India Cram Schools
I was talking education with a student’s father last Friday. He is originally from Koto, India and sent me an article about India’s Cram Schools which have incredibly increased his hometown’s population.
Students drop out of high school and move out in order to attend a 2-year cram school to prepare for the entrance exam to one of a few Indian Institutes of Technology. These IITs are renowned, as you can imagine.
What the article mentioned seemed so crazy, but then again, I’m thinking like an American. My student’s father mentioned India has an opposite mentality of America and it’s No Child Left Behind Act. India, instead, teaches to the top class performers and simply requires the rest to keep up or give up.
This brings up a chicken-before-the-egg sort of thought. We all know that many Indians have moved to America in recent years. Has India changed their educational system just so they could keep up with the world power that is America? Now that they are pumping out these intelligent, scientific graduates, is the U.S. losing its strong impression?
Should we start doing what India is doing now? Would our Ivy League schools accept a student who dropped out of high school to perfect his/her SAT score?
Comments
Are we talking dots or feathers here?
I hope not, seeing as how that would create a generation of people who have sat there absorbing knowledge as opposed to learning it. Not to mention, how weird do you think you would be if, instead of going to high school with friends, growing up, making mistakes, and interacting, you read books constantly with academic success as your only motivation?
I’m, gonna go with very.
Evan said:I hope not, seeing as how that would create a generation of people who have sat there absorbing knowledge as opposed to learning it. Not to mention, how weird do you think you would be if, instead of going to high school with friends, growing up, making mistakes, and interacting, you read books constantly with academic success as your only motivation?
I’m, gonna go with very.
I agree completely, and this is the whole argument against the whole “No Child Left Behind”, teaching for test mentality that is always bubbling under the surface here in this country. Thankfully, and surprisingly people seem to be realizing that it’s a self-defeating, idiotic approach that completely discounts the major elements of academics which is not just learning facts, figures, and formulas, but also how to function in and apply things in a real world social situation.
Jay said:Are we talking dots or feathers here?
Wow, that’s funny.
Kevin said:I agree completely, and this is the whole argument against the whole “No Child Left Behind”, teaching for test mentality that is always bubbling under the surface here in this country. Thankfully, and surprisingly people seem to be realizing that it’s a self-defeating, idiotic approach that completely discounts the major elements of academics which is not just learning facts, figures, and formulas, but also how to function in and apply things in a real world social situation.
If only teachers taught this way, and students cared enough to learn this way. This whole conversation reminds me of a really ridiculous test I took in college. I majored in Mechanical Engineering, which by most accounts is a very difficult curriculum. I was taking a course in Stress Analysis (think material properties, not psychology) with a teacher that was well known for being insanely difficult and stubborn.
Our first test had two questions. The first was pretty much a word for word regurgitation of an example we had gone over in class a dozen times. Most people got it right. The second question was the exact same problem as the first one, but it actually provided a little more information so you could skip a couple of steps in the “solution method” to get to the answer. It took all of 2 minutes to do, but if you didn’t recognize the little twist, you didn’t have the info you would need to start at the “beginning” and you’d be pretty much lost.
Needless to say, I think there were maybe 3 other people in a class of 25 that were able to figure this out, and the rumor that this teacher was some tyrant was passed along to the next class I’m sure.
The problem to me is that American culture has so firmly ingrained in all of us (baby boomers and after, I guess that includes you right Kevin?) that you need to do well in school to get a good job. Your entire motivation behind learning then becomes a desire to do well on tests which themselves are often not at all representative of the key elements of what you’re supposed to be learning, and almost never focused on the process of developing your ability to think.
I’m going to have to hold off judgement on this whole cram school thing because I have no idea what is on those IIT tests, though.
I’m glad in the most up-to-date education classes for a teacher. I’m continually told to:
*link information with real-world knowledge that already exists in the child’s brain.
*tests are for the teacher to see how well he/she is doing.
The thing is, I’m just having some trouble making sure I do that linking. Aaaand… I have a school that requires us to have a number of test grades per semester. It’s not easy.
Jay, I seriously hope that Baby Boomer aside was a calculating dig because if it was then it was funny. But if it was a sincere question then….well…man that sucks.
Anyway, I totally agree that everything has become way too test oriented and everything so fixated on school as the means to success. It sucks. However as a parent who know has to interact with other parents, my impression is that whole deal and frame of mind peaked and is on the wane. Most of the parents I interact with and talk to feel like I do that pushing college or mindless recitation or SAT scores as the only way to success is idiotic. I don’t know any of these uber-competetive parents who overly push their kids in an extreme version of academic acheivement, etc. Maybe it’s because our daughter is in public school and we don’t see it as much as you would in private school, but still it’s at least somewhat comforting. I’m not saying it will ever swing back fully in the other direction but I think there may be at least some backlash to the pushy parent zeitgeist that was all the rage for a while there.
Paris said:I’m glad in the most up-to-date education classes for a teacher. I’m continually told to:
link information with real-world knowledge that already exists in the child’s brain.
tests are for the teacher to see how well he/she is doing.The thing is, I’m just having some trouble making sure I do that linking. Aaaand… I have a school that requires us to have a number of test grades per semester. It’s not easy.
