I am feeling a bit stressed today: we have family coming in next week, a birthday party here at the house and I am attempting to pull together my yearly/monthly/daily school schedule for September. I have a lot of work to do around the house... and I mean, a lot, and I am still trying to balance the needs of my family with all that needs to be accomplished in a short space of time. I realize, only too clearly, that childhood is a brief moment and that once gone, those moments cannot be regained so I want to offer my children a joyful, educational, and fun summer. Gasp...
But the real point of this particular blog entry is not what is stressing me. I mention that only so that the reader will understand if I seem a bit sharp in my comments. No, the real point of this entry is my response to something I read in the blurb for a book on homeschooling. This blurb said, in part, 'remember it is not the end but the journey that counts' and I can simply NOT accept such a platitude. "The Journey" not "The End" -- really people, get your heads out of the ground. The end DOES count. Many years ago now, I taught freshman history classes and believe me, the end was grim. Too many of the students I taught could not write a plain English sentence. They had memorized the "Proper" organization for an essay without having any clue how to write a compelling argument. They had NO clue how to do research and, in at least one case, solved that problem by buying a 'pre-made' essay off the web. (Yes, those sites abound. They irritate me beyond speech.) They suffered from serious test anxiety because they had no clue how to study and so pulled 'all nighters' without realizing that this was detrimental to their success. I spent so much of my time, both in class and during office hours (which usually ran over time) trying to teach these kids the fundamentals. I was grimly horrified by what I was seeing -- both at the state universities at which I first taught and then at the private college. The 'end' does matter.
We need to redefine and rediscover the meaning and purpose of education. The current methods produce rote responses, responses that often lack any evidence of understanding. Students reproduce what they have memorized without understanding the reason, the meaning of what they have memorized. It has been argued by some that in order to own something, one must internalize it by recreating it in one's own image. I am not saying that there isn't a place for memorization. Memorizing information is helpful in that it provides a short cut. But if the material memorized has not also been recast through personal understanding of the subject, the student cannot apply the memorized knowledge in new and creative ways.
When we teach, we must ask that students demonstrate true comprehension of the material as a part of our expectations, of our assessment of learning. And this must be demonstrated by having the student apply the material in his/her own unique way. I realize that it is easy to say this and not so easy to do but the fact that such a standard is difficult to implement does not mean that we should not seek to do so. To do otherwise is to short our students, our children, and our future.
