A discussion erupted in third period the other day that, as near as I can remember, boiled down to existential basics: “Why are we here?” Not in the grandest sense of “What am I doing on this planet?” but in the more direct and pragmatic high school context: “What am I doing sitting at this desk?”
I think, if I recall my own days in school well enough, it’s a question students ask out of frustration and boredom, but also with a dark sense of glee, suspecting that the answer they’ll get from teachers will be as unsatisfactory as they expect.
I think it’s a question many teachers (myself foremost among them) are frightened of as well—because in our darkest moments we ask the same thing of ourselves, and often come up with the same unsatisfactory answers.
I bring this up because of a post by Geoffrey Pullum yesterday over at Language Log, that some of you might be interested in reading: “What gets taught; What gets learned.” In it, he lists things that, looking back, he believes he should have been taught in middle and high school, but weren’t—things he needed to know to be able to function in modern society.
As a teacher himself, he flips the issue around towards the end:
“Of course, there is a difference between presenting important topics to students and getting them to listen (it is the difference between leading the proverbial horse to water and getting it to drink)… On a good day I persuade myself that for most students it is not so: that they are not just saying ‘Blah; whatever’ to themselves as I try to teach them about things I think are important.”
Here are some of the things I kick around in my head, in no particular order. I’m going to attempt to enable comments for this post; maybe some of you can add thoughts from your perspective…
- I see a difference between students who see school and education as “something they do” and “something that is done to them.” I think there is some underlying force in our system that moves more students into the second category—the expectation that education is passive; that it is something that happens to them (perhaps as they believe they see it happening to others); that education is imposed on them by some outside force. They become, in a way, victims of school—they are either dragged kicking and screaming through to graduation, or left to fester in a corner. Either way, they come out the other side wondering why they haven’t learned anything. (Or, is the terminology maybe, “why they haven’t been taught anything?”)
- Many students that I see actually learning are doing so on their own—school provides an opportunity, a “landscape” for learning they’d probably be doing on their own, anyway. Teachers are there to guide, to help, sometimes to push them in directions they wouldn’t normally take…but the students are ultimately driving their own education…not being bludgeoned over the head with it.
- One thing I try to do as a teacher is introduce my students to as many new ideas as I possibly can in the relatively short time I have, hoping that some folks will pick up anything and run with it, in any direction. I’m often dismayed how much is left lying around on the ground. Maybe someone comes back and grabs something later, when I’m not looking—I don’t know.
- I’m afraid that as our society deals with a percieved failure in education by trying to objectify success as a range of numbers generated by various multiple-choice tests, we might end up firmly establishing education as an exercise in filling in blanks and coloring in circles—bringing us back to that existential dilemma—“If I can already fill in the correct blanks and color in the correct circles, why am I sitting in this classroom listening to somebody rattle on about ancient Rome, or poetry, or irregular polygons?” Are we teaching that education is the test?
- Should education be the test? Maybe that’s what we want? There’s a seductiveness to that idea…maybe I shouldn’t worry about anything but what’s on the exit tests…if that’s all society demands, why don’t I just quit once I’m sure my students can fill in the correct blanks and color in the correct circles? Or why don’t I teach only what I’m sure will be on the test, over and over? After all, all I’m really going to be judged on is whether the correct circles have been filled in…
- Speaking of testing, listen to this clip from an NPR news story Saturday, of a training class for the new Iraqi police force. This wasn’t the point of the story, certainly, but it seems to me (cynical as that may be) that using the class’ overly-emphatic cries of “NooooOOOooo!” to the question “Is it right for someone to recieve gifts while they’re on duty?” seems shaky grounds on which to base the assertion that the police force’s philosophy and social mores have changed since Saddam’s rule. What does this have to do with Gateway testing in Tennessee? I’m not sure, exactly…maybe just that sometimes tests aren’t very likely to correlate well to performance in the real world, as much as we’d like to believe otherwise…
- How can I, as a teacher, fire up students who don’t want to be fired? Am I a bad teacher because I often can’t find a way? Where does responsibility for failure lie? Should it be enough to just be sure they can pass the tests? And again, if they can do that already, why should they stick around? How do I justify that to them?
This could go on for a while, I suspect, but these points might at least get the ball rolling… Besides, I still have tests to finish grading. Discuss? Anyone?