This idea is overused as heavily dependant on which school you go to. My school taught a finance course, and gave advice on job seeking and interviews.
Also, mitochondria is usually taught at GCSE in the UK at least, which is not the last year of school. ‘Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell’ is very much a meme, it might have been interesting to use any other piece of useless information taught in schools instead.
My favorite part of the “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” memes (especially when cited as useless info being taught in school) is that it’s grammatically incorrect. Mitochondria ARE because the word is plural, and any self respecting biology teacher knows that. The fact that this is cited as something drilled into students minds when people can’t even recite it back properly is hilarious.
What the hell is a “powerhouse” anyway?
'Tis a house of power, milord.
Got it. I’ll look out for Targaryen Vs Mitochondria in the next season to learn more
A freestanding building containing one or more power generators
Because the “the” at the start was dropped
“The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”
So less “Lion is the king of the jungle” and more “The lion is the king of the jungle”, so I don’t think it is implied to be singular
It’s not a deer/deer single/plural situation with mitochondria, if that is what you are getting at. The word mitochondria is not singular. To replace mitochondria with lion in your analogy doesn’t work because mitochondria is a plural word. Neither “Lions is the king of the jungle” nor “The lions is the king of the jungle” is correct. The singular version of mitochondria is mitochondrion. “The mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell” and “Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell” both work and could be the phrase, just like "The lion is the king of the jungle " and “Lions are the king of the jungle” are both grammatically correct.
Finances are taught in all schools in the UK, but statistics show that the majority of people don’t remember shit and then make financial mistakes their whole life. And then they complain they’re poor, lol.
Because the last five years have shown, that we have spend way to much time teaching people biology.
That’s exactly what I always say when people repeat this.
Imo, it’s more an erosion of critical thinking rather than a lacking of specific biology facts.
Ok. So. Here’s my take.
No high schooler is EVER gonna pay even the slightest bit of attention if we incorporate a “taxes and accounting” class. No shot.
We learn certain general subjects like this in science mainly to learn critical thinking, analytical/logical reasoning skills, how to apply the scientific method (which, yes, can come in handy in many areas of life besides science).
No high schooler is EVER gonna pay even the slightest bit of attention if we incorporate a “taxes and accounting” class. No shot.
Ask any teacher who’s taught it and they’ll confirm. People just like to bullshit. They lie about not being taught things they were taught too. I’ll bet many had a lesson that went over tax brackets etc and they just ignored it
Most of the people I know that complain about not being taught “real life skills” are absolute dumbasses that would have refused to pay attention anyway.
I had also been told this about something before where the guy had poured water on a flat top grill. As it was boiling off be was like “man this is real life right here, if school taught things like this I’d have paid attention” and I was like they did idiot you just didn’t pay attention that’s literally just water boiling smh lol
We learn certain general subjects like this in science mainly to learn critical thinking, analytical/logical reasoning skills, how to apply the scientific method (which, yes, can come in handy in many areas of life besides science).
Given your previous claim:
No high schooler is EVER gonna pay even the slightest bit of attention if we incorporate a “taxes and accounting” class. No shot.
What makes you think that they’d be any more likely to pay attention to any other subject matter?
Maybe they don’t, which is why most of what they teach is useless in 99% of every day life. 🤷🏻♂️
But, to me, that doesn’t really explain why it would make sense to teach things that wouldn’t be useful.
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[…] No high schooler is EVER gonna pay even the slightest bit of attention if we incorporate a “taxes and accounting” class. No shot. […]
Assuming that some high schoolers aren’t going to pay attention to the lesson, wouldn’t it still be better to at least try to teach something that has real life practical use rather than something that doesn’t? At least the people who do pay attention will gain something useful — it doesn’t make much sense to me to reduce the overall usefulness of what’s taught simply because some may not pay attention.
Well, I am unsure if I agree with that, as my business management class, which had pretty ordinary coursework about it without really anything ‘exciting’, had a vast majority of students paying tons of attention and actually learning, and half of the class was the stereotypical lazy bum students who acted macho and popular even though everyone hated them.
Although, the people who failed that class failed to the most catastrophic degree, as everyone else was well above passing, certain students got an overall score from 10 to 30% in total for all assessments.
I’m not too sure how standard this type of class is, so the success rate of accounting or other classes could be highly varied
Ah yes learning critical thinking
Here is a series of indisputable statements.
