• I learned a fair amount in school, and I’ve learned to hate bullies and their types with such an extreme disdain that it’s entirely irrational how much so.

  • Being stuffed in a room with 20 others to sit still for 6 - 12 hours is just inhumane.

    • There’s periodic breaks where the kids who reached puberty first are allowed to hunt you for sport.

    • Ok, schoolsc are typically some variation of 8-3, which is 7 hours. I have no idea where you’re getting 12 hours from other than some crazy extreme outlier.

      During that 7 hours, you think they just sit in a room, and get handed shit after shit? That’s not even close to reality. That “massive” 7 hours is about 4 hours broken up into 45-1 hour increments after you have lunch/recess for an hour, a second or third recess that’s 30-1 hour, art class, music class, gym, ect.

      Beyond that, I have no idea how you think they should learn anything without sitting and practicing. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but when a lot of states went to in hime learning during covid, the kids did fucking horrible.

      You don’t want 25 kids in a class with 3 teachers? Pay more taxes to hire more people to be in the class. You don’t want higher taxes? Well your math doesn’t math. If you think teachers only work between their contract hours, you’re on fucking crack. All that decorative shit in their room? That’s out of pocket not reimbursed shit they bought. All the little snacks your kid gets is out of pocket, not reimbursed. Most teachers skip their lunch and they don’t get a penny of overtime.

      How would you feel if you had to buy nearly everything at you job you used, turn had to work 50 hours a week to get your job done right to be paid for 40 hours. Getting paid on breaks? Yeah, you’re paying yourself. Every check has an amount withheld so you can pay yourself over breaks, holidays, and summer. It’s not “free money” you’re paid.

      Then you have parents like yourself that have zero clue how anything works, how to even deal with working in a class with 25 kids. But somehow you have all the answers and are an expert? Sure, whatever you say.

      • 12 hours are from uni i guess. I think 9 hours happened at a-level.

        Yes you got breaks, where you move from one room to another. So much recreation.

        How would pupils learn better: focus on important topics. Dont teach about arts, music, sports. These belong to leisure time and are more fun in non-graded environments. Any institution needing those skills have their own tests in place already.

        Give them peer reviewed nationally standartized learning material for async learning. From a certain age, dont need a teacher reading the script. A video is sufficient. With a colloqium of course. Until that age, focus on enabling that self learning. Reading, writing, computer literacy. Nothing else.

        Spent 20+ years in the system. I’d call myself an expert, yes.

        • No, you’re not an expert just because you went to school. This is what so many adults think, and get wrong. You’re not trained pedagogically. Didn’t you just comment above that students shouldn’t be sitting still for 6 hours? How do you think kids learn writing and reading? It’s not by playing outside. And learning about art and music is important for overall roundedness of an education. Sports should, ideally, introduce you to various different sports, and encourage you to move. Arts attempts to foster creativity, expression, and using your hands. Music has been a part of human culture for millenia. Teaching kids about music, how it works, about different instruments, different styles of music, is again part of expressing yourself as a human being. This is only one part of your classes though. Nowadays kids, as I am sure back in the day, don’t want to concentrate on just videos. Like, you don’t understand the half of being a teacher if you think you can just leave a video on and expect the kids to learn. About 75% of a teacher’s job is basically managing the classroom so that the kids don’t cause anarchy.

  • It seems like some people here are really coping quite a lot about how shitty their school time was…

    • Not everyone’s school time was shitty.

      Especially those of us who had school before “A Nation at Risk” incited changes in education.

      Reagan’s department of education concluded that falling scores meant kids were slacking and needed to be pushed harder on standardized testing. The result was culling of recess, gym, arts, and things like home economics/shop class. To make more room to hammer in “important” stuff. So the experience became razor focused on some of the most soul crushing material without much reprieve. Note that there’s a thought that making people take the tests they didn’t used to take caused scores to go down, rather than some soft laziness of the system, so we might have ‘fixed’ the wrong things.

      Then COVID happened and schools dramatically cut back on social events and interactions. Even as the critical threat of COVID subsided, I think administration found it easier to manage the students this way, so students did not access to lockers back (because that would encourage congregation in hallways) and on top of everything else, they have to lug all their school stuff around. Somewhat a mixed bag as most of the 'textbook’s are digital now, but still have a few big ones.

      For me, school had carved out time to socialize pretty freely, to be vaguely active in a gym class, to just do some woodworking stuff, to do some cooking and sewing. Recess until like 13 years old. Current kids stop getting recess about 10 or so and unless they join a sports team likely never see physical activity from school again, and while there are still electives, much more rare. I don’t think I even saw an option for a ‘home ec’ class in my kid’s elective options, everything seemed to be more ‘substantial’ than those sorts of classes I had growing up.