Re: Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops

In article <mdr853lfouenfojo9nqo8f5hhldo3kpsha@xxxxxxx>,
Mayor of R'lyeh <mayor.of.rlyeh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, 23 May 2007 01:02:58 -0400, ZnU <znu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> chose to
bless us with the following wisdom:

[snip]

To address what you said in your response to me... critical thinking and
meaningful comprehension *can* be taught. Most non-introductory level
college courses focus on these skills, rather than memorization.

You're talking about college, I'm talking about elementary school. The
reason those college courses don't stress memorization is that you're
supposed to have them already memorized. How, for instance, are you
going to have a meaningful discussion on the effects of the Battle Of
Hastings if no one knows anything about it?

In my experience, most higher level college classes *don't* expect you
to already know all the facts going in. It's not as if they have
students memorize Aristotle in high school and then talk about Aristotle
in college.

But there's still a difference.

You can have students read something that says "The Second World War
started on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland", and then
give them a multiple choice test to determine whether they memorized
that information.

Or, and this is what would happen in any properly taught college course,
you can teach students about the social and political context that led
to the start of the war, and then have them answer essay questions like
"What role did the phenomenon of nationalism play in causing World War
II?"

The students who are taught this second way might not remember all the
names and dates on the day of the test. They will have some
understanding, however, of what WWII was actually about, and they'll
probably retain that information.

In contrast, students taught the first way won't really have much of an
idea of what WWII was about. Even if they can repeat whatever theory the
guy who wrote the textbook advanced on that subject, they won't really
understand what it means and they won't have gained any experience
thinking critically about such issues. They'll know more raw facts on
the day of the test, but odds are they'll forget them a couple of weeks
later.

It's pretty obvious which one of these approaches is going to lead to a
more usefully educated individual.

There is no reason why education focused on concepts and critical
thinking cannot start right at the beginning of the education process.
Good teachers already teach this way, even in the lowest grades.

Standardized testing actively discourages this, however. The teacher who
focuses on concepts and critical thinking is likely to produce students
who score lower on standardized tests than the teacher who exclusively
teaches facts likely to appear on the tests.

The
simplest method of teaching them is to have students do a lot of
reading, and have classroom discussions and essays that require an
understanding the material.

Of course, both of these things require small class sizes to work well,
which is why standardized testing has emerged as a supposed panacea in
the minds of those who have no real desire to properly fund education.

I know educators won't be happy until teaching is a sure road to
riches but that's not what society has decided. And quite frankly why
should we pay more for the performance levels we're getting?

You'll notice I was discussing smaller class sizes, not higher teacher
salaries.

Though I will note that in practically any other field, if an
organization wants better people, it offers more compensation. If you
want to attract the best people to the teaching profession, you're going
to have to pay them something like what they could get in other fields.
Higher teacher pay is probably a necessarily step in fixing the problem,
though certainly not by itself sufficient.

[snip]

--
"That's George Washington, the first president, of course. The interesting thing
about him is that I read three--three or four books about him last year. Isn't
that interesting?"
- George W. Bush to reporter Kai Diekmann, May 5, 2006
.

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