Laughing at U.S.

This is my first international education conference and about half of the participants in any session are from non-US education systems. I was at a very small session on educational partnerships and very quickly the international participants started to ask questions. "Aren't your teachers trained?" and "What do you mean 'Change the curriculum'?" are perhaps the questions that demonstrate the compete increduality of the international participants with our education system.

See, those people all have centralized education systems in which all teachers are trained in with same methods, on the same curriculum, and the same assessments. All the students experience very similar lesson plans and experiences. I think that had heard about our system but didn't believe it until they heard about its effects. See here, each state and district can basically teach what ever it wants. Sometimes each school or teacher can determine their own curriculum (or lack there of) so we have thousands of different curriculums and teacher prep programs that vary wildly in quality.

So educators from around the world: Singapore, Ghana, Canada, Pakistan, Australia, Japan, South Africa, etc, they all laugh at the complete and total mess of an education system that we have. And those of us who were presenting, can't help but laugh as well.