I feel tests are a necessary evil, but in general I tend to err on the side of their validity.
I don’t mean to say that I feel tests should dictate your value as an individual, but surely they do measure your competence at a particular task. Do I believe they’re more for a teacher to see how well he or she is doing? Yes, but only to a certain degree.
I figure I’m a pretty good teacher, if only because the people with whom I work make it a point to say it out loud every once in a while. That being said, a lot of my kids fail or do poorly on a lot of the tests that we give them. Should I interpret that as indicative of my ability to teach? If yes, then I would certainly have quit a long time ago. (Even though I’m aware that we’re historically an underachieving district.) The problem in our school is failure to prepare on one’s own time. To our kids, homework is optional and test-performance is incidental.
While I agree that in the long run grades are not the end-all-be-all of your worth as a person (and perhaps success in the job market, though I’m skeptical of the assertion), there is certainly a positive correlation. Growing up, I bought into the idea that it one day would be and as such studied and excelled, but upon graduation saw people I considered unfit to teach or to be just plain dummies get jobs long before I did. In that regard, grades didn’t matter.
But just today at lunch I was teased by coworkers for using the word “minutiae,” because they’d never heard it before. In all likelihood I know this word because I studied for the SATs, or developed through school a fondness for recreational reading, or listened to Bad Religion or some other lyrically-verbose punk/indie band. Either way, the end result is that they think I’m smarter than they are. In that regard, I have only benefited by the importance of tests and school in which I believed.
The short version of my educational philosophy:
School is supposed to teach you shit. Tests are supposed to see if you know the shit you should have learned. Ideally, passing tests means you know your shit. Once you know more shit than most people, you are “educated.”
Kevin said:Jay, I seriously hope that Baby Boomer aside was a calculating dig because if it was then it was funny. But if it was a sincere question then….well…man that sucks.
Haha. Definitely just a dig man. The rest of your post is quite heartening, by the way.
Sammy said:But just today at lunch I was teased by coworkers for using the word “minutiae,” because they’d never heard it before.
Dude. That’s just ridiculous. You absolutely have a great vocabulary, in fact, your multifarious locution (see what I did there? thanks thesaurus.com!) is one of your defining characteristics in my opinion. But, “minutiae” is hardly representative of this. There’s a pretty good chance that that was one of the first five words I learned as a child.
- Mommy
- Daddy
- Dude
- Elephantiasis
- Minutiae
Sammy, I think grades and tests are two different things. I was great at standardized tests. I think kids SHOULD work towards grades and accomplishment and all that. I think it’s judging kids and/or their teachers based off of standardized testing that’s bad and a negative thing. And a lot of the teaching methods you hear about are geared not towards getting kids to learn or get good grades but getting them to take/pass/do well on a standardized test which are two different things. I was the perfect example of an educational mutt: I did fairly well on standardized tests, very poorly on non-standardized tests (ie math tests, science tests, etc.) and in non-analytical classes (english, etc.) I did amazing. Looking at any one aspect would have given someone a false impression of me or my abilities. Everything from someone reading my papers and thinking I was very smart, to someone seeing my algebra tests and thinking I was half retarded. I think the point of all this is to say the well rounded approach is one that’s missing.
And keep in mind when I say this I blame parents and administrators who push this test uber alles approach, not teachers who get forced into that mode. The one thing that really keeps me from pursuing the teaching thing is having to deal with those two groups of people and that approach.
Well, Kev, I definitely think I agree with you more than I don’t agree with you (which is different than disagreeing with you, you should note). In fact, we’re now spending one day a week (mandatory) teaching a program constructed by a third party that we were forced to hire. Their whole program is teaching kids to be better standardized test-takers.
So far we’ve shown them that test questions are each related to specific learning standards (NJ Core Curriculum Content Standards), and that multiple choice answer choices are identifiable as “Correct,” “Fluff,” and “Distractor,” and that the difficulty of the question is gauged by ratio of “Distractor” to “Fluff” choices. Easier questions have more Fluff, or obviously ludicrous or incorrect answers.
Great!
We get a certain amount of No Child Left Behind money, which we typically spend on technology for the classrooms, that we were forced to spend on a program that teaches children how to take a test… when all the state keeps saying is that we’re not supposed to “teach to the test.” Oh… and it was the state that told us how we were allowed to spend our NCLB money.
Sammy said:
I figure I’m a pretty good teacher, if only because the people with whom I work make it a point to say it out loud every once in a while. That being said, a lot of my kids fail or do poorly on a lot of the tests that we give them. Should I interpret that as indicative of my ability to teach? If yes, then I would certainly have quit a long time ago. (Even though I’m aware that we’re historically an underachieving district.)
I think about this a lot. And then I think about what you and I talked about. You know, that stuff that you wouldn’t want to say to parents who think the world of their particular child.
Personally, I’m an okay teacher for just starting, but I know I can be a lot better. I won’t really feel settled though, until I get into the high school level.
Ugh, you didn’t un-blockquote.
Ugh is right. I swear I do it right every time.