What is wrong with school?
This is a question that I have struggled with over the past year. I love working with kids and I love teaching and learning, so wouldn’t working for the public school board with young people be the perfect job for me? You would think so, wouldn’t you, but there are many things that I have witnessed throughout my career that made me reconsider. Last year, I was working in a grade ten science class and I had one of those “A-HA!” moments that made me wonder if public education, as it is currently experienced by students, is really “inspiring learning”.
The students were being taught by a teacher intern who was not very comfortable with the material being taught. I was taking some notes in a grade ten science class about weather and climate and I wrote down some information that was completely wrong. The worst part about it, is I knew it was wrong when I wrote it down, but I wrote it down anyway. I was feeling kind of tired and tuned out that day. You know, the way many people feel when they are at school. When the “regular” teacher came back and explained that what the teacher intern taught was wrong, I was crushed. How could somebody as brilliant as me write down something that is completely wrong? If I could make a mistake like that, what chance do any of our students have of learning anything useful? It really made me reflect on my role as an “educator”. I have had many animated discussions with many people about public education and I always defended it. But I could no longer deny that there is a huge problem with school. Public education relies heavily on rote learning, which is the antithesis of thinking for yourself. What good is education, if we don’t teach kids to think for themselves?
Long story short, I had a hard go of things for a few weeks. I wondered if I could really participate in public education, when I saw for myself how bad it really is. I contemplated quitting and working at Wal-Mart. I had no idea how I could go on, knowing how bad it really is. But before I quit, I decided to talk it over with some of my colleagues and see what they had to say. Unfortunately, none of them understood my conflict, but they still managed to talk me out of quitting. Groupthink does come in handy now and again. And I decided to stay, in spite of my misgivings about school. I figured that I just might be able to have a positive influence and make people think, even if I fail to start a revolution.
I was fully prepared to quit and sacrifice all the hard work that I did to advance my own personal career. Luckily, I have never worried too much about my career. But still, there is something to be said for job security. But even luckier, I witnessed a PD (professional development) institute last Friday that managed to be useful. Alfie Kohn spoke at Tommy Douglas on Thursday about education. OMFG it was so nice to hear what he had to say. He basically validated my world view.
I have spent the past year or more ranting about the useless of marking and testing. Fixating on marking and testing stands in the way of actual learning. I can regurgitate useless facts with the best of them but I have come to realize that it’s generally a useless skill. I am so happy that I am not alone and that the division will support change. If teachers want to change the way they do things, they can do it and the school board will support it. YAY!!!!!
Of course, all teachers have been taught to think that testing and marking is absolutely essential to the educational process. In fact, they spend many years in school learning how to do those things. How are they suddenly going to give it up? I am lucky because as a lowly educational assistant, I have never had to worry about it. EA’s don’t do marking or testing, it’s in our contract and everything! (BTW, remind me to give money or other extrinsic rewards to the genius who put that in place). It’s going to be hard for teachers to give up testing and marking. In fact, I will not be at all surprised if teachers are really resistant to change. It means going against all those years of indoctrination and brainwashing that they get in teacher school. Teachers have gone through thirteen years of indoctrination and brainwashing in the K-12 education system, before they go through their four year bachelor of education degree programs, where I am sure they learn all about how to administer tests and come up with grades. Throwing that all away is not going to be easy.
October 14th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
While I can appreciate what Alfie Kohn has to say, at the same time, some testing properly used, can be useful diagnostically. I was educated and taught in England BEFORE “look and say” took hold ( I do not know whether it has ever taken hold in England). When I came to Canada in 1965 I was handed The GINN basic readers and Dick and Jane books complete with highly detailed instruction manuals which turned out to be useless. It took about three days in this system to realise that kids were not reading, but looking at the pictures for clues as to the words on the page. This was a travesty.
Later after “educationists” had reduced the number of words kids could be expected to learn in the first few grades to a few hundred, it became clear to me that if a child was not able to sound out a word by the middle of grade one, he was in trouble , the controversy developed between the “phonics first” school and those subscribing to the “psycholinguistic guessing game”. I remember as well that there was an incredible amount of emphasis placed on spelling bees. “educationists” seemed to delight in screwing to make words “simpler” by, for example changing their structure so that they could be memorized more “easily” One that comes to mind in Canada particularly is snow-plough becoming “snoplow” which was a complete perversion. Breaking that down phonetically, I would read that as snop low. Learning English phonetically — which can be done with about 300 phonetic rules and occasional exceptions became like learning Chinese characters where every word had to be learned individually (the spelling bees). One visitor from Europe commented that he could only explain the backwardness of N. American English teaching by suggesting that the phonetic origins of many words had been lost — think sheep – schiff ( German) mutton – — (French) ukulele — Hawaiian.
So when I administered the Schonell standardised reading test to my Grade nine class of 15 year olds in 1972 I discovered they were on average reading at the level of British 11 year olds. On the Edmonton system they were “average”.
10 Years later, I learned that the Schonell test was being used to “teach to” which was absolutely wrong, for it is to be used diagnostically, not as a measure of acheivement. And THAT dear reader is a serious problem. A well constructed test CAN and should be used as much for entering behaviour as anything else, and can be a useful indicator, used creatively to guide the learner in his own learning as much as the teacher. So my message is re testing — don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
October 15th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Wow, I had no idea that Dick and Jane was that bad. I can’t imagine anything worse than having a formulaic curriculum that you are forced to use. Yikes.
In the K-12 system here, there is a huge emphasis on PWIM (picture word inductive model) which can be great for some kids but seems to be overused in some cases. I know of a few kids who say they hate PWIM even though they love to read.
Teaching to the test is precisely the problem with standardized testing. Especially in the US, teachers are under enormous pressure to bring up the kids scores on standardized tests, which leads to “teaching to the test”. There are other and better ways to assess kids that don’t require standardized tests. And what about the kids who just don’t do well in a test-taking environment? I have had many experiences with kids that I know understand the material yet can not regurgitate it for a test or maybe they just don’t care to do so. Then what? Personally, I like the idea of portfolios and keeping samples of students’ work and getting them to reflect on what they have learned and what it is they need to work on. That is far more useful than cramming useless facts into your short-term memory, spewing it on a test and then forgetting it five minutes later.
But I think I see what you are saying about using a test diagnostically. I don’t know what to think of that, since there are many professionals in the system whose entire job revolves around administering diagnostic tests. Should that change? I don’t know, but it’s interesting to think about.
October 15th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
PWIM still sounds like the old look and say. The diagnostic tests I talk about are administered individually. My information may be dated so I have no idea what goes on in the classroom today, but what goes on with kids on computers, I think should be used as a tool for teaching critical thinking skills. I see some very bright kids coming out of school with excellent analytical skills, but at the same time you have to realise that not all are equal. What of the kids with FAS, ADHD, behavioural disorders? I’ve seen FAS kids go through tests and parrot everything you will expect them to have learned. But they have holes in their brains that are almost impossible to fix and keep making the same mistakes over and over and over again. Beautiful penmanship, though.
I’m not sure that things are getting worse, only that maybe, from what my secretary tells me, the schools are no different from when I was teaching.
October 18th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Yeah, PWIM is definitely the same old look and say. In small quantities it’s OK but it’s overused.
October 18th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Is there any objective measure at all of real literacy?
What does GHOTI spell?