“We’re committed to the rules and regulation”, said my son’s teacher to me, as she’s trying to explain why the school wouldn’t let a 7th grader attempt a specific test one more time.
“No”, I said, “You are committed to your students’ success”.
This, apparently was not clear. “There are guidelines we must follow”, she tried again.
“The only guideline is your students’ success”, I repeated. “If a kid gets 95 and 88 and 87 in some tests, and then 35 in one other test, you should let him retake that test until he is content with his achievement. You can’t just leave him with the 35 because some city clerk wrote a rule saying ‘be tough on the kids and don’t let them repeat the tests’..”.
At that point I was advised to perform a 3,000 shekels total evaluation of his learning difficulties. Yea, one of “the rules” is to abide by recommendations produced by such a diagnosis.
Don’t get me even started on what happens to those students who cannot afford such an expensive diagnosis. Just a quick reminder: Almost all students in Israel go to public schools and the law states students’ right to get free education for all. We already know it’s not free – with hundreds of shekels spent on books and booklets. But a law that requires parents to spend huge amounts on a private psycho-educational evaluation is just crazy, not to mention unfair.
People in Israel talk a lot about gaps breaking the society. It’s a small country. We’re only 7.7 million people. There are less than 900,000 students in grades 1-6, and about 600,000 in grades 7-12. That’s all. You’ll be correct to ask yourself how big a gap can occur within such a small country.
And I’m just left with the echo of my conversation. How can teachers feel more committed to the system’s rules then their students’ success?
I’ve been pouring my aching heart over failing teachers and education systems here for the past 3 years at least. Recently I came across an amazing story, of a heavenly teacher.
She’s the teacher I would have dreamed of getting for my little boy. A dream come true. She’s kind, warm, and serene. She speaks calmly, never raises her voice. She leads the kids into learning, developing their curiosity. Makes them ask for more. Gives them a feeling the classroom is a safe harbor. Yet with all this her boundaries are crystal clear. They know they have to prepare their homework. They understand how to behave in the classroom. They know they have to respect each other in and out of the classroom, and that some games will be frowned upon. They know the right and wrong. And they are only on 3rd grade.
One day the teacher came to the school management with an announcement. She told them that she has developed friendship with one of the single parents in the classroom. “Over the past year”, she confessed, “it became evident that this is more than just friendship. This is love. We do not plan to move in together right now or become full partners, but I thought you should know”.
After about 3 weeks or less of pondering the school has decided the teacher should not continue to teach this class. In spite of the special relationships that have developed between the kids and the teacher, and even though they realized she’s the perfect teacher for this class and despite the fact that in this school it is customary that the teacher remains with her class till 8th grade – all this made no difference. In fact, the only reason the teacher wasn’t let go altogether was, perhaps, the fact that she is – really – a great teacher.
I am not school management, but I am an experience mother: Very experienced into education systems. I have seen teachers discriminate between students with no reason at all. I have seen teachers teaching relatives with no favoritism at all. I have never seen such a good teacher (except for maybe my daughter’s retired teacher from 2nd grade). I can’t help thinking; Did the school management really weigh the gain vs. the loss here? Or was it simply the easy way out of potential-maybe-someday headache? What do you think??
My daughter got it. It took me a while to define it as an illness. But it is. And bit by bit I am discovering more and more kids who have this disease to various extents.
Over the past two years plus my daughter got sick a lot of times. Really sick. Dark circles under her eyes, running nose, nausea, stomach aches, dizziness, weakness, sleep disorders, lack of appetite, headaches. We went to the doctors. Ran the blood tests. Nothing pointed anywhere. When the first long vacation of the school year came, and all symptoms disappeared I got the first hint. It all came back with school, and disappeared again with the next vacation.
We sat down and had a long analytical discussion. Now, I am not a doctor, nor a psychologist. I am a mother. A very attentive mother. And I decided I need to get to the bottom of this.
The background is also relevant: my daughter is highly gifted. From the time she joined the special class for the gifted on 3rd grade, till the time she left this class and went to high school, on the 9th grade, she never wanted to miss a day at school. She loves learning and does a lot of learning by herself. Her grades have always been perfect. Even now, with the Disease, she is a straight A student.
But now she hates school. In that eye-opening conversation she confessed that her main problem with school is that “school is preventing and delaying learning”. In those words. Being a mother of gifted kids that’s a startling truth to hear.
