Jul 25 2011: I do get "A"s but I don't think they were well-earned. To me it felt more like cranking physics / financial formulas, learning the optimized methodical approach to making templates for questions, predicting what my biology teacher was going to put as multiple choice on tests, what meaningless essay / poem will I have to analyze (most consisted of themes of discrimination, oppression of freedom, etc), the "technical aspects" of essays (style / POV / references / paragraph structure / flow ) than the actual content/analysis of itself, how well I could manually follow picture by picture tutorial to do tedious tasks on Siblieus for music or IT-Business, etc. If anything, I did less well on subjects that gave me no relevant pointers to why I was learning what I was learning and did better on subjects that used my capacity to think, use the information I had and come up with some sort of conclusion or analysis of historical or future events and what possible benefits / downfalls are involved at play or what other inter-dependencies would alter this problem or what approaches may be the best from a systematic level.
As much as I could and wish to validate my current 13 years of education, I could only find joy in informing others as a tutor when others did "not" get it. Perhaps early as 8 years of age, however I can say much of it was wasted. I hardly remember medieval weapons, metamorphic rocks, the history of Louis Riel..
Sometimes what I was taught was repeated in the best, other times I learned sporadically..although much of it also included naming convention. There might have been no proof at all for what was taught or its relevance (i.e. trig in grade 10) or optics. The transition in each summer has always been dumping and forgetting what was taught and simply remain in the population to advance next year. This to be my contempt, is abysmal and grades only perpetuate such a system when results in the form of raw scores / comparisons (i.e. A++ test service gurant
Jul 25 2011: Hmm, I think grades overall are one of the fundamental problems in educational systems. As a high school student, most students alike are more akin to knowing the course grade, the assignment grade, the exam prep, the scholarship practices/SAT testing, parental pressure (depends on your parents and their previous exposures/influences, i.e. good grades -> university -> job / bad grades -> poverty/death in some parts of eastern Asia countries where doctors/dentists are more prevalent because of that structure) than the actual content/course. And even then, we must ask what good is to be tested on something to be simply forgotten in a week?
I memorize numbers, methods, facts, interpretations and put out some cohesive system offered by the teachers in order to pass these tests / quizzes. In the end, what I get is gapping holes of knowledge in the subject area that I am learning about. The grades may not even be representative of the effort / knowledge I have, I may have went through the course content again, the teacher may have not given precisely what was taught and what was put on the test, people may just want to just barely pass / cram "study", etc.
Putting aside of the representative value of grades, to me it is one of the more demotivating factors for learning. I take APS/Philosophy and several other subjects. The ones I enjoy the most are the ones that I tend to do the best even when the teacher is not as great. Its true I have a capacity to master all of these subjects but pointing me to exercise after exercise, lecture after lecture, note after note will do little to inspire me to want and go out to learn something new. I always thought to myself, some of these lessons always could be condensed in a 15 minute video online in some form or way and even to more depth. I don't understand how sharing knowledge ought to be prohibited in forms of isolation, class advancement and tests/projects/assignments.
Jul 25 2011: Hmm, I'd probably try to make a self-sufficient community by gathering other groups of people specialized in various fields. This would highly create dependence but it would be necessary. These needs would include food, water, electricity, transportation and the like. I guess I would have to start small with gardening, micromanagement, rallying, etc. Security might be a concern, although this depends on others. Maybe a few collective communities with many people with technical skills would be able to survive with their own governing systems. After that, teaching these skills to the next generation of people would be the next concern for me.
I rather preferred if people spent time learning these skills as a trade-off for being allowed to live in a collective society and continual development in various areas than any predefined age/group limit, tuition/administration fee, marketing/job-hunting/investing or whatever confining us to constraints which theoretically don't exist. On one hand, it may mean I no longer have luxuries, people are more dependent on one another but on the other hand any form of unemployment or "marketing venture" or "grant proposal" is completely invalidated in itself because the only values upheld by the community are those with technical/practical/researching/relaying information skills. And in most cases, I guess its pretty idealistic but I'd say many people wouldn't want to live their entire lives having everyday as a Sunday weekend (if resources were always available).
Regardless, resource allocation/governing and relying on "help you; you help me" mentality would be the greatest factor in post-money era.
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A reply on Conversation: Isn't it time to eliminate grades in education?
As much as I could and wish to validate my current 13 years of education, I could only find joy in informing others as a tutor when others did "not" get it. Perhaps early as 8 years of age, however I can say much of it was wasted. I hardly remember medieval weapons, metamorphic rocks, the history of Louis Riel..
Sometimes what I was taught was repeated in the best, other times I learned sporadically..although much of it also included naming convention. There might have been no proof at all for what was taught or its relevance (i.e. trig in grade 10) or optics. The transition in each summer has always been dumping and forgetting what was taught and simply remain in the population to advance next year. This to be my contempt, is abysmal and grades only perpetuate such a system when results in the form of raw scores / comparisons (i.e. A++ test service gurant
A reply on Conversation: Isn't it time to eliminate grades in education?
I memorize numbers, methods, facts, interpretations and put out some cohesive system offered by the teachers in order to pass these tests / quizzes. In the end, what I get is gapping holes of knowledge in the subject area that I am learning about. The grades may not even be representative of the effort / knowledge I have, I may have went through the course content again, the teacher may have not given precisely what was taught and what was put on the test, people may just want to just barely pass / cram "study", etc.
Putting aside of the representative value of grades, to me it is one of the more demotivating factors for learning. I take APS/Philosophy and several other subjects. The ones I enjoy the most are the ones that I tend to do the best even when the teacher is not as great. Its true I have a capacity to master all of these subjects but pointing me to exercise after exercise, lecture after lecture, note after note will do little to inspire me to want and go out to learn something new. I always thought to myself, some of these lessons always could be condensed in a 15 minute video online in some form or way and even to more depth. I don't understand how sharing knowledge ought to be prohibited in forms of isolation, class advancement and tests/projects/assignments.
A comment on Conversation: If you woke up today and money ceased to exist, what is the first thing you would do? Why?
I rather preferred if people spent time learning these skills as a trade-off for being allowed to live in a collective society and continual development in various areas than any predefined age/group limit, tuition/administration fee, marketing/job-hunting/investing or whatever confining us to constraints which theoretically don't exist. On one hand, it may mean I no longer have luxuries, people are more dependent on one another but on the other hand any form of unemployment or "marketing venture" or "grant proposal" is completely invalidated in itself because the only values upheld by the community are those with technical/practical/researching/relaying information skills. And in most cases, I guess its pretty idealistic but I'd say many people wouldn't want to live their entire lives having everyday as a Sunday weekend (if resources were always available).
Regardless, resource allocation/governing and relying on "help you; you help me" mentality would be the greatest factor in post-money era.