A Convergence of Educational Ideas

Several things converged recently having to do with education - namely, traditional education versus alternative strategies. First, H sent me this blog post, "The Varieties of High School Education," which is interesting partly for its comments. The post wasn't anything intellectually earth-shattering, but it's always nice to see confirmation that others think about education as a means to truly learning and not just "getting an A."

I also was talking with a couple of friends about traditional educational methods, such as grades and memorization. One mom, who is sending her seventh-grade daughter to a new private school this fall, was disheartened to learn that the school will be using traditional grades. The school has many positive things going for it, but my friend was highly disappointed to find this same ol', same ol' being used in what otherwise promises to be a progressive, alternative school. 

This ties into a talk I saw back in April, which I posted about in "A Vision of Students As Accomplished Learners." Robert Duke, the speaker, said that, as soon as students find that they'll be tested or graded, the entire focus of learning changes. Instead of "Cool, this is interesting. Look at this Wikipedia entry about this topic!" you get "Will this be on the test?" or even (unspoken) "What's the minimum I have to know in order to get an A?" The focus shifts from learning to learning as little as necessary.

The online conversation I had with my other friend had to do with memorization of facts. We were talking specifically about math facts, but it generalizes to other areas as well. I agree that sometimes memorization is a good thing and necessary. But the big question is when? Should I drill my kid over the summer on his multiplication facts before he understands why they're important? What's the point of that?

Let's face it. Memorizing something like the times tables is simple and doesn't take too long. Why do we stress over that one little thing so much? There's plenty of time in a kid's younger years (and it goes faster at an older age) to master that when it's necessary, and the kid is much more willing to do it when he sees the reason.

Take T, for instance. He recently finished division (we follow a mastery vs. spiral approach when it comes to math). He had never memorized his multiplication tables back when we were focusing on multiplication, but it was abundantly clear that he completely understood the concept. He was inventing little mental tricks to figure out the answer to problems without anyone teaching him the tricks. So when long division came around, he found himself spending a long time doing the problems. Again, it wasn't because he didn't understand the concept - that part came easily - it was because he was having to take time to do his little mental tricks to figure out the multiplication problems.

(Side note: I recently bought Secrets of Mental Math: The Mathemagician's Guide to Lightning Calculation and Amazing Math Tricksbut haven't had a chance to sit down with it yet. The kids thought it was cool that Bill Nye wrote one of the forewords.)

Yes, it would have been easier for T to have already mastered the times tables, but he didn't see the reason for it until tackling long division. When he realized that he was wasting a lot of time figuring out multiplication problems in the middle of a long division problem, then he was motivated to learn the times tables. I didn't have to fight him about memorizing; instead he did it when he saw the necessity of it and it went fairly smoothly.

Granted, there are some kids who, for whatever reason, don't seem to be motivated on their own. Is it personality? Smarts? Peer pressure? Who knows? There will always be those students, and it's our job to figure out what makes them tick.

The question is, does traditional education further the learning of these kids - not to mention all the self-motivated ones? I have yet to see any hard evidence that it does in any real way. As Duke said, the educational system has it all wrong.

Now I just have to figure out how to do it right. Sigh.

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If you liked this post, you might enjoy Transitioning from Love of Learning to Academic Excellence

Photo of "Rules for Class" by theeerin from here