But even if they weren’t gifted… I mean, if this is the way a gifted student is feeling, then those who don’t share such a motivation for learning must be feeling even worse, don’t they??
A little asking around confirmed that high-school-frustration manifests in various physical ways – similar to what my daughter has been experiencing over the past two years plus.
Like other diseases there are several ways to prevent and to treat it. Unfortunately, prevention demands a deep reform into the education system. Treatment – well, the only thing left to do is to let her go. Skip school as much as she needs to in order to feel better. But that could work with kids who can learn by themselves. I am at loss when it comes to kids who really need the classroom and the learning enabler. This is taken back to ed-reform table.
But one thing I do wish: I wish that parents all over would realize that this is real. A real disease. It’s not laziness or some other form of “I want to skip school” naughtiness. This is a real illness and please treat your kids-with-Schoolitis exactly the same way you would care for them when they have the flue or even Angina.
I sit on my chair, in my study and I scratch my head. I feel like I have a mystery to crack. The mystery concerns the future of education, or rather the mysterious revolution in education. I hear great people (which I would love to meet in person) say “We need to change the DNA of education” – Greg Whitby and “Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment, and it’s not enough. Reform is no use any more. Because that’s simply improving a broken model. What we need is not evolution, but a revolution in education” – Sir Ken Robinson.
But the ground is not shaking. It’s not even purring. Nothing. A year goes out and a year goes in and I ask myself how to crack this mystery. What would make a revolution in education? What does it take? Where to start?? And where are we heading?
Can you imagine the French Revolution or any other for that matter being a success without a clear goal?? An #edchat has just ended on twitter, on the topic “What should be the single focus of education if we could agree on only one goal?” . There was no clear agreement. Just a lot of similar opinions, wants, aspirations and – OK, some common goals.
We are having a revolution. Yet, in most cases, around the world, kids are still sitting in rows, facing a blackboard (or white) and the teacher, writing in (paper) notebooks and reading (paper) books. Hard to feel a big revolution this way. And indeed – this is no revolution. Even those schools who try to modify, add and change are not really “in the revolution”.
Yet a revolution is happening.
Like a good Kafka book – it seems there’s an oppressed mass rebelling against a mysterious ruler, only the ruler is an unclear one, and the rebels go in different directions.
One group of rebels go towards technology. Let’s put some more of this to get us what we want. Another thinks creativity is the key. Other think personal values, global citizenship, preparation for employment. Those are all very nice targets – but can they define a revolution??
None of the above, sorry. Or all of them – depends on your perspective. But the true goal of the Education Revolution, or Education Reform Movement is to alter the goal of education totally.
Let’s start with the name: no more EDUCATION.
It’s about time we start talking about LEARNING.
That’s the first change in perspective.
While education is defined in the dictionary first as “the act or process of educating or being educated” and second as “the knowledge or skill obtained or developed by a learning process”, learning is defined first as “The act, process or experience of gaining knowledge or skill”.
It doesn’t seem like a grand difference – but here’s what I see. Education is given, it’s all in passive – while learning is a take type of action, all active.
While education is something determined by the state and forced upon students, learning is what the students are actually taking with them.
Some students don’t’ get the education they require – because they don’t get to be heard. Their personal desire or interest in a topic has no place in a totalitarian regiment of education. Curiosity is often turned off in school, as it is all about getting through some oiled machine, with pre-defined targets. And not about true development which would often change targets and adjust to modifying reality.
I mean, does it make sense to decide in 2010 that in 2022 today’s first graders will have to finish school by passing exams in Math, English, History, Literature, Bible and perhaps 1-2 more topics? Can you really say that this is education?? Can this really help future generations get a job? Or be happy?
No.
But if the 2022 graduates will finish school knowing how to learn whatever interests them, and starving for more knowledge, then I can say that future generations are safe.
Well, at least safer then they are today.
A idea sneaked on me this afternoon: I would like to establish a new movement, social and political movement, the sort that can become a universal force. An Ed Reform Movement. Black Panthers of Education. Well, not exactly.
It actually evolved from a new facebook group titled (free translation from Hebrew) “Parents ‘Yes We Can’ Reform Education”. I thought, why only parents? What about students who care and have a say? And then I thought about parents to be, and parents who’s kids aren’t in school any more, but they see the deep roots and high tops of the education tree and they want to take part and affect the change. And the teachers?? Oh, yes, those teachers who care and want to change and make a difference but their hands are tied by a heavy and old fashioned system.
