Those teachers are admirable, but their actions are more of a 'nice to have' than the primary objective of the system.

As I wrote below. My most memorable math class was a teacher failing to explain fractions to me, what later became obvious to me was that the teacher did not understand fractions either.

I am sure you want to blame me for this, but somehow I went to university and got a degree in (applied) mathematics. So I doubt it was some fundamental problem with me.

Everybody is upset when someone tells them they fail at their jobs and teachers are an entire industry of total failure. In a single semester of university I learned so much more than in 12 years of school. If teachers aren't at fault, who is? By any metric I was a successful student.

I’m not blaming you. But as intelligent as you may be, you have discounted all the possibilities for the failure of you school or your particular teachers. Because you had a bad time, then the whole system is malicious right?

I know a high school teacher with a PhD and has tutored and lectured at the university level. But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the same brush as all teachers.

>then the whole system is malicious right?

Where did I say that the intentions were bad?

>Because you had a bad time, then the whole system is malicious right?

No. In university the expectations were drastically higher. If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university, then it failed at that for everyone. The mismatch can not be attributed to me.

>But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the same brush as all teachers.

We had one of these as well. Average teacher, learned basically nothing in her class.

All students at university were unprepared from school or only some, i.e., performance of different schools, classes, etc. would be heterogeneous?

Then this is a failure of the system in Germany, and does not reflect the experience of many American kids. Some, yes, but not all. Primarily, it's the "smart" kids who didn't have to work for good high school grades who have a bad time in university, not the kids in the fat part of the curve who more likely matriculated having already developed strong study skills. In my experience, at least, the biggest difference between high school and college is that high school teachers teach and homework is for reinforcement, whereas college professors expect self-learning to be the core method of pedagogy and their role is to reinforce and contextualize the topics. Switching from one mode to the other can be rough, no matter how innately intelligent a student is.

Maybe aligned/frameworked/pooled but no full uniform testing or single curriculum across all the states in Germany, for example - so variations exist and some schools might prepare better than others.

> In university the expectations were drastically higher.

Well duh. I don't know where/what you studied, but I did physics and yeah, it was balls-fucking hard some times. I think the vast majority of freshman physics/maths/engineering students experience a similar feeling where there's a huge jump in challenge going from school-level to uni-level.

Whether this means there is a case for narrower, more focused "elite" schools in maths, or in say music, for high-performing students in those areas, is of course an interesting discussion :)

If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university

Well it's not. You studied a narrow subject at university, but during the ~12 years of schooling you studied many other subjects. The goal of schooling is to make you a complete citizen (in an ideal sense, I'm talking :)). Not sure how the system is where you live but where I come from the first 9 years have a fixed curriculum, and it's only during the last 3 years (high school) that you pick subjects in the areas relevant to your university aspirations (or you pick a vocational course).

To add another case: When I was 14 or so, a science teacher taught the whole classroom that the reason stars twinkle is because of light being waves. I considered interrupting and mentioning pockets of air with different densities, refraction, etc... I decided not to. I didn't want to be branded (again) a troublemaker. I hope nobody else in that classroom remembers that lesson.

Some teachers start with high spirits but most turn into regular slobs trying to get to the end of the month once they realise that their job is to mind the children while the parents work.

I was lucky enough to meet just a handful of teachers that tought me some values, the rest were just ... forgetable people.

Incompetence is rampant in government jobs. Schools aren't technically government jobs, but there are many similarities in terms of incentives, hiring practice, dismissal difficulty, talent pool, etc.

In any normal (private sector) job, if you can't perform the basic job requirements you get fired or retrained. Maybe you're moved to a different area that better suits your skill set. But you don't just sit in a position for 20 years screwing it up day after day as you see in government / lower education.

Most teachers are actually quite good and they're actively being held back by curriculum and being stripped of their autonomy.

I really, truly don't know how people form this opinion. Teachers are trained professionals with certifications and a degree. They know what they're doing. It's extremely likely they're far more educated in the subject matter they teach than you are.

Now, they're not miracle workers. Some parents expect little Timmy reading at a second grade level in Middle School to magically get great scores on his end of year exams. It doesn't work that way.

"Incompetence is rampant" is enough. No, incompetent people do not get fired from the private sector either. The dumbest tech question I have ever heard from a tech manager ("why don't we do datamining in Flash?") was from an established guy at an established corporation that controls a lot of the things the world does and really, really shouldn't.

Why do you choose to remember that class and not the ones where you learned to write proper English?