change in educational goals/methods/nomenclature is what soured my wife on her teaching career. Every few years, some aspiring PhD candidate would enter the administration with a whole new set of guidelines, goals and methods that were applied to everything from auto mechanics to English lit. And this was at the college level. Her teacher friends in grade school had it even worse, having to submit lesson plans that accounted for every 6 minutes of classroom time. Just insane.
I note that the Finnish method in fairly close to what I experienced in school 60 years ago in the US--the major exception being one teacher for the first 6 years. However, I am aware that this did occur in some one room schools in remote areas.
When I look back on my elementary education, I realize what a genius our principal was. Not only did he hire dedicated teachers, he exposed us to culture and business outside the classroom. By 6th grade we could balance a checkbook, discuss art and classical music and had a working knowledge of world geography and governments. We had not started algebra or foreign language but what we had covered, we knew.
Wow. Big difference between the OECD list and the WHO list. Am I correct in saying many at the top of the WHO list are FSU countries?
America is modeling it’s education system after China’s. Mindless personality-destroying rote learning, where there is only one correct answer to every test question, including questions like “what did you do on the weekend?” and “what is your favorite color?”
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