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Why Kids Should Be Building Rockets Instead of Taking Tests
An anonymous reader writes "MAKE Magazine founder Dale Dougherty has an article in Slate about how educators are missing the punchline when it comes to getting kids interested in learning. He describes a recent visit he made to a middle school: 'The science lab was empty, as were the library and the playground. It was not a school holiday: It was a state-mandated STAR testing day. The school was in an academic lockdown. This is what the American public school looks like in 2012, driven by obsessive adherence to standardized testing. The fate of children, their schools, and their teachers are based on these school test scores.' Dougherty's preference would be to more tightly integrate basic engineering projects into the science curriculum. 'I see the power of engaging kids in science and technology through the practices of making and hands-on experiences, through tinkering and taking things apart. Schools seem to have forgotten that students learn best when they are engaged; in fact, the biggest problem in schools is boredom. Students sit passively, expected to absorb all the content that is thrown at them without much context. The context that's missing is the real world."
Is a tad bit safer to take a test than to build rockets.
I was fascinated by all things science as a little kid. Doing, enjoying, fantasizing. I craved books for kids about science, electronics kits and chemistry sets - these were what I enjoyed. And toy robots. Then I got to junior high school and started formal science classes. Awful. Hated chemistry. Math was painful. Only physics became vaguely interesting. I did a BS, but school nearly ruined that path.
My third grader informed me one day that "science is boring". You could have hit my in the nuts with a hammer and it would have hurt me less. I inquired more and found out that he is reading a lot of stuff and he just doesn't find it exciting.
First, I got ahold of a few interesting science videos dealing with astronomy and robotics. He was intrigued. On a trip to Disney I took him on a behind the scenes tour at their greenhouses where he got to talk to a Botanist and learn more. And I"ve found a few other opportunities to get him involved in some hands on science.
I'll be damned if I let school choke out his love for learning. He's border-line gifted if not gifted (I'm Triple Nine) and it would be a shame if he limited his options because of school...
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I love the idea of home schooling, but after serious investigation, it is not something that would work for us. My wife isn't really cut out for it, and I'm cut out for making a nice income. Believe it or not my kids are in private school but with a switch to a higher-income city we'll switch to their public schools.
I love teaching, so I spend probably ten hours a week with my kids directly on academics and because I'm a nerd even when I am playing , education comes out.
What we really need are more nerds and less politicians in charge of our education system...
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The "better" system this guy proposes wouldn't work any better. How would you know which student learned, and which did not, if you do not have testing?
You test something you haven't taught them.
That shows how good the students are at applying what they have been taught.
The reliance on pre-digested knowledge is the bane of education. You don't teach the kids to learn, you teach them to become notebooks. I have no use for hiring notebooks. But I would like to hire someone who knows how to learn.
This problem is not unique to the US. Here in the Netherlands kids take their first tests when they are 4 years old! Absolutely ridiculous if you ask me. Let them play and be kids!
Another problem here are boys in the classroom, or rather the fact that the teachers, who are almost always female, don't understand them and don't know how to handle them. Boys have to run, jump and do all kinds of things, while girls are more often happy sitting at a table doing things like drawing, writing and needlework. So boys are often regarded a nuisance. This 'problem' is often 'solved' by giving the boys medication. We should have teachers who actually understand kids, but these days many teachers here can't even spell properly. So we have a whole generation of kids with a shaky foundation on which they have to build all their knowledge. Thank you, governments, for saving so much money on education! We are in for interesting times.
-- Cheers!
Can we please stop the childish creationist crap in this site?
No. Bigots can't stop. They are obsessed with creationists and religious types. Anti-religious bigots see Creationists behind every bush, just like anit-Semites see the Jews hiding between the lines in every news article.
Damn trolls. Everyone knows this is not the problem.
It's the only "problem" that matters to them.
Home schooling is for parents who's religious views are so extreme that they cannot integrate with normal society.
No, homeschooling is for parents who care about their child's education. We homeschool, and belong to several homeschooling groups. I'd say about 1/2 of the families we know do it for religious reasons. Christians being the largest group, and Muslim being the second largest. We know some Hindi homeschoolers, can't think of any Bhuddists off-hand. The other half of the families homeschool because they don't feel the other options are good for their child. The public schools are not very challenging. The private schools around here are kill-them-with-homework factories that leave no time to build rockets and robots and take music and gymnastics lessons.
So there is some actual real-world data for you, based on several hundred homeschool families and dozens of school choices. You're spouting off without either data or experience.
In our case, we homeschool in order to find the point of optimal challenge. My daughter doesn't need a mountain of homework to 'get it', and she needs to be challenged in order not to get bored out of her nut. At 13, she took the AP Chem this spring. That's her third AP exam. She is probably going to jump into the third quarter of freshmen engineering calculus this fall at a local university. There are simply no local schools that would have let her accelerate enough to keep her sanity.
How would you know which student learned, and which did not, if you do not have testing?
Umm, believe it or not, as someone who has over a decade of experience teaching, you can actually assess students on the basis of things other than performance on paper tests.
What would happen is that a few students do all the work, while the other students slackoff and do nada.
Yeah, there's this thing called: paying attention to what your students are doing in your classroom. As a physics teacher who included a huge amount of lab activities in "conceptual physics" classes, I would continuously wander around the room, talking with groups, asking individual students what's going on, etc. You pretty quickly get a sense of whether someone is actively contributing or whether they're sitting there watching everyone else. And, heck, if you ask them to write a lab report or answer questions as individuals based on what they did after the fact, you can easily tell which students actually understand what's going on.
How do you eliminate bad teachers like the joker I had who wasted 40 minutes of every class talking about his karate lessons and/or last weekend at the bar? You need testing to see if the teacher is really teaching, or not.
Umm, no. Standardized testing can give some sort of general baseline about whether any learning at all is going on, but it's not going to tell the whole story.
Having taught at both public secondary schools and a top-tier elite private secondary school, I can tell you that the solution is easy: real, true professional evaluations by good teachers. Many if not most public school administrators who are tasked with doing teacher evaluations are principals for a good reason -- they often were terrible teachers, and took the administration certification test to get into something they'd be better at. These are the people we have evaluating our teachers... most are hardly experts in classroom teaching.
The elite private school I taught at had one member of the faculty who was the head of teaching evaluations and teaching coordinator. (I forget his actual title, but that's what he was.) He was an actual teacher. Just about everyone at the school acknowledged that he was one of the top teachers at the school. He would come to sit in on maybe a half dozen or more of your classes each year, not just the 45-minute mandatory evaluation done by some anonymous administrator at a public school.
And the other administrators were teachers too. The head of the high school still taught a course. He would come and sit in on at least a few classes with every teacher too. Students were used to these people being around, so they didn't behave weirdly (unlike public school evaluations, where students were usually freaked out when the principal came to class once per year). The head of the high school would actually commonly just drop in with very little notice and see what was going on in a classroom, hang out for 15 minutes or so (he was an English teacher, but loved hanging out with students doing science experiments, because he found it all fascinating)... and frankly, because all of this happened so often, it really wasn't stressful for teachers, because everyone at the school was so comfortable with it.
After you had taught at the school for a few years (and before you had whatever their equivalent of "tenure" was), you were teamed up with one of a handful of very experienced teachers at the school who acted as a mentor for an entire semester or year. (These mentor teachers were usually required to teach one fewer class for their service.) You would do in-depth classroom observations, planning, discussions of teaching improvements and strategies, etc. with this person. And all teachers at the school were required to repeat some lesser version of this program with their peers every 7-10 years or something after the initial intensive one.
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