Anecdotes

This afternoon I asked my students to write an anecdote about a defining moment in life.  This could be a defining moment in their personal life, a moment in history, or a moment in someone else's life that they have heard.  My kids were a little confused about the definition of "defining moment," since, for some reason, they are coded to always look for a right answer.  They are hesitant to use a little critical thinking and generate some personal ideas and opinions.  This is, I believe, one of the great failings of the educational system - focusing so much more on answers rather than the way to get to the answers.  I'm all about the metacognition - thinking about thinking.  What's the point of coming up with an answer if we don't know how we got there?  What's the purpose of memorizing definitions to just spew them out come test time?  Shouldn't there be some sort of lasting knowledge present?  When students are learning, shouldn't they actually be learning so that they can learn from mistakes, take initiative, and become better at using learning as a tool and knowledge as a skill, rather than as a way to simply get by in school?  Is learning something to be tossed asunder when it has been used or should it be embraced and never dropped once we have it? 

I've been working on teaching students how to critically think.  So many important choices hang in the balance during a lifetime, and an ability to adequately think through all of the scenarios and measure all of the consequences is crucial for any semblance of success.  Solving those real-life issues is not going to hinge on whether we can add, describe photosynthesis, remember Manifest Destiny, or use adverbs properly in sentences.  For me, the most important thing a student can gain is how to think for themselves.  We throw so much information at them all the time and we expect them to remember it for the tests.  We give them grades for their recall abilities and then give them a summer off to forget everything.  But what if we teach them actual tenets of a contributing member of society?  What if we let them be in charge of their own learning?  Why can't we let them learn the things they want to learn, while practicing self-control, compassion, love, and a host of other incredibly important traits? 

I get where the Department of Education is coming from.  There are a lot of subjects to cover, the government is paying for public education, and they need a way to keep teachers and schools accountable.  We, as a country, are also lagging behind other industrialized nations in key areas.  Our American jobs are being taken by individuals from all over the world who are better qualified because of the things that they learned in school.  But there is not really a way to measure learning.  I mean, we can say that quizzes and the ACT and the MME and all these other state and nation-wide tests can tell us how effective a certain teacher or school is, but it's far from a precise science. 

It's like measuring defensive prowess in baseball.  For many years we used the eye test and judged our fielders by how many plays they made and how effortless or spectacular they made those plays look.  The only measurement was errors, miscues that could be plainly seen and were decided upon by the one official scorer.  Recently, baseball men smarter than me have come up with a host of defensive ratings, including Ultimate Zone Rating, Total Runs Saved, and Defensive Efficiency Percentage.  But these ratings, while a step in the right direction (we think), hardly serve to answer all of the questions brought up by the mysteries of defensive measurement.  And so it goes, I think, with measuring learning.  It cannot be defined by one test or one ranking, just as defense cannot be measured through one set of parameters alone.  And even if learning could be judged through the lens of a single test, we don't even know if that test is the right test to be giving in the first place.  We end up in a pretty common dilemma whereby we hold on to the truthiness of what we thought first rather than what we thought best.

I don't know what the most important thing to teach in school is, and I'm not trying to make it seem as if I do.  I'm also not here to bash the core curriculum or standardized tests or anything like that, though it may appear that way.  Instead, I'm merely trying to bring up the status and importance of critical thinking and having an opinion.  Students are driven by being right or wrong, as if the world is solely black and white.  But the reality is that there are so many grey areas in every part of society.  Every decision does not have one defined answer and one defined non-answer.  There are multiple ways to approach a situation and, therefore, more answers.  That's what I'm trying to get my students to think about - their own personal way to approach a problem.  You better believe they will have a lot of them...

So I definitely did not intend to write a treatise for educational reform.  I was actually just going to give you a little personal anecdote.  Oh well...