Today I'd like to expand on something I started to talk about in the last post. I started talking about how education has to be specific to the child. This leads to a complete change in thinking about how schools work. I'll give you an example:
In schools currently most classes depend on grades. Grading on a curve is a very well known idea. Well, as Stephen Covey points out in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, grading on a curve "basically says that you got an 'A' because someone else got a 'C.'" He goes on to say that in this system, "No recognition is given to intrinsic value; everyone is extrinsically defined." (that's all from page 219 of this edition).
My point here is simple: if we want to change the way we think of education, we have to start with the very core ideas like grading.
Most of my experience is in mathematics, so for the remainder of this series I'm going to focus on that more than other topics simply because I have direct experience that I can reference. I've spent the last year as a tutor for various levels of students from third grade math to Trigonometry. The biggest thing that hits me is just how much is expected of students who may just be incapable of understanding these topics.
While I was tutoring a third grade student last year, I was impressed by the precursors to Algebra that were being introduced on his homework. I mean, the young man was bright, but he was eight, which just seems very young to be able to grasp such abstract concepts as Algebra. I've studied a bit about child development, and, while some children might be able to grasp abstract ideas like Algebra at the age of eight, for most kids that kind of abstraction isn't reachable until they're 10-13 years old.
Worse than that, the constant push to teach to standards and not to students gives me constant headaches. The third grader was learning multiplication, but his education on addition and subtraction was so glossed over that I couldn't teach him anything other than rote memorization of times tables without first going back and teaching him how to actually add and subtract. I deal with students in Geometry and Algebra I and II that still don't understand basic integers. I spend more time explaining to these students how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide when dealing with negative numbers than I spend on the more complex ideas of Algebra and Geometry. They were never expected to actually learn these concepts. Their teachers presented the concepts, the students were tested, then the class moved on and nothing was ever actually learned.
I spent time with one girl was used to getting A's and B's in all of her classes until she reached Geometry. Once she got into Geometry, though, she was outside of most of the standardized testing requirements, so her teacher was able to develop an independent curriculum. She needed help because she was failing, but most of her struggles were not with the actually difficult ideas being presented in the class. Her struggles were much deeper: she couldn't even work with integers, let alone some of the more difficult Algebraic concepts necessary to fully understand the Geometric manipulations she was learning about. She understood visually what was going on, but she couldn't translate that understanding into mathematic statements due to her lack of learning up to that point. This reinforces a few things I discussed above.
First, her grading was not based on any concept of actual learning. She received A's and B's because the other students in the class were either the same or worse than her in terms of being able to put on paper what a teacher wants to see on a test. The testing never actually examined her honest understanding of any concept, and since the concepts were all mandatory from a curriculum standpoint, they were never reviewed. Each concept had to be covered by a certain time, then the class was forced to move on as more and more had to be covered for the students to be able to take the state mandated examinations. She was, up until that point, used to competing with other students and being able to keep pace with her class.
Once she moved outside of that normal class distribution, though, and started dealing with students of varying ages, she was no longer able to compete, and her grades suffered accordingly. Had she been able to honestly learn the necessary topics, however, she would have easily been able to move through the Geometry course. I see this with almost every student I've worked with over the last year.
Again, I'm not finished with this topic, but this seems like a good place to stop before I get into the argument that mandatory testing is bad for students, which has been thoroughly covered elsewhere (here, here, and here for a few examples).
