Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How to Improve our Education System”.
G’Day life couldn’t Linus, I’m a high school teacher in Sydney, Australia and very curious. If you guys over, there are suffering from huge Teeters teacher shortages like we are here. Also, how do you see Tech in the classroom? Evolving in the future, keep up the great content. You know that’s an interesting, that’s an interesting question.
How do I see Tech evolving in the classroom? Um? I confess I hadn’t really thought about it until I had kids and I walked into a classroom and I was like there’s no overhead projector, oh yeah, but yeah. Like, obviously, that would be stupid uh for for the youngins out there and overhead projector uh. Was this uh a light box? Essentially, that had a writing surface over the top with a roll of of plastic like a plastic sheet roll that would roll you’d you’d have like a used Side on one side, so you’d roll it up and then fresh ones would come over top um and the Teacher would have like a a wet erase pen, so they could write on this on the sheet of plastic and then so. The light shines from the bottom and then you’ve got this sheet and then it would go into a mirror. That is a little more complicated than just this, because I think it would have to flip it the other way around or whatever, but it would go into a mirror lens system that would shine it at a projector screen on the wall uh. Obviously that would be phenomenally stupid in the age of we have much better things: sheep, better projectors, Smart Boards – I mean even white boards right like I, I don’t think I saw a white board in school.
It was all chalkboards yeah, pretty much um. So I had confessed, it’s been a while, since we’ve been in school, it’s not something that I’ve thought about a lot yeah I mean we’ve already seen a lot of evolution in in teaching. You know whether it’s Chromebooks in the schools um.
I I donated my I donated a couple of my original VR headsets to my old computer teacher um, because he was still he was still teaching um he’s a principal now, but I was assuming that he could get them into the right hands whatever um, because I Wanted him to be able to have that in classroom for people that aren’t necessarily able to get for your headsets at home? Yeah sure. Are they the perfect experience? This was quite a few years ago, so they were a little bit more recent at the time uh. But are they like the newest and greatest thing ever no, but it can show you the fundamentals of VR and what’s going on uh and they apparently had a computer that was good enough to power them so like very cool um.
But I don’t know how common that is, I hope there’s like 3D printing options and stuff in schools yeah. I feel like that’s a pretty important thing to learn. If you’re growing up, they definitely do do some uh like at my kids school.
They definitely do some coding like introductory stuff basic modeling yeah. I I mean honestly. I do think that in general, school could spend a lot more time on practical skills.
I think this is going to end up being a much much longer conversation. I think that most people will never need even math 8. um, because the reality of it is like, and you can say like well, how are you going to? How are you going to do your taxes? Most people? Don’T most people just give money to the Monopoly? Um the the tax software Monopoly, which is a very interesting Rabbit, Hole by the way. Oh, it’s horrible, yeah yeah.
If you want to look into into it and how they became the the monopolistic tax software Behemoth that they are absolutely fascinating, rabbit hole, which is also the answer to why doing your taxes is so bad, yeah, yeah anyway, anyway, um, you know, like I yeah, I Would I would I would love if people were given more uh, more practical educations, and I know that in some places they do that, like I think it’s at about like 12 or 13., you basically either go to academic school or to like more of a vocational School, that’s more focused on Hands-On and uh. It’S it’s! It’S not because, like one is better than the other, necessarily in fact at least here in in BC, trades often get paid more than white collar work and faster and and way faster, because they are so in demand. The like career career towards retirement and then like moving into retirement stage process for a lot of trade skills, especially around here, is like faster and more stable, yeah frugivor says, as my grandpa says, learning’s, not about the contents, about learning how to learn for the future And that’s true, but I feel like at least when I went through through a lot of what we learned was not super applicable to what we were going to do in our lives.
And while we did learn to learn, we didn’t learn to learn necessarily the things that we needed to learn like it was. You could easily have made it all the way through my high school, never having been Hands-On with anything. Now I took classes that were outside of my comfort zone. I did it on purpose.
I took metal, art and jewelry. I took technology which taught us uh. We did a bunch of really cool projects. We had a like a paper plane, optimization unit that we did.
Oh cool, we did a um, that’s sweet. We did a unit on how home electrical wiring like how to do house wiring. We did a unit where we built our own submarine, so it had to have uh six degrees of freedom uh, and so we had a tether. Obviously, because we couldn’t send Wireless signals underwater, but part of the test was yet to achieve neutral buoyancy, and then you had to be able to navigate up and down forward and back left and right to get to some Target um.
So I did technology. I did auto shop and I think you’ve known me long enough to know that that went really well. That ain’t my thing I got a good grade like I got a good, I’m a good student but like I was not interested. You know what that’s when I started swearing auto shop.
I did not use cuss words until I took shop in grade. I think grade 10., like at all. Like the first time I I dropped like a like a damn literally heads turned like I was like. I was that kid, that’s pretty funny.
Um pick Kurt says you dropped out. So school didn’t work for you. You found your way, but don’t knock stuff that you understand what what are you even talking about what uh I did not drop out of high school? I graduated to high school with excellent grades.
I got into the University of British Columbia very comfortably uh. I did not last in University there’s a lot of a lot of reasons for that, but um no, I was a. I was a good student and it’s important to learn a variety of things, but that’s exactly what I’m talking about every one of those classes that I just listed was an elective, and so, if you chose not to you, could totally go through.
Having only ever looked at books – and I don’t think that just one or just the other is acceptable, that’s what I’m trying to say and there no! No that’s what I’m trying to say. That’S it yeah yeah uh. What were we talking about? I forget what the question even was teacher education, uh technology in schools. Oh yeah, we more because that’s basically the way the world’s going yeah yeah .