Freezing rain over night caused Unit 4 Schools to close, part of a larger pattern of school closings in the surrounding area. This is not unusual for around here, especially for December, except today was supposed to be the last day of school before the Winter Break and at the High School today was supposed to be the second and culminating day of Final Exams. How do they plan to make that up? Might it be they don't give the exams at all? What would the consequences be of that?
With two kids in High School, grades are such a large part of family life that sometimes we take them for granted and don't think through the implications. Some of the questions we do ask are these: What does it take to get an A? How should the kids prepare for their finals? These are the typical questions.
The grades culture for good kids is about personal responsibility. Good grades are the ultimate in signal that the kid is going about his business in the right way. It shows he's not just living for the here and now but making the right sort of preparation for the future.
It's also the last day of Finals at the U of I, the time of year I can say with glee, "I'm glad I'm not teaching this semester. I hate grading final exams." And, at least when teaching the large intermediate microeconomics course that was my staple until I became a full time administrator, I pretty much hate everything else that goes with it - students on the borderline haggling over their grades, proctoring to deter cheating, writing a test that if it asked the students to be inventive would get me fried on my course evaluations so instead writing questions pretty much like the practice exam with only minor perturbations, all of which makes me feel more like a bouncer at a speakeasy in the '20s than like a teacher.
The students care about their grades in College. They care a lot. It's an obsessive compulsion. We know the My Grades area is the most used component of the online course management system. We know some students take gut courses to pad their GPA while other students drop courses where they are struggling, pretty much for the same reason. And we know a lot of students do their work right before the deadline and come to class nowadays only because the instructor uses "clickers" to track their participation. This seems more like the manifestation of pathology rather than a consequence of responsible young adults making serious choices and collectively putting their best feet forward. What gives?
The grades culture is a trust culture. Students in High School (and earlier) aim for good grades because they trust doing so will get them into a good college. Parents have that same level of trust. Both also trust the school that the grades signify real learning, often even when seeing the kid go about his out of school work suggests otherwise. (What kids know versus what they don't know is often very hard to determine. Further, parents intuit Michael Polanyi's point that their kids know more than they can articulate. Polanyi is referring to everyone, not just kids.) At least in theory, the trust doesn't have to go the other way, because the schools monitor the kids performance. In the absence of out and out cheating that goes undetected, the test scores, papers, and other projects should be pretty reliable indicators of what the kid is capable of. Further, the parental involvement in the kid's education makes it more of a triangular relationship and helps keep the gears in synch when the kid's personal responsibility is not sufficient to make it all work smoothly.
One story that explains the apparent breakdown in College is that the kids are much less accountable to their parents and have to assume responsibility for themselves. Many don't. The pathology then is just the consequence of immature kids wanting to have a good time instead of doing their course work. These kids still trust that good grades will get them a good job or into a decent grad school. So they fake it. They want to get the best of both worlds. Seems like a reasonable explanation, doesn't it?
Maybe it's even true for some kids. But mostly, I don't buy it. I think something else is going on. I'll explain what I have in mind in a bit.
But first let me continue with the grade culture, because there is another important aspect of it that we should consider. The grade culture separates kids out - the kids with good grades in one bin, the kids with worse grades in another. The separation happens constantly. Anyone not in that top bin gets stigmatized. So the grade culture is about cliques and stigmas. The benevolent word is "meritocracy." The kids in the top bin are there because, to borrow a phrase from E.F. Hutton, "they earned it." So the kids in the top bin get the benefit of their own peer interactions and they get more instructional personnel resource expended on them per capita than do the rest of the students. Just about everyone has bought into the system, even if it is rigged in favor of the children of the rich and well educated.
Does the system have an ethical leg to stand on? Think of health care. Do we think health care should be allocated via a meritocracy? Or should access to decent health care be a universal right? If so, why should education be any different in this regard? How can one reconcile the meritocracy approach with this, especially if those bins get fixed early in the kids' schooling and don't change much thereafter?
