Day 324: "Cheating on Tests" and "History or English"
Those were two topics that came up on the random topic generator, one after the other. Both education topics, which is fitting enough because I am finding it very, very hard to focus on lesson planning, this evening. Bah.
Cheating on tests... bugs me. I mean, I feel like it's one of those things that hurts the perpetrator, but that the perpetrator doesn't care that he or she has not actually learned those things, or else he or she would not cheat in the first place. If he or she doesn't CARE about learning, how can someone else possibly "make" them care? This expresses a good portion of my ambivalence about teaching. I can try to make a subject interesting, I can try to make learning an often enjoyable process, I myself enjoy some of what I teach (see next subject, or perhaps it should be tomorrow's topic?)... but if a kid is determined not to learn, for whatever reason*, how can I force him or her? I wonder if there are experiments out there about removing grades as an issue, and of course standardized tests, and seeing how students reacted to learning for learning's sake?
*reasons which obviously can include the fact that somehow, for some set of reasons, learning skills in school has ALWAYS been difficult and therefore not enjoyable for some students, and that they associate reading and writing with failure and boredom and lack of enjoyment, as well as shame and associated rejection. How do you get someone to move beyond that experience, especially when their basic skills are so low that getting information from reading is excruciatingly difficult for them. Yes, you can try to use other means for getting information across, and I do, but at the end of the day, there is still going to be necessary reading and writing.
PS, unrelated, I am finally making greater headway through Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, having reached the Diego Rivera/Frida Kahlo/Leon Trotsky portion of the book. Also, I finished her Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which did bother me -- I skipped all of her husband's pedantic mini-essays and the daughter's self-approving anecdotes -- but I tried to take in some of it without sneering at the freedoms which allowed her to "live off the land" and reduce her carbon footprint, etc. I note she and her husband did fly to Italy during the year, to do some farm tourism.
Cheating on tests... bugs me. I mean, I feel like it's one of those things that hurts the perpetrator, but that the perpetrator doesn't care that he or she has not actually learned those things, or else he or she would not cheat in the first place. If he or she doesn't CARE about learning, how can someone else possibly "make" them care? This expresses a good portion of my ambivalence about teaching. I can try to make a subject interesting, I can try to make learning an often enjoyable process, I myself enjoy some of what I teach (see next subject, or perhaps it should be tomorrow's topic?)... but if a kid is determined not to learn, for whatever reason*, how can I force him or her? I wonder if there are experiments out there about removing grades as an issue, and of course standardized tests, and seeing how students reacted to learning for learning's sake?
*reasons which obviously can include the fact that somehow, for some set of reasons, learning skills in school has ALWAYS been difficult and therefore not enjoyable for some students, and that they associate reading and writing with failure and boredom and lack of enjoyment, as well as shame and associated rejection. How do you get someone to move beyond that experience, especially when their basic skills are so low that getting information from reading is excruciatingly difficult for them. Yes, you can try to use other means for getting information across, and I do, but at the end of the day, there is still going to be necessary reading and writing.
PS, unrelated, I am finally making greater headway through Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, having reached the Diego Rivera/Frida Kahlo/Leon Trotsky portion of the book. Also, I finished her Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which did bother me -- I skipped all of her husband's pedantic mini-essays and the daughter's self-approving anecdotes -- but I tried to take in some of it without sneering at the freedoms which allowed her to "live off the land" and reduce her carbon footprint, etc. I note she and her husband did fly to Italy during the year, to do some farm tourism.