STE(A)M 3

[SuperSalad]

Maybe I'm totally out of the loop and late to this party, but in recent months I've been seeing the mention of STEAM programs in the local education system. The "A" standing for "Arts".

Now correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't adding the arts to a STEM program defeat the purpose of STEM, which is to highlight technical fields?

STEAM appears to me like the traditional curriculum minus the social studies. So how long before it just becomes STEAMS and it just includes all areas of study, thereby completely making the distinction meaningless.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the arts and feel they play an important role. Why lump them in with STEM though?

Andrew H.

http://www.mototribology.com

 

[moltenmetal]

drawoh:

"There are no technology oriented high schools in Toronto."

That's technically correct- there is no whole high school with the title "school of science" or "school of technology" or something similar. In contrast, there are three (3) "School of the Arts" high schools, and one program in a mixed high school that is so extensive that counts (the Claude Watson program at Earl Haig CI). That's in the megacity of Toronto, which has a population of 2.5 million. There are numerous art-focused programs in other schools which are quite strong.

Our daughter has been working away to get ready for next year's auditions for one of those schools she has her heart set on, but if she doesn't get in there, she has several others to choose from as potential optional attendance. The local default high school has a music program, but not in her specialty (strings).

However, there are PLENTY of high schools (collegiate institutes generally) with science/math specialist/enrichment/acceleration programs in Toronto - 19 of them in fact. My son goes to one of them. They fall into two broad categories: seven Centres of Innovation for Skills and Technologies (lovely word-soup there, about as meaningless as "STEAM"), and 12 "MST" programs like the science math robotics program my son attends. His program is in a high school which is populated largely by students who grow up in the subsidized housing near the school, but students from all across Toronto apply to go to its SMR program as my son did. The siting of this award-winning program in what would otherwise likely be a very disadvantaged school was not done by accident, and our experience so far (2 out of 4 yrs in) is that it is working brilliantly, and not just for our son either. These programs vary greatly in their focus, philosophy of education (i.e. enrichment vs acceleration etc.), admission process (i.e. exam vs application) and the like, as we discovered when we attended information nights for the three of them our son was considering.

Details are here:

http://www.tdsb.on.ca/High-School/Going-to-High-School/Specialized-Schools-and-Programs

There is also the opportunity to do a semester at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto in a TDSB program run there since the 1980s:

https://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/School/ScienceSchool/

Ontario also fully funds the Catholic school system here all the way through the end of high school- an artifact of Canadian confederation 150 yrs ago. The Catholic system has a very similar structure and very similar programs, has the same core provincial curriculum, and you don't need to be a Catholic to attend (many Muslim students attend for instance).

Some people hate all of this, viewing it as elitist, as an excuse to not have specialist programs available at all schools (a practical impossibility from the point of view of both staffing and cost), or as a kind of "private school within the public system" whose benefits overwhelmingly go to students already born into privilege, i.e. having well educated and comparatively well to do parents. In practice, what you see is that these programs are positively swamped with the children of recent immigrants, many of whom immigrated with their parents. It's a compromise of course, and far from perfect. But it at least gives kids like my son a chance to be in a program where he fits in rather than feeling like an outsider, which was his entire middle school experience.

Havi

 

[truckandbus]

At my daughters' school promotion of the STEM program creates unneeded conflict between the students in STEM and those taking a liberal arts path. STEAM should (in theory) create a broader understanding between the disciplines. there are already too many reasons for people not to get along in this world

 

[cranky108]

In a world with starving art sales, we want to attract more people to the arts?
I guess it makes them feel good.

You know truck drivers make good money. Almost as engineers, so why not truck driver high schools?

We do need more engineers who know how the world works.

 

[CWB1]

JMO but I would love to see a resurgence of trade-oriented high schools here in the states for the masses to gain some valuable skills. IME its somewhat rare anymore to find a school offering basic shop classes, nevermind one with curriculum centered around teaching the trades and graduating reasonably competent apprentices.

