Tim wrote:
On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 14:52 -0300, Jacques B. wrote:
It's unreasonable to expect parents to have access to PowerPoint for
school projects.
I think it's unreasonable that parents should have to stump with $1000+
worth of machinery (a PC), plus proprietary lock-in software, for
homework purposes. And what are you going to do with it? Use it as a
high priced electric typewriter, and to look up dubious sources of
information on the internet as your references, with no trained
educators to help you as you struggle along with your project.
But then I disagree with the notion of homework, anyway. It's only
value is to involve parents with their child's education, but most
don't, or don't do it in a worthwhile manner. The kids go to school to
learn, at the end of the day they've done enough of that. Likewise most
parents have had enough work during their day, and don't want to spend
several more hours doing work on something at home.
It, homework, is pointless anyway. I work in electronics, I highly
technical field. I've never needed anything I was taught at high school
beyond basic maths in the first couple years, and the same applies for
most people that I know in a wide variety of jobs. All those nightly
hours of grief were a complete waste of my time. If I knew then what I
knew now, I would have coasted school. I would have flatly refused to
waste my time with pointless rubbish, insisted that they constrain
themselves to teaching things that were genuinely useful, and flatly
refused to co-operate with any punishments meted out. Even when I
worked in schools I realised it was a pointless place for most people.
That has got to be the dumbest argument I have ever heard in my life.
The academic load at school is not just to teach you the fundamentals,
the core bits of knowledge about mathematics or sentence structure or
turning wood on a lathe. The academic mix is to teach you about pooling
knowledge, to be able to associate dissimilar knowledge sets, to
(hopefully) think critically.
Learning, say, geometry might not *seem* to help you directly in your
job, but every time you want to cut a board or navigate a curve in a
car, you will be more likely to be successful if you understand the
concepts of measuring and calculating the curves and angles.
School is about learning to think, not silos of knowledge. I am
appalled that no one ever taught you that.
Thomas