What would a truly democratic approach to education look like? Is it possible to have an approach where all parties want to honor the trust, simply because the behavior entailed in doing so is what they prefer? Those are the questions I'd like to answer.
Now let me get back my explanation for the pathology. The key problem is that too many students aren't ready for college, but they are told otherwise. College is a quantum leap for them but they expect it to be a walk in the park. So there is shock, both in the intellectual requirements to do the work and in amount of effort needed to do it seriously. Some students overcome the shock. Many don't. That's the cause for the pathology.
Why is college a quantum leap? My guess is that too many students don't stretch themselves intellectually beforehand. These kids need to have developed what elsewhere I called a Personal Learning Agenda, (PLA) though as a label PLA is overkill. You might call it independent reading and exposure to culture that challenges and encourages the kid to grow intellectually, to ask questions, to avoid settling in on easy answers as a closed book. Preferably the PLA will be diverse and the kid will become aware of ideas in a variety of different and quite distinct areas, perhaps trying to make his own theory of the possible connections between them, but in any event not narrowing his scope of interest too early. The kids with a PLA will, I believe, make the adjustment to college (at least the intellectual part of it) much easier than their peers who either don't challenge themselves much at all intellectually or who do but in areas that are pre-assigned by adults and not of their own choosing. (Think of those extra curricular activities that might look good on the College application but that the kids wouldn't do otherwise.)
The other reason is school itself. The teach to the test mindset that is embodied in No Child Left Behind has had a pernicious consequence, perhaps not obvious to some, in that it encourages a cookbook approach to instruction. Cookbooks are great.......for cooking. They are less good for seeing the forest. By High School, for sure, probably earlier too, some of what the students are taught should help them in considering context and the bigger picture. I believe we're losing school as a source for that. Most of the kids I see are too heads down about their learning. That needs to change.
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While the above has the gist of my argument, it is still too simple an explanation. The stigmas that kids develop are not merely a consequence of the grade culture assigning them to bins. The kids put themselves in a box, often because they have misconceptions about what the box means as well as about their own performance and ability as part of a process of development, looking at snapshots of themselves and with that consigning themselves to a lower bin, the one for non-performers. I believe this happens for most if not every student, even those who grade-wise are the stars.
On a personal note, I know that when I was in High School I didn't think I was creative. Creativity was for the kids who'd attend the High School of Music and Art and perhaps the few kids with that sort of ability at my own High School who didn't want to make the commute. The musical in this group could (and did) perform in the school auditorium, giving performances that delighted the audience. I played the piano a bit, could amuse myself that way which was fine, but I knew I wasn't good enough to perform in front of an audience. So on creativity, no. There was the related thing, maybe more important subliminally, that creative guys got the girls (my high school didn't have a football team), the creations being an obvious source of attraction. I definitely wasn't getting the girls. So it was a self-confirming hypothesis. It wasn't till many years later, in grad school, becoming aware that there could be delight in personal idiosyncrasy and foibles as much and maybe more than in performance that attracts others, where I started to lighten up on all of this and see creativity differently.
Kids will put themselves in boxes and I don't believe that can be entirely stopped. But I do think we can come up with a democratic approach to learning that doesn't encourage the kids to make their own stigmas.
Now let's consider some of those other approaches to deep learning that have been advocated and distinguish them from guessing. We talk about teaching Critical Thinking. We talk about teaching Creativity. Some advocate for Problem Based Learning. The list could be made longer, but these alternatives will suffice to make my point.
Each of these approaches embraces both process and product and typically within the approach a student is evaluated on both process and product by evaluating the product produced. Product evaluation, however, can be the source of stigma. "I'm not very good." A big problem with product evaluation is that students compare their own performance to their peers. "Her's is much better." "I need to be elsewhere because I can't keep up." Guessing is purely about process. Mistakes and failure are built in to the process. Everyone can guess. And everyone will guess wrong now and then.
