Winter of All This Content
At my school we have a couple of senior teachers whose job it is to help guide and direct us to make sure we’re all moving in the right direction. One is a math teacher, the other is an English teacher. I doubt that it is a coincidence that math and reading are the two subjects where standardized test scores substantially affect the way our school is rated and judged. When the time comes to talk about how we’re going to improve test scores, as a social studies teacher my job is pretty much to see where I can line things up with the English department.
Truth be told, this doesn’t bother me a great deal. I like finding ways that the history content that I teach can echo across what students think about in other classes. So if I can break out of the history silo a little bit by bringing in some tools from English (or even math), I’ll take the opportunity. And as much as people like to talk about different ways of learning and technology’s effect on spreading information, it’s hard to argue that you can get very far in understanding either the present or the past if you struggle to understand and interpret the written word. So I have always spent a good chunk of my classroom time on building literacy skills. (The variety and scope of what’s needed for 21st century literacy is a discussion I’m going to hold off on for now.) I spent a lot of time with my students this past marking period on the idea of thesis statements, both recognizing them and writing them. I checked off fewer “content boxes†in terms of the history topics I covered. But I hope that I helped the students think about what we did discuss a little more deeply.
It can be tough tradeoff to make, and it can get tougher all the time. As my English teacher mentor says, people keep writing new books; history keeps adding new events. (And quite frankly that is a problem I would like to continue having.) You kind of have to let go of the idea that you’re going to cover everything. Heck, you have to let go of the idea that you’re going to cover everything important. When I have to make these choices I try to think about the questions the students have asked, and the things that I wish I had known sooner. And I try to help my students prepare for the next leg of the relay, when I hope that they will take what we have done and add it to their base of experience.
I think about this a lot, but the reason I’m thinking about it and writing about it now is because of this Chris Lehmann post that touches on similar themes. Toward the end, he writes:
More than anything else, we need to recognize that too often school fails at the one thing we should endeavor to do more than anything else — instill a love of learning.
With that love of learning in place, the student will be an active and voracious learner even outside the school environment. Even then she will not learn everything that there is to be learned, but she will go far beyond the foundation she built from grades K-12. This is normally the point at which I would point to the Deweyan vision of education, and maybe start thinking about more ways that I could open my classes up to more student direction and more independent work that would allow students to pursue their own interests and their own questions. And all of those are important, and they’re all things that I will continue to strive to do.
But as I come back again and again to that phrase “instill a love of learning,†I pause. I’m going to overanalyze Chris’ words here, not because I’m finding any fault with what he said but because that’s where my own thought process is going. Can a teacher instill a love of anything? Is that something that can be put into someone from the outside? Or is it something that must, somehow, already be in the person, perhaps waiting to be developed or nurtured? If it’s the latter, how do we as teachers build the trust and rapport with our students to find it and fan it, especially if they see us as adversaries piling more chores on them?
Lurking behind these questions is another that poses a threat to the whole Deweyan/pragmatist project of an engaged, learning citizen as part of a democratic culture: What is it that makes trying to learn about and understand the world so unappealing to so many people?
I’m going to be thinking about that over the next day or two and writing more this week, but I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments or elsewhere.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.