eduskeptic

What a bike: handmade of course/photo credit: urbanvelo.org

Classrooms are generally good places to learn something, no matter your age. We have all spent a rather large amount of time in them. Some of the time was good, some bad, some ugly. It’s just the way things are. Not everything is perfect.

It is safe to say that not all learning takes place in the classroom, nor should it. The place of learning in a classroom is to gain a new theoretical skill. Except for places like the science lab, music room, art studio, or shop, it’s all theory until put into practice. The labs, shops, and studios combine theory with practice simply because of the nature of their subject matter.

Here’s the message: get out of the classroom and find a way to put the knowledge your child gained in the class room to practical use. The way to test math, science, physics, history, and all the rest of it, is to find a practical, or maybe not so practical, use for it.

Coming up on March 2, 3 and 4 is an outstanding opportunity to put math, science, physics, and art right in front of your child. The North American Handmade Bicycle Show will be in town, at the Sacramento Convention Center.

Children (of all ages) like bikes. Most of us learned to ride them, and a lot of us still do. This show connects science with the art and love of bicycles. It’s not on the program as an “educational experience” mind you. It just is one.

Here are some questions for the inquisitive mind, young or old: what is the bike made of? What keeps it together? What makes it the color that it is? How many triangles are in a bike frame? How many circles on a bike? Whats the reason for spokes on the wheels? How come the angles are all different on different bikes? What are gears? What are gear ratios? What’s a chain do? How do the shifters work? What makes it stop? What’s friction got to do with it? How come a bike stays upright (well, most of the time anyway) when it’s pedaled? What’s a shock absorber do on the forks? Under the seat? Rolling resistance is what? Does force have anything to do with riding a bike? What’s a helmet made of and what’s it supposed to do?

The list can go on for quite a long time. The fact is though, that without a good foundation in math, science and art, and the accompanying ability to read, none of these questions can be answered. The best way to see all the math, science and art put to actual hands on, everyday use, and to make the need for all it understandable, is to go to something like the North American Handmade Bicycle Show, or something like it.

Get out of the classroom, go find something that puts all that knowledge to use, something that you can see, touch, listen to. You might find that you have a young engineer, artist, or mathematician hiding in your child’s imagination, just waiting for the chance to leap out.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

KVA STAINLESS from KVA Stainless on Vimeo.

It is impossible to go through an entire week without reading something in the newspaper or the e- media about schools and testing. There is, it does seem, a bottomless well of theories and opinions on who, how, and when to test everything pertaining to the public school system.

Quite a few of the big time verbal expositions about testing are offered by a group of folks who quite often don’t have any actual teachers on their boards or panels or in their non-profit or for profit corporations. Money yes, teachers, not so much.

I find that to no longer be amazing. It’s been going on for so long now that I expect that. I haven’t been disproved yet, which is a very sad thing to have to say.

How is it that the teaching profession is the purview of everyone who never has had, or has very limited, teaching experience in an actual classroom?

Corporate business types are not teachers, and don’t generally know much, if anything about classrooms and teaching.  That should be obvious. Neither are politicians, which is abundantly clear.

Superintendents aren’t teachers. They are administrators who run the business end of schools. That does include, by the way, the curricula that are used within the district. To be very clear though, they aren’t in the classroom every day, or in some cases, any day. They can’t be. It’s not their job.

Principals aren’t teachers. Their job is to see to the efficient running of an individual school. It’s a very complicated thing to do, and requires a different set of everyday skills than the classroom does.

Teachers, on the other hand, and quite obviously one would think, teach. What a concept. Here’s what else they do: test, every day, before, during, and after each lesson. At least, that’s what the good ones do. One lesson leads to the next, or not. Educational leadership exists in the classroom, not in the admin offices or in the non-profits or for profit corporations.

If it’s obvious that the lesson didn’t meet the goal that was the purpose of the lesson, good teachers stop right there and re-teach. They also know who in the group needs extra help to learn what was taught during the lesson.

This is an on-going, never ending process. It does not involve filling in bubbles on a card. It does involve question and answer, what if’s, and what else’s. When, and only when, a child demonstrates that they understand the concept, does the good teacher move on. It’s a building process.

Some children take a great deal longer to learn than others. It’s natural. It’s why the bell curve exists. In a perfect world, there would be as much help as it takes to help those children learn what they need to, within the confines of the teaching day/week/year. It doesn’t always work that way though.

Notice that I used the term “good teachers”. The teaching profession, like all other professions, has those who simply aren’t good. That’s another discussion for a different day.

Why aren’t teachers, real classroom teachers, included on the panels and boards that let everyone who is within earshot know what testing really needs to do and so on? I have no idea.

Certainly it would be possible to include some of the best classroom teachers in these discussions. At the very least, some very good retired teachers would be possible.

Then again, maybe the answers wouldn’t be acceptable. I just don’t know. Maybe there’s a test for that.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

School is meant to be a place where learning takes place. Drudgery isn’t actually supposed to be part of it, although most of us could easily dredge up an instance or two when that’s what we think we went through.

It’s a fine balance between learning, really learning, and simply repeating factoids.

It’s not that the factoids aren’t useful at times. They certainly can be, especially when engaging in a robust game of scrabble, or educational trivia one-ups-manship. Other than that though, not so much.

Learning involves this quirky little thing called “critical thinking”. It’s far, far removed from the factoid realm. It’s not very testable on a scan-tron card. Mostly, it drives test makers crazy, and seems to completely elude politicians and the ex-”educators” in the corporate make a lot of money game.

Critical thinking is learned though. It’s just that it is learned without a linear map or trajectory. It is,  rather, scattered around the realm of possibilities and ends up presenting more than one answer, and adheres to the theory that there are no wrong answers, there’s just learning.

It takes more time than learning how to simply repeat facts, or lies for that matter. It requires the ability to apply the learning to many different situations, and understanding that the process may be a bit messy, with more than one avenue to explore to get to an acceptable conclusion.

Oddly enough, play, in its’ many forms, is part and parcel of this type of learning. Reading, especially for younger children, requires a bit of time to play out what was read. Play enables the young reader to internalize what was read.

For older, or more mature readers, play, which includes gazing out the window at sunbeams and rain, gives the brain the time to do the same thing, which is to begin to internalize the information that was read, to compare it to other sets of data, and enter the great stew pot of knowledge that is stored away until it is needed.

Play, read, play is more that the title of this little bit of writing. It’s a good road map for learning, actually learning, and growing as individuals in a complex society.