Ideas within topic education,teachers,secondary: (click suns to rate or comment on ideas)
| 1 |
| Make an online activity for each citizen to assign spending and taxation categories of his national government. Experiencing the compromises needed to balance the budget will make people more realistic and will transmit that realism to their government. | |
| 2 |
| Before starting to date, everyone should find and interview 10 married and 10 divorced people to learn how to avoid their mistakes and do what worked well. This is difficult for kids, thus high schools should arrange this as part of sex education. | |
| 3 |
| Create a website with interviews of people who tried to enter various careers and failed or succeeded, with statistics on % who quit that track or got a job. Are they happy? Provide the site for all high school career guidance counselors worldwide. | |
| 4 |
| Murphy Analysis: Murphy's Law says whatever can go wrong will go wrong. When seeing whether some data fit your theory, erase your assumptions and brainstorm alternative theories the data could fit. Often one of those is right and your theory is wrong. | |
| 5 |
| Teach estimation for real-life: Fermi quiz (power of 10 estimates), budgets, taxes, should I buy insurance, how likely are coincidences, how much food to make for a meal. (math,probability,statistics) | |
| 6 |
| Teach practical history. Don't memorize dates. Generalize how people behave in similar events around the world over time: culture clashes, democracy movements vs. dictators, economic booms/busts, ethnic wars, development. Apply to future. | |
| 7 |
| Teach how to handle money: calculate income taxes, how to set up an IRA, how to buy stocks, how to compare returns of various investments, life insurance, annuities, how to start a business, credit cards, loans, mortgage. (practical economics) | |
| 8 |
| Teach practical behavior: top reasons people divorce or stay married, or have children. Causes of spouse abuse & child abuse. Parent/teen relations. Recognizing and treating psychiatric illness. | |
| 9 |
| Teach how to behave in the legal system: what to do when police stop you or arrest you or if you are summoned or sued, what is bail, what is it like in jail, what to do if you're a victim of crime, how to survive in a mugging or rape. | |
| 10 |
| Teach how to use government (civics): how to lobby for changes in laws, how to contact officials at each gov. level, how legislatures work, how to run for office. If you try this, please e-mail me to let me know how it goes. | |
| 11 |
| Idea contest for kids in school. Teachers may divide kids into teams to brainstorm and compete against other teams for greatest number of ideas or best ideas (as judged by other students). | |
| 12 |
| To save paper, trees, energy, and money, try to make your workplace paperless. Instead of printing documents, read and store them on your computer. Use e-mail instead of paper memos, faxes, or letters. | |
| 13 |
| Teach practical health: vaccines, sex ed. & STDs, how to prevent colds (wash your hands), how to recognize commonly undiagnosed diseases (depression, heart attack, stroke) & what to do, first aid, CPR, exercise, car safety, diet. | |
| 14 |
| Teach basic science facts: light things fall as fast as heavy ones (besides drag), drugs short-circuit pleasure circuits in brain, suntan is from nuclear radiation, a liter of water is a kilo, a liter of any gas has ~same # of molecules. (chemistry) | |
| 15 |
| Teach more statistics and probability for real-life. Use examples from the news: polls, scientific studies, lottery, insurance, relative risks from different activities (living near a coal power plant vs. a nuclear plant). | |
| 16 |
| Require all high school students in "developed countries" to study a lesser developed country for two courses, or do some large project. Most students will retain lifelong interest in this country. | |
| 17 |
| Teach geography: rough locations of biggest 100 countries, big religions, big languages, income by region, lifespan by region, government (democracy, dictatorship, theocracy, anarchy) by country, cities over 5 million. Not state capitals. | |
| 18 |
| Have a "prosthetic leg" day at your school. Have everybody bring in a dollar that goes towards buying a prosthetic leg for a child to walk again in Vietnam (through thechildhealthsite.com). $100 will buy a leg. | |
| 19 |
| "New Face in the Crowd" program: Counselors could team up student aids with selected freshmen to help them get adjusted to high school, make friends, join activities, etc. | |
| 20 |
| A course in personal typing is required in many schools in U.S. Should be required for all. Course should also include Word Processing, Spread Sheets, "Power Point" presentations, and basic Internet searching. | |
| 21 |
| Try to reduce global DALYs (disability-adjusted life years lost) as the main goal of your charity, politics, & work. Top causes will soon be perinatal conditions, pneumonia, heart disease, & stroke. | |
| 22 |
| For history to be more useful, it must not only gather data (the past), but also generalize from it to form hypotheses and make testable predictions. History could then be used to improve our world. Example | |
| 23 |
| To explain exon splicing of genes, use film editing analogy: the action of a movie is like the gene's DNA, the filmed portion is like its RNA, the spliced and edited film is like mRNA, and the final prints or videos are like the protein. (science analogy) | |