Then I thought, if such a movement would be established, it should sweep everyone, all sectors in Israel, religious and non religious, Jewish and Arab, and Bedouin and Druse. Those who are interested in politics and those who aren’t – but they are all interested in their kids and their future. Such a movement could campaign in the next elections and win a seat or two – and get more budgets for education – and all those who are expected to cry about the education budget being taken from the police, the defense, health, labor, – all those will hopefully get to see how much money can larger education budgets actually save on all others.
And then I thought, well, actually, this should be a world movement. Nothing unique to Israel here. Education systems are at a critical point all over the world. How different things would be had we invested more in education in the weaker parts of this earth. How much could we have gained in terms of less hunger and illnesses. Less wars and more conversation. It all starts and ends in education, people. And it’s all in our own hands.
It was a surprise ending to our conversation along the nightly walk. When my daughter and I arrived at home we discovered the big news: that the Mathematics bagrut (matriculation) exam, to be held in two days, has been leaked and is being sold to students.
What a surprise.
We were just discussing my new experimental approach to exams. I was telling my daughter I had this idea, aimed eventually at changing learning: enable full Internet access during an exam. The big fear of cheating, I mean copying, is irrelevant, I told her. You’ve got to be a good student and know your way around the material in order not to get lost between the huge amounts of information, advice and opinions available online. If you can get your answers right without learning anything before, you must be a very good self learner and perhaps talented enough in this area not to need extra learning. As I see it, a big part of this test is to test students ability to learn, not necessarily their existing accumulated knowledge.
Shaii, my 10th grader, was surprised at this idea. I mean we’ve been talking for ever about exams and grades being out of date for the 21st century learner. And then we got back to this piece of news, about the Math exams being leaked. “It’s like a very long time extension”, she said, “or a very good preparation exercise. But it shouldn’t be a reason to cancel the exam”. Of course it shouldn’t. Nor should the ministry have to work on producing the back up copies and distributing them instead of the leaked questionnaires.
In fact, if I were the ministry of education, I would actually use the extra day until the math exam to send a copy of it to every student registered to take the exam this year. This way, all students start at the same starting point. Even if they solve everything and use their friends and teachers to break the toughest questions, I see no harm in their coming to the exam prepared.
You see, as long as we use exams as a tool to grade students achievements in a topic, we must keep it this way – a tool to grade ability, and not a tool to quantify what they don’t know. In other words, if a student was able to solve the exam a day earlier, and it doesn’t matter if he or she used assistance to do it, they will be able to solve their “real life problems” too. And that’s the whole purpose of education. To give them that tool, and this knowledge, of how to tackle a problem and reach a solution. In real life you don’t usually solve all your problems totally alone. Certainly not in this time and age of web and social networking.
After a couple of years of intense and on-going research into education world wide, trends, fashions, innovation, methods, approaches, doctrines, special education, unique education, religious education, private education, public education, with technology, without technology, with money or without – I need to put in writing just a few of my observations and conclusions, to date.
The future of education lies with the recognition of each student as a unique individual.
The acceptance of uniqueness and diversity is the key to a better future for all and greater success in education achievements.
Old news: Some kids are good in Math and lousy in literature. Some are great in Lit and lousy and Math. One kid can excel in Math and Lit, but he sucks in Physics and Art. There are kids who suck at all topics, but are social stars. There are those who excel at everything, but are still unhappy. Oh, there are so many types of kids, and yet there are no types – because every child is his own special one and an only package of can-do and can’t-do, of wants and non’s. Still the teachers get a classroom filled with many different kids. Usually the things that bind those kids together in one classroom is their age and sometimes where they live or the financial background of their families. That’s a very artificial binder. Look around your adulthood friends and make your own deductions.
So this classroom, turns into a class, a group of kids, now has to study fractions. Great. But while some kids get it in a blink, others may find it difficult, or maybe not difficult, but simply boring, so boring they can’t concentrate or get what the teacher is talking about. And at the end of the day they have homework or exams and behold, some kids get less then a perfect score. Fractioning this group titled a classroom into mini groups….
