AIBU to say they should NOT teach it in schools

[Calvinlookingforhobbs]

‘It’ being any problem that appears in our society... budgeting for adults, healthy eating, parenting skills, contraception, gardening, etc surely education and parenting are different?

compound interest and simple are part of the GCSE Syllabus

"How much will I have at the end if I pay £X per month into an account which pays Y% interest?" would be a good A Level thing, I'd have thought. Depending on how you want to do it and what assumptions you make, you can be summing series, doing a bit of integral calculus, or using some relatively sophisticated numerical methods. And most importantly comparing the results of all three.

noodle I wish you had been my teacher ☹

noodle I wish you had been my teacher

Mine too! How I wish my maths teachers had brought stale text book maths into real life useful examples. I am saddened to see that maths teaching hasn't really changed much in the last 40 years as I'm in the middle of it again helping my son with his Maths GCSE work now. Yes, they teach the difference between simple and compound interest, but they're still not relating it to real life examples - it's still just "numbers on a page" rather than anything kids can relate to. Would be quick and easy to re-word the questions to make them meaningful. Some of the examples given above by Noodle would make a massive difference to encourage interest and understanding.

All these skills should be taught at home, but I see the need to do some at school, to prepare the kids whose parents are to feckless to teach them themselves.

Actually in the school my children go to and the one I work in; both are having to teach / focus on children playing together nicely. We are teaching children how to play because a lot of children don’t have basic social skills -taking turns, thinking about what others may be feeling and basic manners. These are children from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of needs. Talking to teachers it is getting worse and it comes directly from the children’s home life. A lot of these families need and are getting support from a variety of agencies but a lot aren’t. We don’t get additional funding for this, some of it pupil premium funded but a lot isn’t. We can’t take much more.

Agree with cuboid and mrssmith.

To clarify I think we really need to provide this for children as without it they are going to struggle later on in life. It is wonderful to see children learning from this and it impacts across so many areas including learning. I’m just trying to say that we can’t do everything and it often isn’t as easy as ‘just teach half an hour’ of it and it’s sorted.

Noodle
You sound great.

(I would like to get the children to calculate the compound interest on a payday loan if you are 30 days late on paying it back. You won’t need to teach them the risks- they’ll see it for themselves)

Thanks all - I am really nothing that special just doing my job, which I do enjoy.

Although something jolted my memory last night - I am shocked by some students lack of general knowledge. We had a problem solving question that required the students to know the number of days in a month - a huge number were clueless - in quite a high ability set.

There was a question in a GCSE Statistics paper about why something was less likely to occur in February - less days - and it took much longer than it should have needed to explain the answer.

I do show payday loan interest rates and get them to calculate how much it would be - they struggle to believe me until I show the internet pages!

I agree with OP majority of time kids are being taught lessons to instill a strong sense of societal good but no one actually questions these value that the kids are being taught and how. I'm happy for my child to be taught the actual vocational subjects any thing else such PSHE, sociology and RE no thank you I will teach my child these things, I do not need the government assuming I can't raise my kid better than they can.

Although something jolted my memory last night - I am shocked by some students lack of general knowledge.

As an accountant, I have a large number of "educated" clients such as GP's, IT consultants, etc., earning huge amounts of money, yet even they have poor "general knowledge". Something is definitely going wrong. The number of days in a month issue is one which frequently crops up and costs people money when they beggar up their invoicing by charging for too few working days - typically charging for 4 weeks worth of work every month, when it should average 4.3 weeks per month, or invoicing every 4 weeks, hence 13 invoices per year but only invoicing for 12 when they miss that in one month each year, there'd be 2 "4 week" periods ending in that month. I've had clients under-charge by tens of thousands of pounds - quite unbelievable until you see it in reality, and even the client needs some convincing they're wrong because they just can't grasp the effects of a "month" that isn't 28 (4 times 7).

I wish my school had covered:

• mortgages, pensions, budgeting, insurance
• wiring a plug, changing light fixture etc
• politics (wasn't offered when I was at school and my whole peer group left school with no clue about the basics of democracy, merely parroting or railing against our parents views)
• job interview practice
• cultural studies
• coding
• media (scrutiny of)

kazzy I have three of those DC. It looks like it's going to be very expensive as we live 3000 miles from family. My dad visits often and we have friends who are in the same boat here so we teach each other's kids. DH is good at cooking so has 8 6/7 year olds cooking a meal with him. Things like pizza or cooking with a crock pot where the ingredients are all thrown in are the things cooked.

Scrutiny of media is covered by History teaching. We help kids develop the skills to question and analyse historical sources, to see that even historians have inherent bias or can interpret the same sources in entirely different ways. We are all influenced by the societies in which we grow up and live and often see events through the lens of our current situation.
Part of what teachers do is help dc to become aware of this - once these skills are acquired they can be transfered to real life.

YABU, firstly because HOW do you put 'expecting more of parents' into practice? Some parents simply cannot or will not step up to the mark. It is in the nation's interest to raise capable citizens and it is not fair on the innocent children of hopeless parents if they are not taught these skills.

Secondly, the 'demands of league tables' are an unbelievably shit reason to keep practical life skills out of the curriculum. Ban league tables, cut all the ludicrous hoop jumping and data collecting out of teaching, empower staff to deal harshly with poor behaviour in order to claw back the shockingly huge amounts of time it wastes, and a bit more time will be available for academic and practical subjects.

Secondly, the 'demands of league tables' are an unbelievably shit reason to keep practical life skills out of the curriculum.

Agreed, but the answer is simply to include life skills in the league tables, as they're just as important, if not more so, than academic qualifications, etc. For a start PHSE or whatever it's called could be turned into an exam subject to that the teachers and pupils take it more seriously. Or, "life skills" could be put into the curriculum for each separate subject, i.e. more nutrition and personal healthcare as part of biology, home electrics as part of physics, personal finances/tax etc as part of Maths, letter writing and form filling as part of English - just take a few things out of the current curriculum to fit it in.