Having an approach to learning which has a healthier view about mistakes is a big reason to take guessing seriously. And because everyone can guess, the approach can be started earlier, say in Middle School. Consider critical thinking as an alternative. Marcia Magolda Baxter, among others, has argued that students aren't developmentally ready to be taught that way when they start college, because they embrace a view of absolute knowledge where the professors have it, they don't, and so they have to learn by letting the professors pour the knowledge into their head. Students need to abandon this view, move on to seeing everything as gray, a necessary next step, and then after that to a more nuanced view beyond that where they are active in determining the validity of propositions and in asserting propositions themselves. Not until then can they fruitfully embrace critical thinking. As long as students embrace the absolute view of knowledge, mistakes are things to avoid, as they are evidence that the knowledge hasn't been acquired. So to develop students to where critical thinking can be successfully taught students have to unlearn much of what has come before.
The path from simple guessing, as in the Connect Four game, to Critical Thinking seems much more straightforward if guessing is allowed to mature throughout. Instead of developmental stages one can think of domains of knowledge, some where absolute knowledge holds - what can be looked up in a dictionary, or encyclopedia, or other source of reference - and other domains where opinion and interpretation hold sway and argument is useful and fruitful for contrasting different views. (Let's agree that the "references" are themselves always evolving. So the domain approach is simply a first pass at categorization, not a precise classification that persists over time.) Understanding the existence of these two domains (and that they cut across all disciplines - it's not that in science there is truth and in politics there is opinion) can be grasped much earlier. And then the entire path of learning from grade school on can be seen by the participants themselves as continuous - no quantum leaps.
* * * * *
I hate flash cards.
My mother, growing up in Nazi Germany, was a very good student and she liked to memorize and recite poetry, particularly Schiller and Heine. She got pleasure from that because of the beauty in the poetry. Because of that or perhaps because of how authority manifest in her own education, she came to believe that much of teaching (she tutored in foreign languages while we were growing up and eventually taught foreign language in High School) was exposing students to rules that they needed to memorize and then apply where appropriate.
My mom and dad taught me and my brother how to play bridge, with the rules for bidding conventions and play of the cards (fourth card from the longest/strongest suit) part of the teaching. We played family bridge when I was a teen and I played a fair amount of bridge for the brief time I was at MIT as a freshman and first semester sophomore, then again later as an Assistant Professor. Ultimately, I began to think about bridge as I thought about chess, much more situational in the decision making than rules based. Situational decision making requires on the spot analysis. The rules work for the first card to play but soon thereafter the situation becomes so complex, even in a card game like bridge, where to know a rule for each situation is well nigh impossible. So it's my view that to teach bridge, first teach rules certainly, to understand how the bidding and the play works, but soon thereafter start teaching analysis and insight - inferences from the bidding, how to count in a sophisticated way, considering probabilities and which direction a finesse might be played, those sorts of things. Adhering to rules in teaching for too long inhibits progress in the learning.
The problem is big time in the schools and with many of the students. I call it Rote Bloat. It is not that memorization is bad when applied to its proper domain. It is that memorization becomes the sole method for all learning, is applied in many areas where it is an inferior approach, and makes school a source of intellectual pain, because too much of what is memorized is done in a disembodied way where it can't be applied in any other situation than on the exam where it is tested. This is largely a waste of time masked as learning. When the schools require too much of this, they break the trust. When the students do too much of this to pass the test they are given, they likewise break the trust.
My view is that what we have in the High Schools, and Middle Schools too, even those schools with many students who will go on to elite colleges, is something akin to the financial markets before the housing market bubble burst. There are outward signs of health. But those are coupled with inward signs of dysfunction. Parents and kids are in denial here because they want school to be the path to the good life. The schools are also in denial because of how they are regulated, because they need to preserve their source of funding, and because they don't have other good ways to measure their performance apart from the standardized testing. A major reason for writing this book is to identify the problems and launch an attack on rote bloat.
