The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss has debuted a new education blog. She floats a fun and intriguing idea for middle school reform: Blow up middle school as we know it and turn at least some of it into a “boot camp for life.”
Enough with “academic rigor.” No more projects on the Chesapeake Bay (or whatever body of water you happen to live near.) Stop testing them into submission. How about teaching nutrition and health through cooking classes? Nobody can argue that kid don’t need to learn more, not with the obesity epidemic among young people in this country. An added bonus: cooking can be a great way to teach chemical reactions and other scientific principles. Give kids things to take apart and to rebuild. Yes, bring back shop class. This sparks a curiosity that will drive them to want to learn the math and science necessary to take their tinkering to the next level.
An idea like this is intuitively appealing and makes a lot of sense if — it’s a big “if” — kids have been given a solid, well-rounded curriculum throughout their elementary years. Indeed, if you give kids a good foundation in the early years, you potentially open up an entire range of opportunities in middle school and beyond, of which Strauss’ idea is merely one. But our reluctance to make the best use of the K-5 years contributes to the joyless brand of catch-up ball most middle schools are forced to play.
“The developmental profile of these students–from age 11 to 14–is well established,” says Strauss, “and it doesn’t lend itself to great academic achievement.”
Strauss’s is one of our smartest ed reporters and her blog has jumped quickly from the starting block. See her Q&A with Dan Willingham, which ran earlier this week.
As a six-year veteran of the middle school, I vehemently disagree with the notion that middle school-aged kids are not cut out for high academic achievement. On the contrary, I think they’re humans at the peak of their learning capacity. Smarter than fourth graders; less ennui-striken than eleventh graders. Perky, bright-eyed and absorptive.
But behavior must be brought under control. This is doable, but hard. I think kids are allowed to run amok in too many middle schools, leading to the impression that they’re ungovernable and hard-to-teach.
And I think there would be fewer disruptors if elementary curricula were meatier. I find there’s a high correlatino between disruptive behavior and low literacy and numeracy.
Comment by Ben — September 3, 2009 @ 2:43 pm
Agreed, Ben. The less busy you keep them, the more their behavior deteriorates (which causes the planners to focus even more on catering to their alleged developmental needs). Students who aren’t feeling, by the time they reach middle school, that they’re mastering important skills, are even more likely to become disruptive. Who could blame them. At the same time, I do think that home ec and shop classes (and other hands-on subjects), if taught to high standards, are also a good thing. The skills are important, and the opportunity to identify non-academic talents and interests shouldn’t be foregone.
Comment by Anonymous — September 3, 2009 @ 5:59 pm
I’m with Ben on this one — though I think cooking and shop can (and should be part of the picture). I found 8th grade one of my most intellectually exciting years in school, and I can see my daughter growing by leaps and bounds intellectually.
I think it’s key to make the academic challenges of middle school part of the process of towards growing independence and autonomy, not part of the “being good is pleasing grown-ups” outlook that they are moving away from.
Comment by Rachel — September 3, 2009 @ 9:22 pm
Valerie Strauss asks (or implies at least) a lot of rhetorical questions in her article. I happen to think that for the most part they are not constructive questions. They are not realistic questions. They don’t lead to any promising possibilities of educational improvement. And they are anything but new questions. But I will not call them “dumb” questions. That is because long ago I thought about “dumb” questions and decided it is very important for teachers to realize that dumb questions have answers too. Indeed it is an important challenge for every teacher to make his or her classroom safe for dumb questions. The student asking the dumb question wants an answer. The student deserves an answer.
My thinking on dumb questions goes back to when I was in an introductory geology. The teacher was talking something about minerals, and their chemical composition. Somehow the term “isotope” came up. A student raised her hand and asked, “Isotopes, are they like something you find in the ground?” That caused a audible chuckle from much of the class, probably myself included, and from the teacher. I trust the teacher answered as best he could. I don’t remember that. But I do remember being a little uncomfortable with our collective response. Thinking about it afterward I figured the girl must have been a bit embarrassed. I know I would have been. It was very obvious that she had asked a “dumb question”. But it is very likely that she was not the only one in the class who didn’t understand the term “isotope”. That’s important information if you don’t have it. Actually isotopes are not central to understanding the chemical composition of minerals, but how was she to know that?
Actually some questions don’t have answers, such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “Do you still beat your wife?” When a question does not have an answer the person asking it needs an explanation of why it has no answer. That is not always easy. A classic example of this in my experience was when my son asked, “Does putting gas in the tank make a car go faster?” That was a very sensible question from his perspective at age five or so. I hope I have him a good explanation, but all I remember was being so engrossed in analyzing the question that maybe I didn’t answer at all.
So every question Strauss asks has an answer, or an explanation, or something. Actually I’m not at all sure Valerie Strauss wants answers, but I think the answers are important. And I think most of these questions were asked by progressive educations back close to a hundred years ago. Maybe they never were answered very well, and that’s why their still asked. So I’ll attempt to answer at least some of them. Here goes.