Mitochondria are membrane-bound organelles found in most eukaryotic cells, and they are often referred to as the ‘powerhouses of the cell’ because they generate adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the cell’s primary energy currency, through a process called oxidative phosphorylation. They have a double-membrane structure, with the inner membrane folded into cristae to increase surface area for energy production. Mitochondria contain their own circular DNA, which is separate from the nuclear DNA, and this allows them to produce some of their own proteins. They are believed to have originated from a symbiotic relationship between ancient eukaryotic cells and free-living prokaryotes, a theory known as the endosymbiotic theory. In addition to energy production, mitochondria play roles in cell signaling, apoptosis (programmed cell death), and calcium homeostasis.
Have you learned critical thinking yet?
I’m not sure how you think critical thinking works. Do you have some sort of magical logic flow that doesn’t requiere some base understanding of facts?
Guy trying to sell quartz as “energy enhancing crystals” -> no understanding as to how body energy works -> might be legit, let’s give it a try
Guy trying to sell quartz as “energy enhancing crystals” -> knowing that available body energy is dictated by ATP and has nothing to do with crystals -> this smells like a scam
Critical thinking is about being able to apply knowledge of what you know to what you are currently being told. You need some basis of real, provable facts for it, which is why if you had a bio course, you also likely had some lab component to it as well.
Sure, I hear you cry, but all of that information isn’t something I need to know basically ever! Well, you’re correct, but a fun thing about learning is that the deeper you cut into a subject, the more you remember. You probably wouldn’t remember much if the entire unit only said “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”.
And doing these deep cuts to reinforce the basics of understanding work. There is a reason that “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” is a meme, and it’s because everyone remembers that part, not nessessarily the part that they have their DNA that is always inherented from your mother and is referred to as mDNA.
I hope this helps you to think critically against the continued push against critical thinking, particularly to the claim that what you learned in school has nothing to do with doing it.
The mitoncondria meme is a byword for useless knowledge.
Learning a series of science trivia will simply not teach you the structure of critical thinking.
Reciting a series of science fact is not a critical thinking activity, it is rote memorization of trivia.
Yes, effective critical thinking relies on a wealth of knowledge, but critical thinking is a set of applied skills about finding “your truth”. These skills simply cannot be acquired by downloading a series of establishmebt vetted facts.
If anything, critical thinking would be better learned by teaching flat earth theory, without any disclaimer. You needs exposure to real false information at a minimum.
You need to learn healthy distrust of authorities. Something I have not encoutered once in 15 years of dreadful, boring and painful schooling.
I see what you’re getting at, and you’re not wrong to think about how the lessons we teach kids from the minds and skills we want them to have. There’s positives and negatives to the liberal arts education, and it could be said that it is just as much of what is left out then what is kept in. The choice to teach about mitochondria and not the Krebs Cycle is odd from a scientific perspective, but if you know about endosymbiosis then it’s a lot harder to accept that all organisms appeared independently a few millennia ago. But once you view a liberal arts education from this perspective then you see these biases everywhere. For example, how many world history classes talk about the Tamil Kings, or the Warring States period of China? It’s a lot easier to other a region you don’t know the history of.
So we have to ask, what purpose should education serve? What knowledge and skills should we expect people to have by the time they reach adulthood? Add what is the best way to disseminate those?
The stated goal of high school level education is to create well roubded individuals. But individuals that know about mitochondria but not how fucked up the tax code is and how to survive all the finance predators? That know about Christopher Columbus but not how to change the tires on their cars ? That is not a well rounded to me. You have to know how to live before learning about biology trivia.
It would probably make more sense to ask the bio teacher for sex ed than economics.
Lol. Mainstream economics is nothing but ideologically charged excuses for the status quo. And you wouldn’t learn heterodox econ in high school anyways.
At least we do know how mitochondria works.
Mainstream economics is nothing but ideologically charged excuses for the status quo.
Would you mind defining exactly what you mean by “mainstream economics”?
Anything that’s not heterodox. Neoclassicists, Chicago school, etc.
It has been taught, you weren’t listening during math/economy classes dipshit
This is what used to be taught in home economics class. Now it’s just sewing and baking.
Knowing math isn’t always enough to navigate the oft poorly written tax forms.
Tax forms change. And some little shit complaining “why do we have to learn percentages? Teach us something useful like how to do our taxes.” would make for a better joke. And it would be more accurate.
I have never heard of an economy class in high school. And our math teacher did a tiny thing on compound interest in general when we finished a quiz early.
So I don’t know what school you went to but it wasn’t the normal one.
the normal one.
