Astronomer

Heh, well obviously the Australian and American schooling systems are incredibly different then! Because in the last couple of decades or so our schools have taken a huge turn and focus on all the things I mentioned and steer clear of all that memorization/ROTE learning stuff.

It actually makes me sad to think that schools in other parts of the world are still stuck in that mindset.

__________________

Guybrush

When I was a kid, we still had the old school teachers who often were not really good to or with the kids. Learning was often by memorization or - even worse - having the teacher dictating what you have to write into your book for an hour. I was really restless as a kid and sitting quiet with my desk like that for hours every weekday was just torment. By the time I was 16, I was so fed up I dropped out .. I started again a few months later, but then I was studying art which I stuck with for 3 years. I don't think the education was that good, but it was much more freestyle and flexible. I could do things in my own pace and wasn't trapped with the desk much.

People may be surprised at this because I imagine most would think I was a pretty good pupil, but I eventually got extremely rebellious and most of my late teens, I didn't really care what grades I got. I learned a lot from school, but the way it was for me it was definetly a creativity killer and that way of learning just did not suit me as a kid at all. I think that is or was a quite common scenario for young boys with ants in their pants.

School is always changing here and so it's probably better now than it was. I'm glad I'm done with it .. Now I have lectures, but I choose to go to them. And yeah, I still get ants in my pants but I've learned to cope .. mostly.

__________________
Something Completely Different

Seltzer

The primary strand of the NZ high school curriculum is bloody appalling in this regard. When I was in school, maths/chem/physics for the most part involved blindly plugging in numbers to formulas sans creativity. English involved memorising the essays the teacher would write on the board and regurgitating them during exam time. French and Latin were my only subjects which were stimulating for their content alone. I did have some great teachers but it can be hard even for them to inspire anyone when tethered to such a dull curriculum where the underlying goal is to ensure as many people as possible meet the bare minimum requirements. The exception to this is the scholarship exams which actually involve some sort of creativity, ingenuity and understanding. I really wish I stayed in Australia for high school.

As for our universities, I think they're pretty similar in standard to those elsewhere in the world. I'm sorely disappointed that my university insists on pigeon-holing students to one language (Java) for 99% of programming assignments (even the 'open-ended' ones) but I'd say in general that creativity is encouraged, not stifled.

The thing with software engineering is that aside from fundamental theory, a lot of information is ephemeral in nature - information has a half-life and learning a new technology is often done as necessary rather than for the sake of it. And that is what makes it even more insulting when students are dragooned into rote learning flavour of the week (or on the other hand, stupidly archaic/obsolete) technologies at the whim of a lecturer whose teachings are distorted by whatever he/she happens to be researching at the time... it's exactly that kind of 'teaching' which stifles creativity... I've had to tolerate it in a few of my papers so far.

__________________

Astronomer

^ I didn't realise the NZ schooling system would be that different from Australia's. I'm also actually really interested in NZ secondary schooling at the moment because I'm thinking about moving there for a year or two once I finish my course and am a qualified teacher. So that's pretty interesting to hear.

And yeah I have to say that most the public schools in Australia are pretty fantastic. I've done teaching rounds at both private schools and government schools and the government schools are always better by a mile. Private schools teach by memorisation and very uncreative techniques, and spoon-feed their students because all they want is their school to perform well and get high marks. Government schools over here have come a long way and are really open-minded, creative and innovative in terms of schooling.

__________________

M.C. D

I believe that what is being thought about here is this. As per a professor friend of mine: We are all born with a poets mind, all born geniuses and the crap that school fill your head up from very young kind of quashes that genius and creativity out of you. He gave the example of G.B. Vico, the historiographer, who cracked his head on some steps and thereby needed to be homeschooled (or maybe even taught himself) and therefore became one of the greatest intellectuals to postulate the beginnings of man, his institutions and his language.

