School then vs school now. A question.

debodun said:
We had a bomb threat when I was a senior in 1970. They evacuated the school, but, fortunately, it was a hoax.
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My kindergarten had duck & cover drills once every semester.

My high school had emergency drills where several students posed as injured people and the rest of us performed triage, various types of first aid, and CPR. Local EMTs and firemen organized and supervised them. We had fake blood, fake compound fractures, fake severe head trauma, and real first-aid kits.

It was fun! And educational, of course. But mostly fun.
 
Aunt Bea said:
I feel bad that the local public schools have discontinued many of the basic life skill classes like wood shop, home economics, etcā€¦

IMO those basics along with simple financial management and a few other real life skills are desperately needed by many young people today.
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Replacing academics and pertinent, critical life-skills with trend-topics is a huge disservice.
 
chic said:
There were no computers in classrooms and none at home. Technology, the internet, make it easy to cheat because no one memorizes. They copy what google says.
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A good teacher can devise ways to discourage this. When I gave my students an assignment that required them to research and then write in their own words, I insisted that they present their first draft plus their references. Then I would hand them back later and they would finish writing the assignment. I did this to discourage them from just copying something word for word from a book. They learnt what I never learnt in my day - how to do research.
 
chic said:
Another plus was that girls could bring Midol to school and take it when we needed it. One of my closest friends used to suffer terribly at this time and the pain would almost make her faint. I hear girls can't bring meds like Midol to school anymore. Maybe they use poison pill rings or lockets these days? In the old days schools were not ridiculous about things like this. :unsure:
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No child was allowed to take medication to school when I was at school. ..and if something happened at school that required medication, it was a big palaver, and they could only give paracetamol...
 
HoneyNut said:
Definitely I'd prefer school as it was when I was young because we didn't have nearly as much homework as my daughter got. She, poor thing, was absolutely buried in homework all the time.
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We had a ton of homework every night, to the point where even my abusive father started commenting on how much it was... my daughter in the 80's and 90' s at school was literally weighed down with homework. I see the kids today coming home every day . and none of them seem to be carrying heavy bags full of homework..
 
Aunt Bea said:
I feel bad that the local public schools have discontinued many of the basic life skill classes like wood shop, home economics, etcā€¦

IMO those basics along with simple financial management and a few other real life skills are desperately needed by many young people today.
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In New South Wales woodwork for boys and home economics and needlework have been rolled into one subject called Design and Technology. This is mandatory for years 7 and 8, after which they have the choice of specialising more in the area they are most interested in. This happened when I was still teaching around the 1980s, so not a recent development.
 
Warrigal said:
A good teacher can devise ways to discourage this. When I gave my students an assignment that required them to research and then write in their own words, I insisted that they present their first draft plus their references. Then I would hand them back later and they would finish writing the assignment. I did this to discourage them from just copying something word for word from a book. They learnt what I never learnt in my day - how to do research.
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My nephew came to live with me for a few years because of trouble at home. He was a high school sophomore whose reading skills were very fundamental and his ability to do math was practically non existent.

I had a meeting with the school principal to ask if they had a tutor program, and when I explained my nephew's deficits, the principal looked at me like I was an absolute idiot and said "Um....we have calculators, and there's this thing called spell-check."

That's what he said, verbatim. I'll never forget it.

This was in the 1999-2000 school year. I wound up hiring 2 private tutors. That added up to about $3K per semester, and I could only afford 2 semesters, but he graduated HS with a 2.90 GP average. Not great, but he was talking about dropping out, and he didn't. And I think that's thanks to the tutors.
 
hollydolly said:
We had a ton of homework every night, to the point where even my abusive father started commenting on how much it was... my daughter in the 80's and 90' s at school was literally weighed down with homework. I see the kids today coming home every day . and none of them seem to be carrying heavy bags full of homework..
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I liked studying, the challenge of it. The love of books has stayed with me.
 
Murrmurr said:
My kindergarten had duck & cover drills once every semester.

My high school had emergency drills where several students posed as injured people and the rest of us performed triage, various types of first aid, and CPR. Local EMTs and firemen organized and supervised them. We had fake blood, fake compound fractures, fake severe head trauma, and real first-aid kits.

It was fun! And educational, of course. But mostly fun.
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Better than dodgeball ! :poop:
 
I hated school from the beginning! I was reading before I went to school, 2 years of "Dick and Jane " tried to bore me to death! Arithmetic was more like a foreign language to me, so my brain went elsewhere during that. I did like science, history and grammar, but the first 2 years set the stage for my schooling!
 
Our desks were the old wood and metal traditional school desks with the flip-up seats and tops. They were bolted to the floor in rows.

I do believe they were strong enough to survive a direct bomb blast (or a tornado, because we had tornado drills more often than bomb drills).

What was more likely to kill us was a fire. The building was an old brick 2 1/2 story structure that had wooden floors and stairs that had been waxed and oiled for 75 years. There were NO fire escapes.

Based on how long it took for the school to evacuate, those on the top floor, at least, were probably going to be toast.
 
Iā€™m glad that I went to school when I did! I never once worried about being shot, but rather about bullies and about the Soviets coming to nuke us. Bad blood between students would at worst result in a fistfight rather than a gun fight.

The notion of students talking back to teachers or being defiant was rare, and students assaulting teachers almost unheard of. Parents for the vast majority supported the teachers, and showed up for conferences and special events at school. There was community pride in schools, and the best and brightest in communities tended to sit on school boardsā€¦.

Research for school assignments was admittedly more tedious and time-consuming, and required frequent trips to the library to wade through card catalogues and encyclopedias. Computers were the stuff of science fiction. It was the age of manual typewriters and slide rulesā€¦
 
For us in this forum, school was about fifty years ago. All the sciences have made great leaps in knowledge. Plus, there's a half century more of history. Back in our day, basic education was to prepare one for job in manufacturing. Today, a basic education is to prepare for a job in an office, that means a whole different and advanced education.
 

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