A week ago, I was riding the Metro 372 from the U District up to my college in Bothell. It was the Monday of Spring Break. I was listening in on a gaggle of Nathan Hale High School students talk about a literature class. One was bragging that he had been a star in a recent “Socratic seminar” even though he had not read any of the material covered by the seminar. Another person said, “Well, you did read the first chapter ‘cause we read it together in class.” Another person chimed in, “Did you spark the novel?” The conversation devolved at that point to some pretty adolescent flyting until one student started talking about Mad Magazine. He offered an almost verbatim quote of a particular text in a recent volume and then an interpretation of why it was funny; his peers listened even though it wasn’t yet 8 AM. Then some one tossed in another pretty sophomoric comment and the insults flew.
Smart students with an unfortunate view of teachers: it seemed that they perceived teachers as authority figures almost completely unaware of how students thought about literature and how they read. In fact, the whole point of the literature class seemed to be fooling a teacher into believing that assignments had been read and that the student’s interpretation matched the teacher’s.
This strikes me as a tragic use of resources, of time and space. Sure there are “correct interpretations” and correct answers to math problems, but it’s not clear to me that a meaningful education can be gotten by fooling authorities into believing that one is correct. Interpretations and answers are the end result of a process that is, for most learners, more important than the end result. A professional engineer knows how to use numbers to model a situation; a writer knows how to decipher a text or situation. Neither puts a lot of weight on having gotten correct answers in school. Could be I’m taking a utopian position here. I suspect one can go a long way without knowing how to use fluently numbers and words. A Yale or Harvard MBA taken after fooling professors is still a Yale or Harvard MBA. Education is, at one level, a way to pile up social capital.
Guess that I am not really interested in the piling up of social capital in the absence of personal development. I ask students to develop their own readings and to document the process by which they came up with those readings (and rarely offer my own interpretations). Rather than asking them to be correct, I ask learners to be purposeful and conscientious; that is, I ask them to take what we do seriously and to take responsibility for doing it. No more; no less.
I find a great deal of joy and enjoyment in this practice (I expect to have “fun” in my classes this spring). But I’m the sort of person who took three degrees in “English” (and minored in math). Am I asking too much of my students? Am I failing to teach them the rules that will enable them to be “correct” and thereby accrue social capital.
Maybe, but I doubt it. On my experience, purposeful and conscientious students who enter just educational institutions end up being able to be correct enough to do what they want to do. Trying hard, of course, does not guarantee getting the correct answers. At times, learners discover that mastering one or another process or content area will cost a lot of time and energy. Confronting such a situation, a purposeful, conscientious learner makes a choice: she invests the time and energy or alters her goals. She doesn’t complain about having to make an investment.
Hmmmm, this is making me think more precisely about my obligations to this sort of learner. I have to provide access to processes and content and have to provide comprehensible feedback on performances. I’ll go after this line of thinking in another posting.
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8 comments:
I think that one of the reasons high school students have this issue of just trying to pass like they have done assignments and not really take advantage of all of the resources they have available to them is that high school is like babysitting. So many of the kids there are at different learning levels, and the teachers have to work with that, and it's not easy. Kids just give up, and don't take learning seriously, it's just a place they are forced to go. I had this metality in high school, and now that I am 7 years removed from the experience, I look at education totally differently,
Thats a deep look into the study habits of students. I couldn't agree with you more.
The thing about writing is that there are no wrong or right answers. With math 2+2 always =4. When writing a first assignment for a teacher its hard to know how they grade and what they expect from us. Last quarter I wrote a paper and thought I was doing everything right but turned out I got a C- for the draft and D for the final draft. WHY? I didn't understand how i went wrong. Is my thinking wrong? Writing is very broad and there is so many ways to do it. Fortunately in papers after that I finished satisfactory.. but why was it that with that first paper i did so horribly. Maybe i should've asked my teacher but i was so pissed about it i didn't.
Is an MBA or PhD from Harvard really the same if you BS your way through it? I would like to think that at any college, professors are astute enough to know what BS is, especially at so-called Ivy League schools. At that point, if you're paying tens of thousands of dollars for a degree, wouldn't you want to make good use of that money? I guess it all depends on your priorities; maybe some rich kids are just getting degrees to satisy their parents, in which case it would be a tragic use of resources.
After reading this blog it takes me back to when i read the Sommers Essay and she talks about how not one person can be right or have all answers. We have to see ourselves as sources. I do not think you are asking too much from your students. A lot of people may think so but to me you are not. And for me you help me see myself as a source and to bring my voice into other topics. So I do not think you fail to teach the rules that enable students to be "correct".
Wow, from what I am reading, sounds like you are a very good teacher, one that puts your whole heart into what he is doing for his profession. You know, this is kinda how I want to be in my career. I want to be the best of the best. I'm not necessarity striving for some kind of glory, but my goal, my wish, my desire and my, is to have a career that I will love. That I can put all of my 100% into it and not mind a bit. Not be afraid to over work a little, maybe even for free. I want it to be part of my pleasant life.
About reading. Yeah, sometimes I feel like I read a piece a billion time, annotate it and everything and still get a defferent interpretation than the rest of the class. I guess that's fine, right?
How do you guys feel about teachers noticing students "in the wild"?
It's bound to happen I guess. That's cool. We student's see you all "in the wild" to occasionally too. But what I wonder about more often, is generally along the lines of what that grouchy old English professor Mark Edmundson talked of, educator's talking together about their students. God knows we talk about you guys... What do you say about us?
While getting groceries recently I overheard 2 teachers go on and on belittling their students (and the parents too, which concerned me more.), while I stood nearby making my selections. The woman seemingly taught an elementary class and was angry with two particular students who had a definite case of the wiggles. She was older and harkened back to the days when teachers employed corporal punishment as means to control their class. She felt the availability of this kind of punishment now would be advantageous to maintaining a learning environment.
Her companion suggested that parents were the real culprits for the insidious behavior of their young (and I agree parents have a large part to play in the behavior of their children). She believed the lack of discipline parents now wield over their children constitutes neglect and ought to cause us shame (she said "today's parents ought to be ashamed of themselves. They can’t be bothered to teach their kids to behave anymore. They ought to make conscious choices that benefit their children").
There I was standing next to them picking out a high fiber, low sugar, organic cereal (instead of lucky charms), wondering what these ladies would say if I piped in mentioning the changes one mother I knew, had made in her life as a "conscious choice" to benefit her children. I thought of my son, and his wiggles+, and realized I was this parent they were referring. That stung. I’m guessing I’m not the only parent out there willing to make sacrifices for my kid sake. I think parents do “bother” to teach their children, but it’s often a slow going process. I’m not afraid to say I don’t think hitting my children or using intimidation methods is helpful. Modeling respect helps as does modeling a love of learning.
I think students are often helped by teachers who model a love of teaching. More often than naught, that has been my experience here at Cascadia (and thank G-d at my son’s school as well) I have seen on occasion that being an educator has it’s moments of frustration. My naïve mind likes to think our educators respect us students enough to keep their comments constructive (or at least not be overheard). If I’m right, my thanks are freely given.
mmw
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