Anecdotally, I attribute most of my success in life to my 7th grade teacher's decision that since I was far beyond the rest of the class in math and followed direction well, she put me outside the classroom with a self-directed algebra book.
She created a gifted program with me, and ended up sending more kids outside with a guide on how much we should get through.
I was always a distracted kid otherwise, and this got me really excited about a subject that I may not have engaged with otherwise.
I had something similiar -- Got so far ahead of the other students in 5th grade math that I got tossed into a computer lab with a bunch of original IBM PCs and several years backlog of PC Magazine and Byte to read through. I learned so much from those years.
> So, you had a teacher spend one-on-one time with you.
In Finnish, does “self-directed” imply more time with a teacher? In American English, it almost always means less… sometimes zero.
Source: Me. I was a self-directed learner through quite a few math subjects in junior high school and high school. Total teacher one-on-one time was typically 30 minutes or less per year.
I encourage you to try to be a slightly more sympathetic reader in this thread. You seem to be ignoring and/or twisting things many people have said.
> You seem to be ignoring and/or twisting things many people have said.
I honestly definitely can see how it comes off that way. And thank you for giving me a chance to see this doubly so.
However, my comments are thinking a bit beyond the system at hand, and a lot more __critically__ about the things we hold universally true, or important, or moral.
This is mainly why my comments are going to sound outrageous or outright "trolly" because it's breaking a LOT of basic assumptions people have about the way the world is setup.
Fwiw, I find your views interesting, and I want to read more.
Maybe this isn’t the right part of the thread to ask, but I wonder if the difference in Finland versus the US is that the concept of what a “good education” looks like is largely shared in Finland while there are very divergent and often times conflicting views of what “good education” looks like in different US communities.
> but I wonder if the difference in Finland versus the US is that the concept of what a “good education” looks like is largely shared in Finland while there are very divergent and often times conflicting views of what “good education” looks like in different US communities.
Oh 100%, there are cultural differences here that are significant. And America is a far more diverse country than, essentially anywhere else in the world.
With that being said, I think a lot of our problems stem from the extreme segregation that is still with us today.
In reality, segregation legally ended, but we really didn't take efforts to "undo" the damages done by segregation and have kinda...let it become a compounding failure.
Our economic system, has an amazing marketing team. Low regulations, government steps out and only comes in to protect your property & your rights. But in reality it ignores that:
1. Society health depends on *everyone in society*. Society health is important. People suffering in your country is not something that anyone likes.
2. Okay, so people are suffering. We have a system where they can... well, try to better their lives. But is that actually the case?
3. Okay, fine, it's not actually the case. What *is* fundamentally broken then? What CAN we do to actually live up to the American dream?
These questions have really lead me down into the path of "I...don't think Capitalism is optimized for social health, but focused on individual health. And I think that's bad"
She created a gifted program with me, and ended up sending more kids outside with a guide on how much we should get through.
I was always a distracted kid otherwise, and this got me really excited about a subject that I may not have engaged with otherwise.