Persistence, blame and resilience
Hi all,
On this chilly September morning, I am reminded about the qualities of persistence and resilience, and the tendency of those who would rather not work to blame those who they want to do their work for them. This is starting to sound very republican, but I assure you it's not. I've been teaching in a low income, very diverse magnet school for my whole teaching career (13 years). Every student who has ever come into my classroom has had some degree of this. Mostly, I hear things like, "Mister, why can't you just show the steps?" or, "why don't you just teach us?!?" This is the basic issue. People want other people to do their work for them. This is a universal, human characteristic. However, we cowtow to it whenever we allow students to push us into giving them the answer. It's easier. But the problem is, when we do that and let them push us into didactic, step by step instruction, we rob them of the chance to discover the information themselves. When I was in school (roughly 1986 to 2004), most instruction was didactic, and I was able to get what I needed from it, earning 4th in my class at Gilbert in Winsted, and then going to Bates and then UConn and doing well at both institutions. However, schools ought not to be judged by students like me. They need to be judged based upon what they do for the lower echelon of students. These students glean little from auditory information, something from visual representations (on the board) and maybe a bit more when they try it themselves (coaching).
The blame, I think, for this lack of resilience in many of our students falls to us, their teachers as well as their parents. Whenever we just give the answer instead of asking socratic questions to guide students to it (scaffolding), we miss the educational opportunity to give that student confidence and an "aha moment" where they get to develop a theorem on their own, an idea of how something works. This is how humans naturally think . . . go from specific to general, use the scientific method and eventually come up with ideas that are abstract. When we just jump straight to the answer and bypass this process, we are telling students that there's absolute truth in the world and that they aren't smart enough to figure it out for themselves.
This is the main focus of the Common Core NCTM curricula, in my opinion. Instead of taking something like division, and discussing it as repeated subtraction or putting things in piles, we used to just say, "well, 20/5 is 4." The why was never addressed. Indeed, as a child of the 80s and 90s, I don't remember ever being told why something was so, or being encouraged to find out in math class. As a teacher in 2017, I try to answer that why question with something more satisfying than, "because I said so." Even better, sometimes I can scaffold students into coming up with their own explanations, which are better because they help students to actually own the knowledge, instead of memorizing that it was discovered by so and so in such and such a year.
Anyhow, if we can help them stop blaming teachers, and instead develop the persistence and resilience to problem solve themselves, then maybe we can actually make America Great Again . . . by sending the first manned mission to Mars, or reaching for the heavens like we used to in the 60s. We need to get back to innovation and free thought, because that was what truly made this country great in its heyday, and it's the only way we will become that way again.
On this chilly September morning, I am reminded about the qualities of persistence and resilience, and the tendency of those who would rather not work to blame those who they want to do their work for them. This is starting to sound very republican, but I assure you it's not. I've been teaching in a low income, very diverse magnet school for my whole teaching career (13 years). Every student who has ever come into my classroom has had some degree of this. Mostly, I hear things like, "Mister, why can't you just show the steps?" or, "why don't you just teach us?!?" This is the basic issue. People want other people to do their work for them. This is a universal, human characteristic. However, we cowtow to it whenever we allow students to push us into giving them the answer. It's easier. But the problem is, when we do that and let them push us into didactic, step by step instruction, we rob them of the chance to discover the information themselves. When I was in school (roughly 1986 to 2004), most instruction was didactic, and I was able to get what I needed from it, earning 4th in my class at Gilbert in Winsted, and then going to Bates and then UConn and doing well at both institutions. However, schools ought not to be judged by students like me. They need to be judged based upon what they do for the lower echelon of students. These students glean little from auditory information, something from visual representations (on the board) and maybe a bit more when they try it themselves (coaching).
The blame, I think, for this lack of resilience in many of our students falls to us, their teachers as well as their parents. Whenever we just give the answer instead of asking socratic questions to guide students to it (scaffolding), we miss the educational opportunity to give that student confidence and an "aha moment" where they get to develop a theorem on their own, an idea of how something works. This is how humans naturally think . . . go from specific to general, use the scientific method and eventually come up with ideas that are abstract. When we just jump straight to the answer and bypass this process, we are telling students that there's absolute truth in the world and that they aren't smart enough to figure it out for themselves.
This is the main focus of the Common Core NCTM curricula, in my opinion. Instead of taking something like division, and discussing it as repeated subtraction or putting things in piles, we used to just say, "well, 20/5 is 4." The why was never addressed. Indeed, as a child of the 80s and 90s, I don't remember ever being told why something was so, or being encouraged to find out in math class. As a teacher in 2017, I try to answer that why question with something more satisfying than, "because I said so." Even better, sometimes I can scaffold students into coming up with their own explanations, which are better because they help students to actually own the knowledge, instead of memorizing that it was discovered by so and so in such and such a year.
Anyhow, if we can help them stop blaming teachers, and instead develop the persistence and resilience to problem solve themselves, then maybe we can actually make America Great Again . . . by sending the first manned mission to Mars, or reaching for the heavens like we used to in the 60s. We need to get back to innovation and free thought, because that was what truly made this country great in its heyday, and it's the only way we will become that way again.
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