“How about teaching nutrition and health through cooking classes?” Because you don’t teach A by teaching B. Obviously there is some connection between cooking and nutrition and health, but there is also a lot of separation. Kids might enjoy cooking. They certainly might become engaged in cooking. But learning to cook is something different than learning nutrition and health. If you want kids to learn nutrition and health, teach it directly. Isolate and concentrate. That’s how you get anything done.
Looking back at her article I see that she does not put most of her suggestions in the form of a question, so I will. To continue:
Why not ” . . . allow kids to learn skills in unconventional ways . . . .”? We do. We allow kids to learn in any way they want. But this question kind of misses the more direct question, why don’t we promote learning in unconventional ways. The answer actually is very simple. We use conventional ways because conventional ways work best. That’s why they’re conventional. Critics of education often seem to assume that we pledge allegiance to some mythical and powerful tradition imposed by stuffy know-it-alls long ago. We don’t. We are very practical. We teach as best we can. And what works best is direct instruction. We explain. We elicit feedback. We answer questions and explain again. We assign homework. We grade it. We give quizzes and tests. We do all that because it works, very imperfectly of course, somewhat like democracy. But it works.
Strauss says “cooking can be a great way to teach chemical reactions and other scientific principles.” So why not use cooking to teach chemistry? Because Strauss is dead wrong. Cooking is not a great way to teach chemistry. You don’t teach A by teaching B. And you don’t learn A by doing B. If you teach cooking, kids will indeed learn to cook. But they won’t learn chemistry unless you teach chemistry.
Why not “Let them learn the kind of music they like, with the instruments they want to play.”? Well, we do that a little bit. But we don’t limit music education to that, and they reason why is very simple. If kids play only the music they choose they will get a pathetically limited music education, and they won’t enjoy it very much. A very important motivator for learners at all levels is satisfaction of accomplishment. I am thinking of beginning band here, fifth and sixth graders. Kids can’t get satisfaction of accomplishment from playing music that they choose because they can’t do very well at it. But they can get satisfaction of accomplishment from playing the simple tunes in their beginning method book because they can succeed at it.
Why not “Let them learn about financial literacy by running small businesses.”? Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful and shiny new idea?, just like it apparently sounded to John Dewey close to a century ago. But the question has an answer. Because they’ll learn faster and better with direct instruction. Perhaps running a business in the school will come closer to teaching financial literacy than cooking will come to teaching chemistry, but it still a stretch. If you want to teach financial literacy, by all means do so, directly.
Strauss says, “Give kids things to take apart and to rebuild. Yes, bring back shop class. This sparks a curiosity that will drive them to want to learn the math and science necessary to take their tinkering to the next level.”, so why not use make tinkering the basis of teaching math and science. Well, because tinkering doesn’t go much beyond tinkering. Some curiosity may be promoted in this way, but not a motivation to seriously tackle topics in math and science, and certainly not a workable plan to tackle such topics.
I’ve given my answers to a few of the implied questions Strauss asks. The answers pretty well boil down to a few important principles of teaching. You have to isolate and concentrate on one thing at a time. You have to present information and ideas in some way. You have to elicit and respond to feedback in some way. You have to provide some means for students to practice, to apply their information and ideas. And you don’t learn A by doing B.
Comment by Brian Rude — September 4, 2009 @ 12:06 am
The ed establishment, among others, seems to have a pathological hatred of the whole idea of a content-rich, sequential curriculum across all subjects, taught in the most efficient way possible; direct instruction.
Its adherents are willing to go to great lengths to avoid both solid curriculum and effective instruction. If it takes 10 times as long, can be done in groups, involves lots of arts/crafts/technology and results in few, if any, of the class actually learning the material, it just has to be wonderful (and the converse is evil, developmentally inappropriate and probably fattening). It’s natural and it’s creative!!! Creativity in the schools, as currently defined, is vastly overrated and a huge waste of time.
Comment by momof4 — September 4, 2009 @ 7:02 pm
Could we please get back to the idea that parents (married mom and dad) can and should teach life skills like cooking, cleaning, ironing and basic home repairs on their own? JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING IS A GOOD IDEA DOESN’T MEAN THE SCHOOLS SHOULD DO IT. Let’s get back to the Puritan/Protestant work ethic that gave so many generations of Americans so many opportunities; diligence, persistence, thrift, self-control, delayed gratification/planning for the future etc. The recipe for success is pretty simple: use self-control, work hard, stay in school, get a job, don’t have kids until you marry etc. In the 50s, most kids of any color or SES came from stable, married families. The 50s weren’t perfect, but did much better in that respect than many/most of those who followed.
That being said, schools can offer options among the above “life skills”. However, my kids learned to do useful things in the house/yard/garden, eat healthy, cook healthy and plan for successful futures much better at home than at school. My kids took one look at the unhealthy, prepared-food-heavy home ec class and opted out. I’m not a nutritionist or a chef, but I clearly know – and taught my kids – far more about appropriate diet than the master’s-prepared “educators” in their affluent, highly-educated leafy suburban schools. Pathetic.
Comment by momof4 — September 4, 2009 @ 8:46 pm