Guessing and rote need to be done in parallel, with the proportion devoted to each varying with student maturity. I have in mind that in elementary school students are given lists of words to spell and times tables to reproduce and that seems somewhat inevitable to me. But there should be less of this as the student matures. Each new field that the student learns has its own nomenclature and terminology, that must be learned as part of learning the subject matter. So if not rote there must be some other way to get students comfortable with the trappings of the field of study.
Mostly, I believe these should be learned en passant as the students produce their own personal narratives about what they are studying and in an iterative fashion develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the underlying issues. This is hard at first and the students will find themselves returning time and again to the nomenclature itself to make sure they have the definitions right. But they will do this in the process of making their narrative, which if sensible and in accord with the the wisdom in the field will help the student transfer the knowledge and make good judgments in context. Seen this way, memorizing the terminology outside of the narrative, as things in themselves, is taking a short cut intellectually, one that will lead to a dead end. The desire for short cuts is there because students don't put in enough time to produce interesting narratives that make sense.
There is a vicious cycle that needs to be cut. The pieces of the cycle are these. The subject appears difficult and unwelcoming. The student feels incapable of penetrating it. The student needs to pass the course on the subject because it is required. The student procrastinates in doing the work in the course. With the test looming the student crams. Cramming is about rote, not about producing narrative. The student hates doing this but gets an ok score on the exam. The next part of the course partly depends on what the student "learned" earlier in the course so the cycle repeats with the student on a very shaky foundation of the subject. And because the process is painful, the student dissipates a lot of time outside the process simply to provide himself with a source of comfort. The "good students" are the ones who tolerate this pain better and manage their time in a way that the stress is not so great. Very few produce those personal narratives about the subject that show deep understanding.
The argument for guessing then is that producing a personal narrative about a subject needs to be a habit that has been developed very early in the student's life. It's an argument about intellectual habit formation. That's the view we should focus on.
If the habit exists before College starts the students will approach their courses differently. They will choose their courses (and their majors) in part on the basis of where they think they can best exercise this habit. Aptitude will reemerge as a reason to opt for a field of study and the student will see the choice more from the point of view of matching personal interest to the learning than as a passport to a career. It does not mean that students will avoid finding subjects that are over their head or ultimately not interesting to them. But it does mean that more of what they are exposed to will result in real learning and that they will have their own healthy view of the one or the other. It is our best chance for building the trust.
* * * * *
Part of the reason for the current morass is that the notions of personal responsibility, deferred gratification, work and play are confused with respect to where learning fits in. I'd call the current view militaristic. School is like boot camp. The teacher is the drill sergeant. And the mantra is, "no pain, no gain." Schoolwork is not just time away from play, it is drudgery or torture. Certainly, it is not a reward in itself. Personal responsibility in this setting means embracing school because of what it will deliver down the road. It is one and the same with deferred gratification. School is definitely work. Play happens outside school. That's why some kids play hookie. This is an Our Gang view of education. The current emphasis on accountability in the schools reinforces this view.
There is an alternative view. Learning is the essence of our nature. Learning, wherever it happens, in or out of school, is how we should spend our time, to be one with ourselves. It may be work or it may be fun, but either way it is compelling because it is natural. We are driven to pursue our own learning. Learning is about self-expression. Along the way we need nurture and help, but not always, only from time to time. Personal responsibility in this view is to do what's natural....now. There is no reason to defer gratification because doing the natural thing now will produce dividends down the road. Learning is about personal growth. Institutions that promote learning and the exchange of ideas are about societal growth. The two go hand in hand.
There are, of course, attractions that in moderation are fine but in excess are not natural and that might divert attention from learning. So personal responsibility means finding an appropriate balance between the two and deferred gratification may require limiting access to those attractions that don't promote personal growth. On this score the two views are closest in line. But for the rest they differ substantially.
I subscribe to the second view. A program of guessing is the best way to implement it and let the kid find his own way. A moderate level of discipline may be desirable but beyond that most of us won't tolerate and the system will produce false facades with shaky underpinnings. Trust will be better established in a system that is true to our nature.
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