The Measure of Success

What does the word “learn” mean to you? If a child can tell you that 4 times 5 is 20, did the child learn multiplication? What if you ask the child “If George is given $5 a day for four days by his father, how much money does George have?” and she comes up with $18. Would you still say the child has learned multiplication?

Personally, I believe the above example demonstrates the difference between “fact” and “knowledge”. It appears that our children today are learning a lot of “facts” in school, but less and less “knowledge”.

In Catherine Luna's piece this week, she discusses the learning styles of students with learning disabilities. We all have “preferred” learning styles. For example, I prefer discussion over lecture. It does not mean that I can not learn from a lecture, but I definitely get more out of a discussion, hearing how other students interpret something and finding out what their struggles are in understanding the material. With respect to learning disabilities, the differences in success are more extreme between the amount of learning occurring between “preferred” and “non-preferred” instructional methods. Given a freedom as to the method of instruction, or the way to express their knowledge, students with learning disabilities do very well. Should these students be punished for the fact that they can not learn the same way as “everyone else” does? What counts more, the actual knowledge, or the delivery mechanism?

In my opinion, the students in Luna's article are more “knowledgeable” than your average student, despite their learning disabilities. They know what methods work best for them, and which they struggle with. They are trying to work with their teachers and staff to be able to maximize their learning, instead of just “surviving” with the method prescribed by the instructor.

I believe this is what Carini is referring to in “Valuing the Immeasurable”. Rather than “fact” and “knowledge”, Carini discusses “training and schooling” and “education”. Carini takes the Luna piece on method one step further. Carini talks about how “in the name of efficiency and homogeneity” “variety is minimized”. Our schools today are focused on covering so much “material” in so little time. Legislation such as No Child Left Behind has forced more standardized testing and education on our children. We are creating economies of scale not in the corporate world, but in the classroom. We are trying to figure out the best way to teach students how to pass a test given a minimal use of resources. Obviously, customized education plans per student would not be cost-effective in this approach. Instead, we drill our students in how to take standardized tests. We given them strategies for eliminating derailing answers, and giving them the best odds at getting a question correct. Then, we drill them in the facts these questions will be asked on. Sometimes, the students are given a free-form essay, but even that has an “equation” to follow in order to maximize your potential score (introduction, supporting idea 1, supporting idea 2, supporting idea 3, conclusion). Could you imagine the look on the evaluator's face if a student responded to an open essay question of “Describe how the American Revolutionary War was influenced by the French Revolution” with a comic strip instead of a written essay in the prescribed form? Does the comic strip necessarily imply that the student knows any more or less on the American and French Revolutions simply based on her choice of medium? It is this idea of measurement which Carini says “is valued and recognized to be important in education.”

Delpit reinforces the need for freedom of expression in her piece “No Kinda Sense”, in which she focuses on language, and more specifically, verbal language. Too often we correct children as they speak to us … grammar, pronunciation, use of slang. Why? Is the use of slang that critical if the child is discussing his understanding of plant cell reproduction? By focusing on the correctness of the language, and not the thought behind the language, Delpit says we are stifling out children's thought process. She says school has become all about the language, and not the content, and we are actually encouraging our students not to gain more knowledge to talk about. She reinforces the “push” nature of our educational system by saying “students rarely get to talk in classrooms”. When they do speak the “standard dialect is embedded in instruction that has little connection to children's cultural lives and personal interests.” When they do get to speak about something they care about, “the children whose language is considered defective are themselves viewed as defective.” The children consider both themselves and the topic they want to discuss as wrong. Would that encourage you to explore beyond the topics listed in the syllabus?

Hilliard expresses how much a person's language actually tells us, both about that person's knowledge abilities and their personalities. Some language dialects are based in persuasion. Some are based in song and are artistic and more illustrative. Some are more scientific. The use of one dialect over another means that the individual thinks best not just in the technical aspects of that dialect, but using the qualities of the dialect as well. Our culture today has written in all of these assumptions about dialects of the English language which are baseless, and the metrics used to test our children's knowledge, the almighty standardized tests, are based on a very specific dialect of the English language. Students who do not perform well on those standardized tests might very well perform better if the test were written to their dialect and culture. These tests are not testing knowledge, but expression and comprehension in a particular dialect. Can you imagine having to go through high school and taking every exam in the foreign language you were studying? Math, Biology, US History … all the tests given in German and the answers expected in German? Do you think you would have done as well in school?

We see from these readings from Delpit and Hilliard that our evaluation system today is very focused on a particular dialect, and much research has been done showing increased learning capabilities when children are taught in a dialect more closely aligned with a child's history and culture. Luna questions even further the methods used, and Carini questions the medium. We might not get to Carini's ideal classroom overnight, but this display of articles gives us a good spectrum to begin making progress toward that ideal.