Apparently, not being American (I’m guessing) is considered “not being normal”.
I went to an American public school that taught economics. We also had a project for building a household budget.
The county I grew up in was a little bougie, which rather explains it all.
I hear so many weird ass things from people in the US. Plenty of “why were we taught this and that” as if learning the countries in Europe is somehow some esoteric knowledge. And then I remember having to learn all the countries in the world, all of the US states, all of the capitals for 90% of the countries, all the seas, rivers etc. It’s really funny seeing people complain about the tiniest of things they had to learn as if it was med school.
Well no. I freely admit I’m posting about the absolute slop that is American public education.
Frankly, we should move on from the mitochondria and start talking about the immune system. I want pre-schoolers to know about the interleukins, goddamnit! Let the children in first grade recite a list of adjuvants! And somebody
shootshoo away vaccine deniers!We need to train more medics in the Team Fortress 2 university, so they can shoo AND shoot vaccines at vaxx deniers
Instead of focusing on specific facts, what about focusing on honing the skills required to acquire and understand information?
But mitochondria is cool, it has its own dna because it used to be a separate organism. It fused with us, only to be made into a joke by us.
It also separates raw protons from hydrogen atoms and somehow turns it into spinny-motion, which it then turns into chemical energy with incredible efficiency. It’s a wild piece of biological machinery
Ok but I need to learn about hone economics and employer labour relations so as not to get financially exploited all my life.
Cause it’s the teacher making this decision, riiiiiiight
Do you guys call your teachers at school (i.e. not university) “professor”?
Not in the US. Professor is for college teachers.
Yes, primary school is teacher, anything higher is professor.
Where are you from out of interest?
Slovenia
If we’re going to scrap something from high school to add a tax lesson, let’s ditch some literature. Over four years my graduating class studied 5 shakespeare plays and a handful of sonnets. Surely we could have cut out Much Ado About Nothing and The Tempest if we still have Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet and Henry V.
Reading comprehension is more important than ever … And you want to cut the classes that teach it? Why?
I’m unconvinced that Shakespeare is a particularly good exercise in reading comprehension given the vocabulary, phraseology, spelling and grammar is 500 years out of date.
I remember reading Hamlet out loud in class, and that was the last of the plays we studied so we had read some Shakespeare before, and every other thing you’re running into a sentence that doesn’t work or a word that is NEVER said except in Hamlet like 'contumely" or ‘orisons’ and you just get a room full of teenagers saying words one by one taking none of it on board.
If anything, learning to understand words from a text without knowing their definition makes it better for that
I’m unconvinced that Shakespeare is a particularly good exercise in reading comprehension given the vocabulary, phraseology, spelling and grammar is 500 years out of date.
Hrm I’d argue that regardless of the parlance used in the work, it’s still an exercise of reading comprehension, as one is still comprehending the work while reading it.
as one is still comprehending the work while reading it.
Especially in something like Shakespeare’s case I don’t think that’s necessarily true, because 1. a lot of the vocabulary is just…not English anymore. Let me ask you: what part of speech is the word “contumely”? Is it a noun? An adverb? An adjective? 2. Not all of the information is there. Shakespeare only ever wrote down the dialog not the stage directions because he told that stuff to his actors in person. Comprehending the play by reading the dialog alone is difficult because the context is missing.
The gravedigger in Hamlet is in the habit of saying “argal.” Because he heard someone literate say “ergo” and he uses it right, as a synonym of “therefore” but he doesn’t pronounce it right. It’s an interesting bit of characterization because it shows the gravedigger maybe should have had a chance at some school. I realized this watching the Kenneth Branaugh production years later when I found it in an old stack of VHS tapes, not in 12th grade listening to my classmate Jeremy try to read it without having it explained to him first. He kept pronouncing it “ARgul” rather than “arGALL” so he never heard himself say the joke.
Perhaps my English teacher could have done a better job conducting this lesson but was this really a useful exercise in reading comprehension?
not in 12th grade listening to my classmate Jeremy try to read it without having it explained to him first. He kept pronouncing it “ARgul” rather than “arGALL” so he never heard himself say the joke.
Perhaps my English teacher could have done a better job conducting this lesson but was this really a useful exercise in reading comprehension?
My money is on “your teacher didn’t know the joke either”.
