Today's Reading

In the reading from the Peter Elbow book today we talked about several sentences that everyone liked. Mine didn't seem relevant to the context of the conversation today, but I liked the sentence because it's one of my pet grievances with teaching to the test and the difference in what kind of an education is really needed to function in the world today versus the kind that was needed prior to the widespread use of the internet.

My sentence was "It makes me happy when students figure out how to get the help they need. This is a feasible knowledge, and it is crucial for success in future courses and jobs." To me, this is the real need that we are not addressing in schools, not teaching students information, but teaching them skills and patterns that help them find that information. We still seem to be under the impression that students must know all of these facts in their heads. While some facts should be readily available to most or all individuals, most are easily accessible online, or in other resource centers.

It seems to me that, especially in English, we should instead be teaching our students where to go to find the information they are searching for and, more importantly, how to evaluate the information they find to determine its validity and its value. These are skills that students need in the modern world to be productive citizens. Most businesses don't care if an employee has memorized the entire body of information they want him/her to have. Businesses want to know that he/she can access that information quickly and efficiently, that he/she can interpret that information correctly and come to conclusions based on it, and that he/she can condense large portions of that information into shorter sentences and paragraphs that are easy to understand.

Unfortunately, as I'm sure we'll be saying a lot through this course, we can't spend the bulk of our time on these ideas when we have to spend it teaching and reteaching our students terms for the test. It is the monster in the corner.