I stole this from my professor on Ning. It really encompasses some of the true illls of our educational system. No offense to Math, I am sure some of my students wonder why they need to define assonance and consanace.
Stealing the souls of children
5 years ago
2 comments:
At the risk of sounding like (or rather revealing) my heretic tendencies, just about all one needs in what passes for education can happen by 8th grade.
I hope schools can start focusing more on how to think, how to question, how to discern.
How many of us dare to ask our students what truly matters? How many share what matters to us?
(I find it distressing that some of my favorite people did not thrive in school. The man I trust most for thoughtful opinions never finished high school. He runs a 300 acre farm in Michigan, plays music for fun and happens to make some cash doing that, is as well read as anyone I know, and, most important, is happy. A lot of good things happen in public schools,but the pursuit of happiness is not one of them.)
I am reading David Halpin's Hope and Education right now, so the question of what really matters is one that I have been thinking about a lot recently.
He notes that we cannot get over the hopelessness many of us feel as teachers until we can make education meaningful to our students. While this is something all good teachers strive for, it is constantly thwarted by state imposed standards of what should be important to them.
I agree with Doyle, in that we are still functioning in a model that doesn't allow for any of us to determine what is meaningful learning. When our students then go on to question the validity of what they "have to" learn, or they don't remember any of it because it doesn't resonate with them it easy to see why teachers often feel so discouraged.
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