 

[HamburgerHelper]

I think that it is a terrible mistake for the arts to be valued on the basis of how a high school graduate can monetize it after high school. I don't think my time was at all wasted being in band. I wish I could better at drawing and painting but I still like collecting interesting art. There are a lot of things that provide a better quality of life but offer absolutely no monetary value. If they had had a yoga class at my high school, my quality of life probably would have been better having taken it. My life has been beyond needs for awhile. All I have are wants.

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If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.

 

[zeusfaber]

I went to a really good school, and the excellent scientific education stood me in good stead for higher education in engineering and a future career. Having said that, I suspect that I could have got much of that out of a less good school.

What I probably couldn't have got from the (notional) less good school was the superb and enthusiastic musical teaching that has left me with a lifelong love for the art. The sort of teaching where, when the Director of Music caught half a dozen of us larking around in his classroom one rainy lunchtime, instead of chucking us out, he had a quick look round to see what he'd got, fished out a few scores of Magic Flute and set us off from the beginning. Out of that lunchtime was born a whole season of opera.

Forty years on, we're still in touch - I'll be singing a service (Guerrero Missa Ecce Sacerdos Magnum at Sarum St Martins for anyone who's interested) with a group run by one of those teachers in a couple of weeks' time.

A.

 

[CWB1]

Growing up just outside NYC I went through a fairly good music program in HS, took classes for years with one of many local Juilliard grads, knew many Broadway performers/musicians, played with county, area, and all-state bands, and my first MOS (job) in the military was 02M - percussion player. while I know far more about the intricacies of music than most, I cant say my life is any better/worse for the education than friends and family without it. Many of them have a deeper love of music than I do, I get my fill after an hour or two whereas others listen practically all-day, every day.

I will always support a basic arts program and sports as fun elective sidebars to a STEM education but I would never support any K-12 program that focused on them outside of the small handful of Juilliard'esque schools. Far too many parents today spend huge bucks pushing their kids through programs designed for the 0.00001% rather than preparing them for the realities of life.

 

[moltenmetal]

cranky and CWB1: I always like to tell the story of my band in high school. Two went on to become engineers, two professional musicians, and one financial services guy. Four of the five of us could have chosen to study anything we wanted- and the financial services guy had no problem getting into a good university program of his choice either. The guy earning the best living out of the five of us is one of the professional musicians. You've never heard of him- he's not any kind of 0.0001% guy. But if you've watched the popular syndicated TV series Murdoch Mysteries, you've heard his music, and hence the advertisers have paid him money for the privilege. He has his hand in a hundred other things too, but his business writing music for film and TV is the thing that makes the money. The other four are all doing just fine- the two engineers because we both found a way to get some ownership rather than just being employees. Same with the financial services guy, and the other musician- we're all businessmen rather than just employees, to a lesser or greater degree, and that seemed to make the difference.

All of us have a passion for music that has enriched our lives, and had that passion encouraged in high school, even though some of us were destined for other paths from the get-go. There's far more to education than mere job training, and the second we forget that, we destroy this for our kids.

What drives me nuts is the presumption that forcing kids against their nature and inclination to go into something a parent considers to be "practical" is actually good advice for the kids. Sure, sometimes kids need a kick in the pants and a dose of reality to teach them something. However much of the motivation to push kids toward something practical arises from fear which comes from a lack of imagination and faith in what kids can manage in the future. And in these days when we seem to be drowning in the graduates of every kind of university program including engineering, it makes even less sense than ever to push kids in one direction or another. Parents have to be wary of the value of their own advice in relation to the future- like the advice my grandfather gave my dad when he asked to borrow money to start his mechanic's business in the 1950s. Grandpa was a farmer and managed to feed 10 kids through the Depression, so he told dad to buy a farm so he wouldn't starve since cars were obviously a fad...fortunately my mom's father was a more progressive lender!