Over in The Meadow

As a teacher, I look at the state of education now and compare it often to how it seemed when I was growing up. Students are given numerous opportunities now to turn in work, to do work, to retake tests, over and over and over again until they grasp the concept. I do not think this is a bad thing. The point of school is to learn. As educators we should want our students to learn everything we are trying to teach them by whatever means necessary. That leads into the question of: Why are so many students behind, struggling or failing? If we are giving students numerous chances to do this work and learn, why aren’t they learning?

“Well back in my day”, starts the old voice from head “I wasn’t given all these chances.” Which is true. I remember once telling a teacher I was going to turn in a project tomorrow and her telling me no, I had missed my chance, and I now had a zero. I put my head down and cried for 20 minutes. I would like to say I learned a grand lesson on turning in my work, and making sure I did everything the moment my teachers said it but that just isn’t true. That interaction made me sad, and it made me have a greater fear of always messing something up. I would have been thankful to have been given another chance.

So, if it’s not chances, perhaps it’s the means of delivery? If you’ve been in a classroom in the last decade then I’m sure you’ve heard the term differentiation. It basically means you present the same material several times, in different ways in order to teach all the children how they learn. You can present an art project to show you understand volume and shapes. You can design a rollercoaster to show you understand force. Students inside of P.E. Classrooms are asked to bounce the ball in 3 groups of 6 to figure out their multiplication. Students inside of government classrooms are creating their own countries with constitutions to help them understand the rules they are growing up in. Yet, none of these things seem to be helping the students who are falling further and further behind.

The latest educational surveys have shown that more than 50% of children are a grade level or more below where they would be. Some kids simply do not care about school, their education, or their ability to read. I have heard numerous viral videos about students saying, “school doesn’t teach you anything useful”, “I need to learn to do my taxes.”, like that is some great rebuttal to being taught algebra. (High school does teach you to do your taxes if you take personal finance, and I use Algebra every day of my life whether I’m at the grocery store, planning out my garden, or even buying fabric.) Many students no longer see the value of an education. The same education that numerous people have sacrificed to achieve, and that some still strive to receive, is being tossed aside like it is nothing in favor of becoming the next viral video star. I’m not blaming the education quandary on technology, but on the fact that our goals as a society have changed. Children need to be continually told the value of an education, and adults need to act on the value of their education. Some students need help seeing the end goal of their education, which is to develop into an adult who has to function in our society on their own.

If you do not know how to read, you will get taken advantage of in business contracts. If you do not understand basic math, how will you know which is the best deal on food at the store, or if your boss has shorted your paycheck? Education is the most basic building block of our society.

As educators, parents, and just people in general, we have to help students see their goals. Maybe helping a student whose only interest is science involves relating everything back to science. Perhaps the key to working with a student who has autism is relating every subject back to a subject their interested in. A student who wants to own their own business should learn math by focusing on finance and read by studying contracts and law. Everything in our modern society is now tailored to us. Even Netflix has a section of shows it thinks we will like based upon the last things we watched; they do this to keep us engaged with their platform. Perhaps it has become time for Modern Education to take place where instead of forcing children to read things they have no interest in, to be able choose the means of their own education. Educators and Parents are competing with video algorithms written to keep all of us in a loop of never-ending engagement. If we want to win, we need to start copying some of the playbook.