[…] I don’t think that’s necessarily true, because 1. a lot of the vocabulary is just…not English anymore. […] Comprehending the play by reading the dialog alone is difficult because the context is missing. […]
I think you may be missing the point that I was trying to make. I agree with your opinion that think Shakespeare can be difficult to read, but, regardless of that, trying to comprehend it is still trying to comprehend it. If one is practicing their reading comprehension, no matter the difficulty of the material, imo it could still be said that they are improving their comprehension. Now, it could be that there is material that is more efficient at improving one’s reading comprehension ability than Shakespeare, but I think that’s a separate argument.
no matter the difficulty of the material, imo it could still be said that they are improving their comprehension
Nope, that’s not how education works. Due to the Principle of Effect, lessons which are too confusing can do more harm than good. If, as some other commenters have suggested, students are arriving to 12th grade English class reading at an elementary school level, handing them a copy of Hamlet isn’t going to accomplish anything, it’ll just frustrate them, convince them that they really can’t do this and they’ll just give up. Even honors students who are reading at advanced levels might start second guessing themselves.
Shakespeare’s work was all written ~400 years ago, reading a Shakespeare play is an exercise in translation as much as comprehension. Take a copy of Hamlet to a 16 year old, open it to a random page, point to a line and ask a teenager to read it. They’ll probably stumble through it. Ask them what it means and they won’t have taken it on board.
It may have more of a value in teaching the history of the English language than a reading comprehension exercise.
In 11th and 12th grade English class we mostly focused on themes and such; it was treated more as an art appreciation course than communication practice. And art appreciation should be elective rather than required. If we’re really honest with ourselves, the reason we teach Shakespeare in high schools is because English teachers like it, and English teachers majored in English in college because they like it, and there’s exactly one job an English degree qualifies you to do: Teach high school English class.
Hell, replace Shakespeare lessons with descriptive or persuasive writing classes.
Nope, that’s not how education works. Due to the Principle of Effect, lessons which are too confusing can do more harm than good. If, as some other commenters have suggested, students are arriving to 12th grade English class reading at an elementary school level, handing them a copy of Hamlet isn’t going to accomplish anything, it’ll just frustrate them, convince them that they really can’t do this and they’ll just give up. Even honors students who are reading at advanced levels might start second guessing themselves. […]
I wasn’t arguing that Shakespeare would make the students more interested in literature. I was only arguing that the act of reading, no matter what is being read (within reason), improves one’s reading comprehension.
[…] reading a Shakespeare play is an exercise in translation as much as comprehension […]
[…] It may have more of a value in teaching the history of the English language than a reading comprehension exercise. […]
I am a little confused now — is this you agreeing that reading Shakespeare improves reading comprehension?
[…] the reason we teach Shakespeare in high schools is because English teachers like it […]
Hm, this feels like conjecture. Do you have proof of that?
I’d argue it does the opposite for literacy. You tell some teenager with a third grade reading level to read “thou prithy foresooth bout thy they thou thumb” and they are going to completely check out.
“Man, I can’t do this.”
What exactly would you want to remove, and what would you propose in its stead, and why?
Surely we could have cut out Much Ado About Nothing and The Tempest
The only subject that was required for all four years when I was in high school was English, and senior year English was all British literature, so we got Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bronte’s, shit like that.
Honestly I think later high school English classes do more to beat any love of reading teenagers have out of them by force feeding them dire dour old ugly hateful and just plain obsolete shit written by damaged people who lived in a world before the invention of epidemiology so sometimes your neighborhood would die of cholera because someone’s pit toilet leaked into the ground water.
Make English 4 if not English 3 electives rather than required. Replace them with a semester of driver’s ed, taxes, fire safety, how to safely refrigerate chicken, I can think of a lot of shit that would benefit the world more than having teenagers read a Skakespeare play they don’t get aloud.
When Americans already can’t read, you’re seriously suggesting doing away with requiring English for all 4 years? I understand wanting to change the material, but that just seems really heavy-handed and counterproductive.
If they can’t read by junior year of highschool I very much adoubt fucking Shakespeare is going to be the aha moment
Again, material choice is not the issue at hand.
Again (don’t know why you said again but ill add it too), if they cant read by junior year I doubt two more years of the same shit is going to help. Is illiteracy an issue? Sure. Should junior and senior year english be mandatory for every student because some of them struggle with reading? No, just make a class to help those kids.
Without a tailored class your just sticking kids who cant read well with more advanced kids in the same class and by senior year that gap has probably grown substantially. How do you make a single class that can challenge good English students and also nurture people struggling with the fundamentals? You don’t. The high functioning kids are bored and unengaged and the struggling kids are stressed by how far behind they are, it doesn’t help anyone.
