What a wonderful world it would be if, for example, the people in charge of our public schools really believed in knowledge. If, for example, the National Council of Teachers of English, really loved English. If the National Council of Teachers of Math, really loved math. Alas, that does not seem to be the case.
A lot of boring things are being taught in boring, incoherent ways, with the result that children learn almost nothing. Then the Education Establishment comes up with so-called “authentic assessments” to prove that the children learned a little something.
There’s an easy way to tell if the school is taking care of business. Ask a kid: “What did you learn today?”
If a kid can state something factual, that's half the game. If the student is excited about what he learned, that’s the rest of the game.
If for example the kid says, smiling, “We learned all about dinosaurs!!!!!”
Well, go ahead, test the next kid you see. You’ll probably find that most kids are bored and learning little. However, the Education Establishment is always ready to blame this on everyone else but themselves: parents don’t help, there’s no money, and the kids are dull. Really??
I've always been particularly fascinated by the question: what exactly can we teach to the slower students? Our Education Establishment seems to think: almost nothing. My answer is, we can teach them the world, the wonderful world.
Here’s how. You start with the really exciting stuff. The crowd-pleasers. Let’s imagine a room full of really dull people, of any age. I submit to you that they will be fascinated by video clips of volcanoes erupting, magma flowing down toward a village. People walking on the Great Wall. People visiting the pyramids. Camera footage as a plane cruises through the Grand Canyon. People exploring the Amazon rain forest. Exotic fish in the Caribbean. A heart beating. An ameba eating. Most animals. Most cars, planes and boats. Most gadgets and machines. Most athletic events. Truthfully, most military events. Think of all the unforgettable scenes in just the one movie Gladiator: war in Germany and all those great scenes in the Coliseum.
Then, in each case, after saturating the kids in exciting stuff, you use it to teach the science, the history, the geography, or whatever else that is implicit in the scene. Consider the volcano. Where is that stuff coming from? How deep is that hole? You get a sense of the surface of the earth and you start to wonder well, what is it like 20 miles down? Kids realize that the skin of the earth is hard, but inside it’s molten and moving. No kid will forget that moment.
I say that the Education Establishment, contemptuous of learning, has lost touch with how to teach.
To confirm that, go to the website for the Common Core standards, for second grade. Please, don’t say I’m a sadist for suggesting you read some of this stuff. The people who wrote it are the sadists:
“Use addition and subtraction within 100 to solve one- and two-step word problems involving situations of adding to, taking from, putting together, taking apart, and comparing, with unknowns in all positions, e.g., by using drawings and equations with a symbol for the unknown number to represent the problem. Fluently add and subtract within 20 using mental strategies. By end of Grade 2, know from memory all sums of two one-digit numbers. Determine whether a group of objects (up to 20) has an odd or even number of members, e.g., by pairing objects or counting them by 2s; write an equation to express an even number as a sum of two equal addends. Use addition to find the total number of objects arranged in rectangular arrays with up to 5 rows and up to 5 columns; write an equation to express the total as a sum of equal addends. Understand that the three digits of a three-digit number represent amounts of hundreds, tens, and ones; e.g., 706 equals 7 hundreds, 0 tens, and 6 ones. Understand the following as special cases: Count within 1000; skip-count by 5s, 10s, and 100s. Read and write numbers to 1000 using base-ten numerals, number names, and expanded form. Compare two three-digit numbers based on meanings of the hundreds, tens, and ones digits, using >, =, and < symbols to record the results of comparisons. fluently add and subtract within 100 using strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction. add up to four two-digit numbers using strategies based on place value and properties of operations….”
Ad nauseam. It just goes on and on. Don’t you feel that you've wandered into a lunatic asylum? The average adult has no idea what is being discussed here, so why would we possibly expect seven-year-olds to know or care? (What’s the opposite of a crowd-pleaser? This gibberish.)
Meanwhile, I submit you can teach all
first-grade math with American coins and a dollar bill. You can also start to teach percentages and decimals. What’s a penny but 1%? In the second and third grades, you can use a football field to illustrate percentages and decimals: 50 yards equals 50 cents equals $.50 equals one-half equals .5 equals 50%.
Let’s go back to dinosaurs. Every kid loves dinosaurs. The point is to teach other things with the dinosaurs. All animals have to solve the problem of locomotion. Feet? Wings? Fins? Then you have the problem of maintaining temperature.
You can use almost anything to teach almost anything else. That's what a clever teacher does without even thinking about it. A boring teacher, on the other hand, makes you wallow in the single least interesting thing until you are ready to jump out a window.
Even adults, even smart adults, appreciate a lively presentation. Common Core was devised by people who have no idea what the word “lively” means.
The sickest part is that these pretenders claim they’re teaching the
meaning of math. Basically, all of math is a tautology. 2+3 = 3+2 = 4+1 = 5. What is the meaning behind that? Whatever it is, a kid in the second grade does not need to worry about it.
The challenge is to find the fun in math and everything else.