Greg Whitby, the Executive Director leading a system of approximately 80 Catholic schools in greater Western Sydney Australia, talks about uniformity Vs. diversity here:
One of my own eye openers is my youngest son. A second grader he told me that he loves to learn, but only when he chooses and what he chooses. While the professional educators around him criticize his independent thinking and work constantly to turn him into a uniformed student in his classroom, who does everything the same as the rest of the class, I am observing and here are my findings:
He hates his Arithmetic class and homework. It drives him nuts. Yet, when his father went abroad he produced an amazing shopping list – listing the prices of the toys, after he converted them from US dollars to Israeli Shekels. He can also Arithmetic percentage of time, to know exactly when his eggplants will be ready for harvesting on FarmVille.
How important is it, for a kid like that, to go through a methodical, framed, graded system of teaching him Arithmetic? To be honest – there is no simple answer. As we are in an education system – the education is systematic, automatic, and cannot be adjusted to individual persons. Or can it?
In an education system that is based solely on the transference of knowledge or information from a single teacher to a class of kids – there is indeed no room for recognition of the individual.
So, what’s the purpose of the education? Have we forgotten about it?
I think if a child knows how to calculate foreign exchange rates and percentage (on time!) – he is well beyond simple Arithmetic. So what’s the point of insisting on teaching him one booklet after the other of things he is way passed? Is the purpose of the education here is to transfer the specific books into the child, or is the purpose is that the student actually gets a knowledge in the particular subject and knows how to use it?
Well, neither is enough. The major declared goal of education has always been about preparing the young students to their adult life, to acquiring professions and making a living. Arithmetic was important to learn, and very methodically, in a time where trades men managed their own little businesses and they didn’t have computers or even calculators.
But what does today’s education system do to prepare today’s students to tomorrow’s professions? Those professions which have not yet been born? What did yesterday’s education system did to turn me into an internet communications specialist? Or a multi player online game designer? Or my neighbor to a genome researcher or my friend to a researcher of the structure and function of the ribosome? Answer: nothing. Those are individuals who are born with an important quality or two: curiosity and the ability to ask and to teach themselves.
Self teaching is indeed a quality some lucky people are born with, but eventually, all people are in need of this quality. The amounts of information are growing constantly. It is not possible to transfer all this knowledge to any individual. The diversity of occupation is increasing, allowing people to develop expertise in what really interests them. Turning some knowledge they acquired in school irrelevant.
Those who are afraid of the individualism of education often talk about the importance of wide education. But is it really necessary for a physicist to study how to analyze a poem? Or is it enough to assign reading assignments, to those who do not read enough on their own? And while you assign those books to read, how about some classic films? Classical music? Classical rock bands? Tours in various museums world wide and in archaeological sites around the world? If we are talking about expanding horizons let’s do it with pleasure – and not with pressure. Not every subject in school requires grading and marks.
And as individuals are encouraged to learn and expand their horizons let’s allow for one more thing to change in the classroom: let the kids express and teach – teach other kids, teach the teacher. Because only when the teacher becomes a learner, then he can become a learning enabler. A real 21st century educator.
Here Greg Whitby talks about the 21st century new teaching DNA:
The top neuroscientist quoted is Lady Susan Greenfield. She is an amazing 59 year old woman and a specialist on the physiology of the brain, a professor at the department of pharmacology at Oxford university in the UK. A serious, serious academic.
I am dedicating this post to her achievements and to the Ada Lovelace day, and to this pledge.
I had to read the article several times to try and understand what she is saying. After all, she is a top neuroscientist. You can’t simply dismiss what she says. Being a mother of 3 children – I want to know.
I am already poisoning my kids with un-organic food, we live in a polluted city, there are cellular antennas in the neighborhood, not to mention their personal mobile phones. Am I doing some more damage to their brains by letting them have a Facebook account??
Anxiously I was looking for scientific hints in the article. The research conducted… the methods and subjects… anything to learn a little more. But the most scientific reference I found was: she “believes repeated exposure could effectively ‘rewire’ the brain”.
OK.
The article quotes her saying “Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo are said to shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centered” and then adds the quote “My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.”
Last month, the same lady, who is a member of the house of lords said “I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitized and easier screen dialogues…, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf,” arguing that exposure to computer games, instant messaging, chat rooms and social networking sites “could leave a generation with poor attention spans”.
Well, hello and welcome to E V O L U T I O N.
Indeed not all evolutions do well for the specie. Think Mammoth for instance. Perhaps we are doomed.
