Education Foray 2

Education Foray 2
The following will attempt to elaborate further on a concept mentioned in the first installment on Education. That concept is somewhat damning of the educational establishment. Prevalent attitudes displayed by school personnel suggest a level of stupidity even among the highly educated. What I am referencing here is the educators’ ability to misconstrue academic rigor.
Perhaps one example will suffice. For years, teachers have heard about the importance of writing, in all disciplines, for all students. Many teachers have responded by trying to find ways for students to write MORE. I believe, however, after 20+ years as an English teacher, that writing is more like riding a bike.
Learners do need to write, and they do need to practice, but they really need to learn how to write well ONE TIME! My point is that volumes of poor writing don’t automatically lead to a higher performance, the same way that sitting on a bike for hours on end won’t naturally lead to quality riding. To be sure, practice will definitely help, but the practice should be more for the sake of practice than for the sake of assessment. If a person has written ONE THING extremely well during young adulthood, he or she will be able to write well forever. Of course, after periods of inactivity, s/he may need to scrape away the rust and regain the balance with a little bit of practice.
The preceding example may not seem to jibe with well-indoctrinated attitudes toward writing. Yet I will maintain that the students that I have taught have made their writing progress in big steps. The progress may have been facilitated by the multitudinous practice sessions, but when they ‘get it,’ the quality of the writing is altered forever. Therefore, my only conclusion is that the acquisition of quality writing skills comes in little epiphanies, which, after concerted practice, develop into observable huge improvements.
Take this for an example. A student, by accident, by trial and error, or by recognition in models, ‘sees’ a quality that he recognizes as valuable. Let’s just say that he decides that precise vocabulary makes his writing better. He then uses that particular method often and progressively more effectively, until one day his writing is enhanced by the perceptive use of that technique. This would correspond directly to the BIG STEP mentioned earlier. The improvement began when the student tried to adopt the desirable trait, but the noticeable improvement didn’t come until the student had had enough practice to use the approach well.
To be honest, I think that most learning works in this way. “Getting it” is the first step, and then practicing it until mastery is the next phase. Any student who has truly grasped the value of the appositive, or of the parallel element, will continue to use the technique, because it works. Therefore, the volume of writing assignments is NOT the critical issue. Presenting the material in such a way that the individual understands and is prompted to use the technique is the critical component.
This misunderstanding of the elements of academic rigor is the core of this discussion. Teachers are driven at times to justify their value by demanding rigorous performances from their students. The stupid part materializes when the teacher or administrator misconstrues the method by which rigor is measured. Which of the following describes a rigorous activity: a student composes a series of journal entries in response to three reading assignments; OR a student writes three pages of analysis that must demonstrate points of relevance among three different novels. In each case, the student will read three novels. In case number one, the teacher might require a one page journal entry for each chapter of a book. The student will cumulatively compose thirty or more pages of journal entries. In the other case, the student needs to write three pages. How could the second approach be the more rigorous one?
The answer is again simple. If the three pages of analysis require, via a rubric, a level of thinking and communicating that demonstrates higher level thinking skills, then three pages of meat is infinitely more rigorous than thirty pages of cotton candy. Perhaps that is a weak analogy, but I think I’ve made my point.
Maybe I can make a more visceral mechanical analogy. The journal assignment is analogous to asking a person to cover thirty miles in thirty days, with no demands on the elapsed time of each running session. Therefore, the student could complete his thirty miles by walking. At the end of the sessions, s/he might be in somewhat better shape than s/he would without the exercise, The three page analysis is then comparable to having the student run three miles in less than twenty minutes. S/he cannot meet the requirement, three miles in a limited time, without having done some preparation that requires sustained intensity. Walking a mile a day, for thirty days, is not as hard as training to run three miles in less than twenty minutes.
I think many teachers apply this misconception to their classroom practices. They assign thirty minutes of homework instead of fifteen, citing increased rigor as their aim. Or they require three projects when one will do. The level of required investment should be the measuring stick for academic rigor, not the number of minutes invested, not the number of pages read or composed.
In another manifestation of the disease, some teachers seem to believe that they need to have lower grades to ‘prove’ that they are challenging their students. That is absolute hogwash. All I would need to do to deflate the grades of my Honors English students over the years is to construct poor tests. I could ask questions that I knew I hadn’t covered well, or phrase questions in such a way as to promote confusion. Grades are also reflections of how well a subject is taught, how appropriately the material has been chosen for the course, and how well the test measures the skills and knowledge of the students. In other words, the grades themselves mean nothing.
I always thought that my grades should be skewed to the high end of the bell curve. If natural capacity can be represented by the bell curve, then the signal for the teacher’s contribution would be in moving all of his students up a standard deviation. Try to hang in with this. If the bell curve represents how the grades will be distributed naturally, then the teacher’s goal should be to improve upon that. Otherwise, the teacher is rendered inconsequential. The students arrive, the lessons are presented, and the grades are assigned. We all know that we have on occasion risen ABOVE our natural ability. Shouldn’t that be what the teacher is all about – giving students the tools and resources necessary to rise above their limitations?
In closing, I don’t want to give the impression that the other side of the coin is the answer. If teachers can create tests that encourage their students to score poorly, they can also create tests that inflate grades way out of proportion. The grades themselves are not the aim. Determining legitimate objectives, then devising methods by which all of the students will meet those objectives, is the aim. The grades that students earn are also grades that teachers earn.