| 24 |
| Take the performing and visual arts and incorporate them more into the school curriculum (i.e., pairing English with Drama or Playwrighting, Speech with Drama etc.). There are grants for this -- if interested, email. | |
| 25 |
| Many people throw out their electronic gadgets because of simple electrical problems. To prevent this waste, basic electronics should be a mandatory course in schools so that people can fix things instead of throwing them out. (garbage) | |
| 26 |
| Internet Scavenger Hunt: a fun, educational game for a group of kids or adults to test ingenuity and resourcefulness. Race to find a list of things on the net, such as a photo of a certain object, a certain fact, a particular piece of music. | |
| 27 |
| There are so many people who are still suffering from depression, even very young people. Why can't schools offer seminars to give practical help to young people in this area? It would help them their whole lives! | |
| 28 |
| Do zero-based budgeting of education time. Decide what's worth teaching based on criteria of usefulness for job, health, marriage, finances, voting, etc. This might replace geometry & history w/home & car repair, & practical child behavior. | |
| 29 |
| Teach languages in primary, not secondary, school, since it's easier to learn young. Teach common, not traditional, languages: more Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Hindi, Mandarin, Portuguese; less German, Italian; no Latin. | |
| 30 |
| Write a math book for teens written in a teenage style that shows actual applications for trig, calculus, imaginary numbers and other subjects typically deemed worthless by teenagers. | |
| 31 |
| High school level math should be taught through a case-oriented approach of learning as opposed to memorizing billions of useless concepts and eventually applying them in Calculus. Ask the ninth-grade student what baffled the math pioneers and teach that. | |
| 32 |
| Identify teenagers who struggle with and fail at normal and learning disabled classes and enroll them in trade apprenticeships with practical hands-on learning at the workplace (no classrooms). Teenagers are happier and successful. | |
| 33 |
| Teach less local national history, more world history. | |
| 34 |
| To teach cell stucture, use a water sachet pocket model with a black marble as nucleus and with other organelle models in it. Children will understand better. Ribbons can be used as DNA model helices. | |
| 35 |
| Provide students all over the world with a book or method to record answers to a real world given problem. | |
| 36 |
| Encourage children in grades 4 and up to tutor or help younger students in whatever subject the tutor knows best. Have this tutoring or mentoring instead of one block of classes or in a section of its own. | |
| 37 |
| Let students attend high school online, going to a school building weekly for tutoring or testing. This would save money for buildings and buses, protect kids from dangerous school neighborhoods, and teach kids independence. | |
| 38 |
| Education systems are distinct and organized like silos. Need to integrate university training methods into vocational education and make voc ed methods available to university students. | |
| 39 |
| Read about these 10 Stories the world needs to know more about from the UN, then take action: post them, send them on, or write to legislators. | |
| 40 |
| To allow teacher to display computer screen output to the TV screen, use the adaptor that is available to link computer to television. | |
| 41 |
| Require students to take a vocational class of their choice. Computers are great, but somebody is going to have to do the manual labor. | |
| 42 |
| K-12 teachers who use grading computer programs always enter grades in gradebook by hand and then on computer. I have some ideas, but please send me yours, on this topic or others related to "teacher automation". | |
| 43 |
| Disruptive students get expelled and fall through the cracks. I suggest an alternative high school for these students, run by special counselors. Example. | |
| 44 |
| To show electricity principles to students or as science fair project, use water: water height is like voltage, volume is charge, reservoir volume is capacitance, flow is current, pipe width is conductance. Water wheels show power. (science analogy) | |
| 45 |
| Why not teach kids how to build computers in school? Or build computers easy to repair. Come to that, why not do that for all machines? The Russians did that for tanks during the second world war; illiterates maintained tanks with simple colored parts. | |
| 46 |
| Teach less geometry since not practical. | |
| 47 |
| In teaching history and literature, don't start with a survey and then specialize. Do the reverse! Start by looking deeply into one point with personal relevance to the student. Then curiosity takes hold and the student is motivated to make connections. | |
| 48 |
| What, in a broad and unfocused sense, does education lack at every level? A global brainstorm, going for quantity of lines to get quality at the end. | |
| 49 |
| Use crossword puzzles for teaching. | |
| 50 |
| A college application service for U.S. colleges, located in other countries. High school students in many areas, like Hong Kong, are eager for help in applying to U.S. colleges. | |