I was a bit shocked recently when I found out a friends 12 year old could barely read, and that according the school and the parents the kid is educationally doing just fine. I mean what!? That’s nowhere near fine. How is this good for anyone? The kid has no learning difficulties according to the parents. They are getting him a tutor now. He seems to be of average brightness, so having good reading at 12 should be no problem. Everyone has let the kid down. School and parents both.
Comment on Discussion Thread 🐀🐁🐇🐈🐕 Wednesday 26th March 2025
LowExperience2368@aussie.zone 1 week ago
just my rant about the education system
The school I’m at has very low standards for its students. Most students are not interested in tertiary education or are doing unscored VCE, so all they have to do is fill in a worksheet for each subject (barring English I think) and there’s their satisfactory. They don’t even have to pass the unit tests, and if they want to pass, all they really have to do is regurgitate information from a textbook and tailor to different scenarios. Then there’s the UK’s curriculum and IB, requiring students to write essays in their science subjects and conduct their own research projects. GCSEs probably have more rigour than the VCE system, and that’s not even the final qualification if you do A levels. I understand education in the academic setting is not for everyone, but I feel like as someone who actually wanted to develop better critical thinking skills throughout my education, the system has failed me. All I learnt from doing VCE was how to memorise a bunch of pretty much useless facts, so I when I got to uni, I knew fuck all about writing essays. Heck, I still can’t write a very good essay or write well in general. Maybe my experience would’ve been different if I did more humanities subjects. But I’m about to go on and teach kids content that they’re going to have to memorise for an exam. At least with one of my subjects, it’s easier to deviate from the whole “here are some slides, now take notes” thing and make it more hands-on.
SituationCake@aussie.zone 1 week ago
LowExperience2368@aussie.zone 1 week ago
Yep, I feel like a lot of kids will slip through the cracks and they’ll get to upper primary when someone recognises that they can’t read :(
imoldgreeeg@aussie.zone 1 week ago
Low, you sound like a teacher already - yep its a frustrating job, and that is a super sucky placement. But you care about those kids. Which is really important. And there are other schools out there. Yep, the education system sucks. So does the health system. So do most of the systems (yay, late stage capitalism). But people care, and if you can find a group of them that do it’s awesome. There are schools with better cultures.
This also reminded me - I learned how to write essays in year 10. Not because it was on the curriculum, but I happened to have one ace english teacher and she taught us the principles one day. Decades later I am still grateful for that teacher, and use that info still, and my science/maths teacher who pushed me into trying when I wanted to just fail.
LowExperience2368@aussie.zone 1 week ago
Cheers! Not lecturey at all :)
I’m glad to hear you had a good teacher to guide you with essay writing!