STEAM Education: Putting an A in your STEM

[NotJustBikes]

Thanks for making this. It's an important video.

It reminds me of something I came across when researching for a video: an offhand comment that in the US, local schools are funded by local property tax.

As a Canadian, this boggled my mind when I read this. I thought there's no way that could be correct because that would mean that people from richer neighbourhoods would get more funding for schools than people in lower-income neighbourhoods, and that would lead to insane wealth disparities.

But yeah. It's true.

As you mentioned, there is Title I, but that provides nowhere near enough funding to make up for this discrepancy.

I've read that one of the top predictors of success in America is what zip code you grew up in, and this is a huge part of that.

I now live in the Netherlands, and the school system is designed to be as egalitarian as possible. Almost all funding is provided by the national government and is made to be as fair as possible across the country. There is also extra funding for students from low-income families and for those with special needs.

It's actually annoyingly egalitarian at times: for example, in Amsterdam, kids don't just go to their local high school, they have to rank their preferred schools, and then an algorithm determines how to best place all students so that they get one of their top choices. This is stressful for kids because they don't know what high school they're going to until quite late in the year, but it's all built specifically to avoid the problem where "rich kids go to the good schools and poor kids go to the underfunded schools."

It's definitely not perfect by any means, but it does significantly level the playing field for access to education.

It seems like everything about the US education system (especially changes by Republican governments over the past few decades) has been laser-focused on making a good education something that's only available to the wealthy.

[HITABikes]

When I moved to Canada people were like "was it bc of trump?" And I was like "naaaawww it was bc of Reagan"

[rotmohawk]

I like it when you talk about politics.

As a European, whenever someone tells me they're not political, the example I use is
"If you think children should be well educated without going into debt, you have political opinion".

[christopherknight]

Came for the science, stayed for the revolution.

[RealMenWorshipZeus]

"Public school is about education. It is NOT job training. And it should not be. Otherwise, the capitalists win."
As a teacher, it felt so good to hear this. I love your channel so much.

[noatreiman]

“How can we get to Star Trek if people who want to do science aren’t allowed to do science” 💗

[jd]

The worst part about being the artistic kid who gets pivoted is when everyone comes to you asking why you never did anything with the arts because you were “so artistic as a kid” but everyone around you treated it as a distraction

[tunateun]

Today I learned that in America teachers don't get paid during the summer

[WilliamWallace]

Is anyone else a little disappointed she didn't say "... Just throwing slime at your kid and hoping it sticks ..."?

[Yordleton]

When I was a Music Education major in university, it was surprising how often people would tell me my degree was going to be useless TO MY FACE. It always felt like they were being disingenuous, as obviously we live in a world where people love music and consume it more than ever. It never felt like a waste of time to me, and it was pretty much the only thing I wanted to do. I just don't see how spitting out another future Lockheed-Martin employee is considered more useful to society than musicians. Crazy how we still suffer from Reaganite Cold Worrier brain rot, even all these years later.

[Xplodicon]

"You can sing while you work in the oilfield" Lol

I definitely held the misconception that STEAM included Art. Thanks for this video.

[no_thingness]

The correct acronym is obviously MEATS

[seventeenraccoonsinatrenchcoat]

loving that hard pivot in the middle to acknowledging the elephant currently standing on top of our chest

[billyt]

as someone who went to one of the biggest engineering schools in the world and worked hard for my GPA… i want to say….. thank you for subtly calling out engineers for being so damn smug because they thought being graded on a curve meant they worked hard instead of realizing their professors were either adjunct or ready to retire and didn’t care.

[dysxleia]

This video started as a fun little review on an idea, and blossomed into one of the most banger callouts of what is going on in US education. What a dramatic and awesome pivot right in the middle of the video.

[windowdoog]

My 6th grade chemistry teacher made us memorize the entire periodic table. Despite there being ya know a table we could look at. I am still bitter I know the atomic weight of lithium is 6.94. There was a flippin chart on the wall Mr. H! Those hours couldn’t have been used on something else?

[TheReykjavik]

There is also an even bigger lag with parents of students being even further behind. When I was in high school, there were a lot of complaints about learning how to do math that nobody would ever use. Then common core came out, with an emphasis on the problem solving skills and a deeper understanding of the underlying concepts, rather than on the mechanics of getting to the right answer for a test. And parents immediately threw a fit.

[VerryBonne]

As an adult I came to realize that math isn't taught very well in high school. In High School I got good grades in math, but I realize I didn't actually learn it very well. For example, I didn't actually understand what a Sine and Cosine are, I just learned how to plug them into a formula without understanding why the formula worked.

I got a much better understanding of Trigonometry when I started learning how to do some programming for making video games. I had to write code that would rotate a little space ship in the game, which required me to learn how the Trigonometric formulas actually worked. Many of us think of games as just being arts and entertainment, so it's kind of funny that they ended up teaching me math better than school did. I realized I had a bias that I think a lot of people have, where they assume that math is supposed to be boring and difficult, but it doesn't actually have to be that way.

[gatsbysdead]

It was not until I got to college, took my first programming course, and learned about binary, octal, and hex that I understood how numbers work. It was a true lightbulb moment. I took CALCULUS in high school and this was the first time in my life that arithmetic made sense. After the awe finally wore off, I just thought of the years of rote memorization I suffered through, the overwhelming confusion that came from staring at pages of complex notation because the fundamental building blocks were never explained to me. I could do the math, but I always struggled because I didn’t know WHY I was doing things this way. It made me think of the kids who had the same feelings as I did with even more basic math, and my heart hurt. It’s messed up.

[Ryukachoo]

Nothing on this earth got me into engineering more than a lego mindstorms set for Christmas when i was like, 8. Building and programming actual robots from lego is a pretty transformative experience