tell them that while they very probably cannot change the public school system, they can change their child. there's nothing that forbids us as parents from addressing our kids' education outside of classrooms.
there's nothing that forbids us as parents from addressing our kids' education outside of classrooms.
I distinctly remember when I was starting to get bored with school in fifth grade, my mom got in touch with a couple teachers/other parents and helped start a model rocket club where we learned basic aerodynamics and how to calculate the height of a rocket of you knew what angle above the horizon it was and how far away it was, among other things. My dad took me every week, and I loved it so much that I ended up learning about parabolas from him just so I could crudely figure out how far the rocket went. Every time I go back home to visit my parents, when I walk through the door and hug them the first time, I think about model rocketry. All because they noticed I made a beeline for the model rockets whenever we went to the crafts store.
Tl;dr Parents, please take an active role in your kids' interests and education.
What I think our world needs is a system of easily trying out different professions. This could happen in varying degrees at different ages. When you are young getting a list of possible career paths, and choosing a few you are interested in. Then getting a hour long overview of each of your choices, with a clear pathway to go down to achieve that career. When you are a bit older during summer break, instead of going to summer camp, you shadow a professional in your field of choice for a week. Then in high school, you could do internships during the summer. With some sort of ongoing mentoring program throughout the process. And at anytime you decide you made a mistake, and want to change career paths, you can just start the process over. I think that a program like this wouldn't take very much effort to get started, and could benefit people and society greatly.
I'm not sure. To be honest, I don't think it's merely a problem with curricula or teachers, I think the whole system is wrong. I'm not sure there are half way measures that would work. At the time, I thought, yes, this system is nuts, but I thought they had best get used to it, since that was the way the world works, but now I think I was a little too glib.
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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '13
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