But, does this mean we have to exclude all new media and stick with the old ways? Is preserving the current wiring of the brain more important than developing and arriving at new, yet unknown, places?
Here is something to think of. My 9th grader told me about her new History text book. Text books are rarely noted or gaining any sort of comment from a teenager. But she actually pointed out that this is a rather good book to study from. The book’s uniqueness is by adding several different fields of information into each page. Allowing the students to follow the main text while absorbing other types of information, some are minor others are accented.
When I encountered this fantastic presentation by Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins – things fit. I already wrote about it here.
I am not a scientist. But I believe that Lady Susan Greenfield is right. The young brains do go through some re-wiring. Sarah Robbins is right too. Students today are capable of handling a lot more information then students in the past. Call it “poor attention spans” if you like. I actually think it’s rich attention span.
I know that my Kids find it easier to absorb and process several sensory and information sources at once. They are certainly more successful at it than most adults I know and I believe they are better at it then I was as a student. Excuse me for not crediting social networking or penguin club with these achievements. I give most of the credit to the environment they are growing into and the future they are naturally preparing for.
Some of the many comments made to the article on “The Mail” try to dismiss everything as an oldie attacking the younger generation. Which makes you wonder really, about how society related to various media changes in the past century, or better yet – from print, through phones, to mass and digital media.
Still one question remains: can we really fight it, or should we find a way to use it to society’s advantage?
“We look at the present through a rear view mirror; we walk backwards into the future” is one of my favorite Marshall McLuhan quotes. The man who said “The medium is the message” and “The user is the content” tens of years before the web 2.0 made its first steps has a unique perspective on evolution.
I was thinking about the medium and the user following several education-related video presentations I watched recently. I would like to mention two; both are talking about today’s education, in relation to the past.
It will be wrong to say that we live in an era of great changes or a surprising rise of new technologies. It will be wrong, because this is not an era. This is it. It started with the invention of the writing, moving us from pre-history to history. The next great leap was the industrial revolution. Evolution has been on that course of rapid developments and constant changes ever since. Some aspects of life keeping up and some being left behind. Unfortunately, one of the most important aspects of civilization is having trouble keeping up. That’s education. Individuals are doing great jobs sometimes. But as a whole, education is in trouble.
How relevant to today’s education can a 40 year old quote be? How relevant can a 160 year old quote be?
“Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment, where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects, and schedules”.
This opening statement, to a presentation made by university students, quotes “Marshall McLuhan, 1967”.
The same presentation ends with another brilliant quote: “The inventor of the system deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not the greatest benefactors of mankind”. Quote by Josiah F. Bumstead, made in 1841 on the benefits of the chalkboard.
Looking back at the invention of the chalkboard this was the previous revolution to education. At the time it was perceived more as an innovation than as a revolution. A revolution is happening nowadays too. And surprisingly, it is also perceived more as an innovation than as a revolution.But an Australian school is demonstrating its full grasp of the revolution in a series of 9 short videos, linked to from the Flickschool blog.
Watching them I felt happy: Someone has finally got it and is actually saying it out loud.While the teacher’s role in the past was to teach, to pass on material to students, the teachers today need to understand that their role in the society has changed. It’s a revolutionary transition from a giver’s role, where the students are passive, to an enabler role, where the students assume an active role. Moreover, as a learning-enabler or adviser, the teachers themselves become active learners. And they learn from their students too.
Many teachers complain about the downgrade in the teacher’s status in the eyes of their students. Students hardly look up to teachers as they used to do some 30 years ago maybe. Teachers who are respected are those who respect their students. And I can see it every day as a mother and as an active PTA member.
As a communications strategist, working with hi-tech companies, I can honestly say that learning enabling is the highest value of all and the only expectation I have of school. If in the past a teacher would be preparing his students for a well known set of professions, it is clear, and even clearer over the last 20-30 years, that teachers couldn’t have prepared us, for those professions which they had no idea would exist. Who would have thought of a New Media specialist 20 years ago? E-business? Homeland security? Organic agriculture?
You can look around you and see who the people who learned-how-to-learn are. The teaching and studying environments change. But if you think that computers are the new teaching tools – you are greatly mistaken. Computers, like the chalkboard, mark the environment. The tool has never changed throughout the history of mankind: curiosity remains the single most important quality and tool of the learner.
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