Education

During a recent discussion of using a specific technology to manage class papers, one teacher wrote briefly that she had a couple of questions:

1. How do you grade them?
2. How do you keep the students from working ahead?

I thought it would be a little rude to respond, "Why would you want to?!?!", especially when I sadly already knew the answer to the question.

I've spent so much time in the last few years working with a school that doesn't assign letter grades and requires students to learn as fast as they are able (you know, "working ahead"), that it was a jolt to remember how totally clueless many teacher college graduates are about education. They've been taught the one true modern factory educational method and it's so ingrained into them that how to apply it to tools that are new to them is completely outside their imagination.

Letter Grades
Most Americans are used to letter grades. In brief, the student completes a piece of work and it is evaluated, usually by the teacher or a proxy, and the teacher assigns a letter grade, generally based on some percentage of a possible point total. As part of that system, it is considered acceptable to do poor work and to not actually learn anything. What is important is what score the student got, not what they did or didn't learn.

I know, incredible, isn't it?

It usually doesn't matter to the system how well or poorly the student understands what is taught. What is considered important by the system is that the teacher "got through the material" in the allotted time. That's what the teacher gets paid for and that's where the incentives exist. Many times it matters to the parents of the student, but their only recourse is to put pressure on a unionized bureaucracy that is very good at resisting pressure to do anything differently.

When is the last time you heard a teacher in a traditional district school complaining that they were worried about their job because their students weren't learning enough. Compare that to how often you hear parents complain about their children not learning enough. There's obviously a disconnect there somewhere....

I submit that the important thing is to measure that a student has learned a concept, skill, or set of knowledge and then help them learn another once they're done with that. That it's not acceptable to simply shrug and say "It's the student's fault!" if they get a D or an F on an assignment and then turn around and expect them to quickly learn the next concept presented without the necessary foundation of knowledge from the last one.

Sometimes people wonder how a student can get so far behind that they graduate from High School functionally illiterate. The grading system is primarily to blame. It sets up results where students are allowed to fail. Parents start complaining that their kids are failing? No problem, we can give them all passing grades while still covering the material. All we have to do is lower standards, then rinse and repeat.

See how the system works and the school staff stays happy?

Working Ahead
Of course, if the objective is to get through a set amount of material in a set amount of time, beside students that fall behind you're going to have students that already know something or can figure it out faster than the others. If your primary method of instruction is to lecture to a classroom of kids, some of those kids are going to be unable to understand what you are talking about and some of those kids are going to be bored out of their mind as you tell them things they already know. Some will be bored and unable to understand, and some will just be bored. Among other things, that's a natural result of the well known Bell curve.

In the profession this phenomenon is called "glaze" after the look in the poor kid's eyes. There is a lot of glaze in a traditional classroom.

Traditional educators have found that while some students could "work ahead", when they do their education stops being under the teacher's control. Suddenly they want help with stuff that the teacher hasn't taught yet. The farther ahead they get, the more bored they are with the teacher's lectures. We can't have that! So while the objective is to try and help the kids that are behind catch up a little, the unspoken (to parents) objective is that none of the kids get too far ahead, either. Besides, if they get too far ahead they'll just be even more bored next year, right?

Here's an idea! Encourage, nay, demand, that the students learn as quickly as they can, but no faster than that! Teach them as if they are all individuals and not parts in the assembly line in a factory.

Yes, that requires teachers who are smarter than those that score well below average on the SAT. You might even need to have teachers that can mentor a student individually and teach without lecturing. Many teachers try. Usually the newer ones that the system hasn't burnt out yet. The teachers that stay more than 4-5 years in a traditional school system have generally adapted to that system. The process of indoctrination and adaptation started in their educational college.

Most of all, you need to replace the current traditional system with one that rewards school staff based on the learning their students do. With a system that measures and reports on the concepts and knowledge students have, instead of reporting on whether they did or did not turn in the worksheet their parents did for them last night.

Sound impossible? It's been being done in practice for over 100 years now.

Montessori
Actually, she had more than just two questions. After numbering those two, she added in parting, "Does anyone do something different that works for them?"