Cycle Two: What should schools teach? How should they be held accountable?

 It’s hard to determine the answers to these questions, because the second depends on the first, and the first always leads us to the question of who has the right to decide that answer. Hirsch, for example, in his chapter “Cultural Literacy and the Schools” claims that, “many more students could become highly literate if they were presented with the right sort of curriculum” (p.116). However, despite my Bachelor’s degree, work towards my Master’s, and experience living abroad, according to Hirsch’s standard I would be culturally illiterate, based on the fact that John brown evokes nothing for me, (certainly not “a whole network of lively traits”), and that I couldn’t even tell you that Falstaff is fat and likes to eat and drink (p.127). I think Hirsch would take this to mean I had earned a subpar education, and probably would be horrified to know that I minored in English. It would be both impractical and impossible to cover every work of Shakespeare, though, and in my English classes we read Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet, not Henry IV. I don’t think this makes me in any way illiterate, nor has it hindered my life in any way. In this day and age I don’t think it is necessary to memorize long lists of facts, because we have Google. 

Jonathan Wai disagrees, quoting David Lohman that “how well we reason depends on how much we know.” This makes sense of course, but if you’re reading a book or find yourself in a situation where you missed something because of a cultural reference, you can use technology to find the answer within seconds and be able to make the connection. Wai also quotes Benjamin Stein, saying today’s youth “are not mentally prepared to continue the society because they basically do not understand the society well enough to value it.” This ignores the fact that society is changing at a more rapid pace than it ever has, thanks to technology. Today’s youth may not be as well versed in the things that past generations would mark as vital for cultural literacy, but if you go back even farther I think you’d find that their predecessors found them equally lacking. Add globalization to this, the way cultures are blending and interacting more and more, and the feasibility of compiling a list of things someone should know becomes even more improbable.

While I don’t think a strict body of knowledge that must be learned is necessary, I do think there are some things which technology cannot replace. Al Doyle, teacher at Quest to Learn, for example, calls spelling “outdated.” Yes, students have spell check available to them, but students still need to have a basic understanding of spelling in order for spell check to recognize which word they’re trying to use. And what about homophones? Uniform spelling is necessary for mass communication, and to get to the stage of someone (or some machine) editing your spelling, you must have some handle on the skill.

Basically I think students should be taught to use resources available to them to solve problems. These resources will likely include Google and spell check, but the still need basic knowledge to use those tools. Even though they have Google, they have to be able to determine whether the information they’ve found is trustworthy or not, and what to do with it next. The what of what we teach, in my opinion, becomes a lot less important than the how and the why.

In this way I really appreciated the article about video games and learning- they present problems that students must work (often collaboratively and creatively) to solve. And while I’m torn about the idea of making school “fun” simply to avoid kids dropping out because they’re “bored” (honestly, many jobs are boring, and most bosses unfortunately won’t work to try to make their work more fun), Paul Gee points out that gaming is not always fun, there’s a lot of failure involved. Will Wright calls it “failure-based learning” which is absolutely right, kids are willing to fail over and over again trying to find a way to beat a game, and still love the game, unlike the feelings that evolve if they fail continuously at school.

Data shows that the Quest to Learn school students didn’t perform any better on standardized tests than their peers from traditional schools despite how much funding this innovative design requires, but I think it’s unfair to judge the success and value of this experience based on traditional testing. Students might not perform any better on a paper-pencil type of test, but given the opportunity to apply the knowledge in a more performance-based assessment, I bet they’d outperform their peers. This would be an interesting study.

I know kids love games (Yesterday my students were working on a project using imovie, and after finishing one student asked me if he could play a math video game until class was over. I was surprised he was so excited about practicing math, but said yes, please do.), but I lack the competence with gaming and programming as well as the time it would take to implement the methods used at Quest to Learn, so I searched the internet to see how other Spanish teachers are using video games. At first I found very little, just that the market for Spanish video games (not the educational sort) is expanding. Then I found this thesis  on using video games like The Sims 2 in foreign language classes. I have considered using this game in class before, but haven’t gone anywhere with it because of logistics (buying/ installing the game, how to monitor student progress.) I also decided to check out Alice, a program mentioned in the reading about Quest to Learn school. It claims it’s for beginners, so it might be something I try out this summer, but at this point I don’t have time for it. Something else I stumbled upon while doing this research is Inanimate Alice, a digital story-telling website. I’d love to learn how to make stories like that, but my students aren’t advanced enough to really benefit from the ones offered on the website.

The idea of video games as assessments in themselves intrigues me, and I wonder about the uncovered possibilities there. I don’t think standardized tests as we’ve known them make sense in our technology-rich future, and while some tests (like AP, that are delving deeper instead of trying to memorize so many facts) are making positive changes, others seem to be digressing. (Like Kentucky assessing music with a paper-pencil standardized exam when music teachers have been using performance-based assessment all along.)

In my last post I struggled with this same idea- that we need some sort of accountability measure, but that it shouldn’t be restrictive. I know my stance is still vague, but I still think that’s where I’m at. We need to find a way to test what students are able to do, to prove that they can think critically, as they’ll need to in their real futures- and this probably won’t involve a lot of rambling off memorized facts, so why should tests?