Wk3 Response 2: Anne Alsup’s Anecdotes

POST 3

Dear, dear Anne,

So nice of you to give me something to respond to that doesn’t require me to search my soul:

“Almost universally, students perceive the role of the teacher as supplying knowledge and answering questions, a notion that has been perpetuated by an arena of high-stakes testing. While this methodology has merit for the conveyance of basic facts and principles, it falls short of moving the student to transference of the principles at higher levels of intellectual and cognitive application.”

Do you really think the methodology has merit?  That’s not what your AR said!  Will kids remember ANYTHING we tell them… tomorrow, let alone next year?  Why can’t they remember that “a lot” is two words?  That “definitely” has “finite” in it?  I even deduct a point every time they write it the wrong way, and still, every time they write it they write it the wrong way!!!  OMG, every school communication I’ve seen go home in the last half decade, from the highest echelons to the newest teacher, has used the wrong “your”!  So how can I expect the kids to get this stuff, yes even if they’ve been TOLD since kindergarten?!?!?

Crikey.  I skipped the soul searching and went straight to the rant.

Yesterday, I sent my new principal-to-be an email in response to his wonderful meeting with a few of us teachers to begin to design a professional collaborative community.  He wants to begin with something different at pre-school days (yes, we got two of them back), and I told him what I’ve been learning this year about “meaningful.”  That a lot of people write off anything we do in those “Welcome-back-let’s-bond” activities—because to them, they’re not “meaningful.”  When we let our students develop THEIR thoughts, THEIR understandings, THEIR ideas—that’s when something happens. When we shut up and let THEM find solutions to problems.

THAT is what you have so effectively and brilliantly documented in your AR project, and I hope you publish it EVERYWHERE, because you have documented the absolutely most important thing for every teacher in the world to learn.  We can give them all the answers in the world—but it turns out that that’s not giving them anything.