British expat in the US here. I work in marketing for a tech company.
I was astonished that when someone suggested a rhyming couplet on one of our ads a) no one knew what a couplet was, and b) no one even understood the basic concept of meter.
Both those things are definitely covered in high school.
Whenever I see one of those “what would you tell your younger self / a younger generation to do” — definitely “pay attention to all your classes, it all becomes useful one day”
Yes even algebra. Yes even reading Of Mice and Men
Why are you using the word expat and not immigrant in the US?
a) because for this context where I’m from adds more context than where I went to
b) because immigrant in the US connotates South American heritage usually
You’re putting a lot of the onus on the student, when often times it’s the state. I went to a high school that should have had 2000 students but actually had 3000. So crowded we all abandoned going to lockers between class in order to make it on time, and just carried full backpacks all day. Most classes had too many students for the teachers to really help actually teaching at.
That last statement came from one of my teachers, so happy she had one of the few classes with around 20 students instead of 30 plus. It was a world history class, and still the one I recall the most, more than 20 years later. She had the option to work directly with us on stuff we didn’t understand, and had more interactive classes (like having students with specific relations to civil rights type stuff discuss their experiences in front of the class).
When you’re an exhausted kid being taught by an exhausted teacher who can’t even check up if you’re falling behind, you don’t retain much.
What is a couplet?
Pretty sure it’s Juliet’s last name in Romeo and Juliet.
If the schools taught us that how would the tax prep companies make their profits?
“Or life skills”, says the people who actively avoided Home Ec.
Home ec was completely gutted by the time I got to middle school. Really wasn’t very useful for teaching “life skills”. Also who thought that should be a middle school class? Budgeting should be a topic for when you actually have some kind of income, and I sure as hell didn’t have one in middle school.
School in Norway teaches you basic woodworking, how to cook and in math we even had an assignment where we had to find a job and create a monthly/yearly budget based on that job, taking into account loan from car, house, etc…
Does the US have nothing like that?
The important thing to realize here is that “does the US…” is almost a meaningless category to ask about (at least as far as education is concerned), because each of the 50 different states manages its schooling requirements very differently. Potential course offerings and curriculum are often completely the authority of the individual school districts. So it’s almost impossible to ask any given sweeping generalization question about the US school system.
Ok, but like, what’s there ro teach specifically? If you know math it takes just a while to crank the numbers
Okay, but to be fair, school does not teach about taxes.
Probably because if they did, they would have a neverending supply of rebellious little adults on their hands, from either side of the political sphere.
This is not very helpful when you’re making little cog workers and soldier yes men.
Came in to say something similar.
Another issue is that people don’t remember anything from school because they have no reason to. Stuff isn’t taught, it’s trained for the next test and then promptly discarded as useless. The purpose of school is to train factory line workers to be able to do one repetitive task over and over again. It’s how the public school system was originally designed.
School almost made me hate learning, and I love learning new things and skills. I literally never learned how to actually learn and be afraid to make mistakes until after I dropped out of college. I still struggle with it in my 30s.
