5 Subjects Not Taught In School (But They Should Be)

 

Education is way more than sitting in a classroom. Unfortunately, it is often the same old story. Go to school. Read, write, learn math, history, science, and the searing pain of social rejection. Go home. Forget everything you learned. While having a specific course for each of these ‘subjects’ might be a long way off for schools, integrating these into your existing classrooms need not be. And you never know – both students and teachers might find themselves a little more engaged. Long story short, these skills are learned inside and outside of schools – we get that – but they aren’t actual subject areas that you can focus on.

In fact, the idea of trying to learn some real-world skills is what Modern Lessons is all about. While it may not offer courses on all the below subjects (yet), it’s got a lot of helpful bits of info for anyone looking to learn important skills for free! (Jeff, the founder of Edudemic, built Modern Lessons just FYI!)

Making films is a excellent vehicle of self-expression. Not everyone is cut out for blogging or playing an instrument, and the world has more than enough bad poetry as it is. Films have become a part of our everyday lives, from big-budget blockbusters to amusing no-budget clips on YouTube. Teaching students to make more effective videos is not only good for keeping students interested in their lessons, for once, but it also means that there will be more high-quality content available in the future. The entire world will thank you for that.

At around age eighteen, students will graduate from receiving six hours of taxpayer-funded babysitting per day and be thrust out into the real world to fend for themselves. Some of them will delay entry into the work force by obtaining a few years of self-funded babysitting at university, but the end result is the same – they need to be able to find a job. Rather than allowing hordes of students to list their Playstation high scores on their resumes and wear pajamas to their job interviews, it would be in everyone’s best interest if students learned the ins and outs of convincing someone to hire you while still at school.

Yes, math is taught in schools. No, that kind of math isn’t doing anyone any practical good. You will never need to do coordinate geometry while paying your taxes, and you’ll never have to work with radians at the grocery store. Unless kids are fortunate enough to have been brought up in a rare household that isn’t bad at literally everything pertaining to money, they’re going to have a rough time once they’ve been cast out of the academic womb. What percentage of their monthly budget should go to rent? How much money will they have to make in order to avoid sharing a tent in the woods with four other people? For kids who’ve never faced greater financial responsibility than paying for their own video games, these are the great mysteries of life – and they shouldn’t have to be.

Despite popular belief, people are not born with perfect social skills; they learn them. Some children are graced with interactive families and plenty of cheek-pinching relatives to teach them good manners early on. Other children are allowed to spend most of their time alone, slowly reverting to their evolutionary roots as they build dens and discover fire in the basement. Even the most well-adjusted child is going to have some tricky situations to deal with in life. How do you cope with a coworker who steals credit for your ideas? What are you supposed to do when you want to break off a relationship with someone who hasn’t really done anything wrong? How do you deal with a roommate who won’t pay his share of the rent on time and keeps a stolen baby rhinoceros in your bathtub? A few classes on social skills could really help students to navigate these unavoidable situations.

From oil changes to shattered iDevice screens, there are plenty of quick fixes in life that you should know how to do yourself. Sure, a computer technician will always be there, happily taking your $100 in exchange for running a can of compressed air over your computer fan and evicting the family of mice living underneath the motherboard, but you can save a lot of time and money by doing it yourself. Everything you buy will break at some point, and many people don’t have the skills needed to un-break them. Sure, you can tell kids to struggle through with an instructional video, but wouldn’t it be better to learn it properly?

What kind of practical skills do you integrate into your classroom? What ones would you like to integrate but haven’t yet?

View the original article here

Jacqueline Wilson: 'Spelling is not something that seems to be taught at schools'

The best-selling author, who receives hundreds of fan letters each week, told The Independent that children from Eastern Europe, Spain and Portugal all had better spelling and grammar than British children.

“They’re writing in English, and apologising for their English, yet these letters will be more grammatical and spelt more properly than [those from] our own children. It’s quite extraordinary.” Around 90 per cent of children who write to her cannot even spell Jacqueline correctly, she said, adding that standards had slipped in the two decades that children had regularly written to her.

“Spelling doesn’t seem to be something that happens [at school]. I don’t think it is being taught.” Many children didn’t even bother to try to write properly, resorting to “text language”, she added. “Sometimes it is unintentionally and sweetly funny. [They will say] ‘I want to be a famos ritter’,” Wilson said. “They think all you have to do is finish a book and then it takes off and you have a movie deal.”

The author, who became Dame Jacqueline in 2007 in what was a first for a children’s author, is one of Britain’s most popular writers thanks to the success of her breakthrough novel The Story of Tracy Beaker in 1991. It is Tracy’s defiant behaviour that makes some parents lament the character’s creator, but Wilson is unperturbed, saying she isn’t worried what adults think about her work. She does, however, clear up one misconception: “There are no drugs and no sex, ever.”

She is known for tackling tricky subjects, from broken homes and adoption, to physical abuse and bereavement, all topics that were missing from the children’s books she read when she was little. But she says some topics are taboo given that girls as young as six might read her books.

“If I were writing for mid-teens and dealing with relationships, I’d try terribly hard, but hopefully not in a didactic way, to show girls there is more to life than getting a boyfriend and that it’s maybe not such a terribly great idea to have lots of sex when you’re not in a proper committed relationship because in the long term it won’t be particularly enjoyable or fulfilling.”

Although her books are most popular with girls, largely because they are usually told through a female first person, Wilson willingly wades into the contentious issue of gender-based marketing. “The difficulty is a lot of my books have been published with pink covers. You have to be a very secure-in-yourself little boy to be seen publicly reading a book with a pink cover although boys [who read them in school] seem to enjoy them as much as girls.

“I would always much sooner my books weren’t pink. But WH Smith says if a book is pink then it sells twice as many copies.”

The author also discussed the fact that she is poised to join the waiting list for a kidney transplant and will shortly have to start dialysis. The procedure will leave her unable to write for five hours every two days, because the fistula she had to have inserted is in her right arm.

Wilson added that today’s parents don’t always appreciate the appeal of “simple old-fashioned things” such as going out and having picnics, adding: “That’s something children enjoy.”

Picnics are a big feature of her latest book, Four Children and It, which is a modern-day retelling of the classic E Nesbit story Five Children and It. This week, to mark 155 years since Nesbit’s birth, Wilson will be joined by around 100 schoolchildren in the grounds of Well Hall, where Nesbit used to live, for a picnic and live webcast hosted by Simon Mayo.

Teachers and librarians can register classes to watch Jacqueline Wilson’s live webchat on 9 May at? www.puffinvirtuallylive.co.uk.

View the original article here