Seltzer

I think that Australia has always had slightly higher academic standards than NZ which is perfectly fine, but then NZ switched from SC/HSC to NCEA in 2004 and that was the downfall. NCEA is a standards based system where subjects are broken down into modules assessed as achievement standards or unit standards. Unit standards are pass/fail. Achievement standards allow students to score Not Achieved/Achieved/Merit/Excellence depending on how many questions they answer correctly at each level - no numeric score is actually given for any standard but it is implied that the bands correspond to sub 50%/50%/75%/90+%. My main gripes with it are:

* In the situation where a student answers enough A/E questions correctly to easily satisfy the Achieved/Excellence bands but misses out on the Merit band by one question, their final score will be Achieved. In HSC that question might be the difference between 90% and 85% - in NCEA it means that your grade plummets from Excellence to Achieved... botching up one question out of 15 can completely jeopardise your grade in NCEA.

The reverse applies too - there is no distinction between someone who just makes a low merit (maybe 60% in SC) and someone who makes a high merit (say 85% in SC).

* NCEA was devised to ensure that more people 'pass' their courses and meet university entrance requirements - as long a student scores an Achieved mark for a standard (which is ridiculously easy since NCEA is so dumbed down), then they get the full number of credits for that paper. This blurs the division between people who just scrape through and people who perform flawlessly. The sad part is that it encourages students to think it's acceptable just to scrape through and learn the bare minimum. A lot of people in my school would walk into an exam, do only the achieved questions leaving the merit/excellence questions blank and walk out because it's been instilled in them that the only important thing is passing... as long as they get the credits, it's all good.

* The marking schedules for internal standards can be quite vague which makes it difficult for teachers to apply them and this results in a lot of variation between schools in this area.


Perhaps NCEA has improved since I was at high school but I doubt it. The idea of handing out bluntly unspecific qualitative scores for standards is flawed from the start, and the motivation behind the system is malign. It promotes underachievement. After all, what's the incentive in going for 75% over 60% if you don't think you can get 80%... because either way, you're going to end up with a merit? And why go for a merit when an achieved is good enough?


To be honest, I am slightly embittered that I didn't stay in Australia and do high school there. I was at a selective primary school before I left and I was well set to get into a good selective hs (quite possibly even James Ruse). Instead I ended up going to a random public school here and becoming lazy. Not that it ever prevented me from doing what I wanted to do at uni in the end, but still, I feel like I've missed out.

__________________

Astronomer

^ Wow, that is very different from our marking system! NCEA sounds to me like such an odd way to assess; I had never heard of it before. Some states in Australia are still based on the HSC system but Victoria has switched to the VCE. For every subject you get a score out of 50 based on assessments during the year and exams at the end. Then all these scores are translated to an overall percentage, which is called an ENTER score. For example, if you get an ENTER score of 80% it means that you performed within the top 20% of the state. Entrance into university depends on what your ENTER score is - each university course will have a required ENTER score that you need to be successful in entering the course.

The system we have is good as far as assessment goes but it does have it's downfalls. For example, some subject scores get scaled up and some subjects get scaled down. Mathematics, sciences, and languages get scaled up while arts and humanities subjects get scaled down. There is a formula to how it works but it basically sends the message out to students that maths, sciences and languages are harder subjects so therefore your score will be scaled up while the arts and humanities are easy subjects so your score will get scaled down. Which I think really sucks because it makes students who are arts/humanities inclined to think that they are dumber than students who are more mathematically or scientifically inclined.

Another downfall is that a lot of students think that the score they get at the end of the year will determine the rest of their life. A lot of students will purely choose subjects and perform in a way that they think will get them the highest score. The score at the end of year is not what determines the rest of your life and if you don't get into the university course you desired it's not the end of the world and there are still many ways of pursuing ambitions.

So I guess in that way our system is kind-of the opposite of the New Zealand NCEA system - instead of students not trying and thinking it's okay to just scrape through, students are pushed to perform in a way which gets them the highest ENTER score they possibly can. So in a way both systems are quite stifling in terms of students' creativity.

S I guess assessment in schools is one way in which creativity can be stifled - as students will perform in a way which will get them the 'highest score' and not in a way which will allow them to be creative. But on the other hand, assessment is a really difficult thing. It must be done for many purposes but it can never be truly fair or objective.

__________________

bardonodude

memorization is a mindless use of a mind. You only really learn when you apply your novice knowledge of a subject to something of merit to the individual persona.

khfreek

Most oxymoronic thing ever, kudos

__________________
last.fm

bardonodude

haha thanks.