Chapter 2 in our book
written by Daniel Strong touches upon the “hidden curriculum”, something that I
myself am a victim of. I use the word victim because it has caused me to often
times believe that learning is about a grade and not being about learning.
Learning is about practice, experience, and risk. The risk part of learning is
where I feel learning is wounded in our educational practices. The risk isn’t
trying something new or expanding on ideas, the risk is passing the class.
With the risk of school
work being on making the grade, how can we really make students explore their
learning and make it their own? In high school, I could be handed an assignment
sheet on comparing a common motif between two novels in four pages, with a
clear rubric, and I could do it in a matter of 3 hours and hit all the main
points. At the least, I would say that paper would get a B+/ A-, but I couldn’t
really tell you about what I wrote about, or what I learned 3 months later.
I don’t think this
grade is proof of learning. And I think that it may be because this assignment
is fake. I say it is fake because there is no connection to the student.
Assignments like this have students regurgitating the ideas that are being
passed around in class. There is no real room for personal opinion, or real
world connections.
So now I am curious as
to how we can eliminate this hidden curriculum of school being about grades,
and make it about learning. Some ideas that I have already began playing with
are giving real world assignments. Instead of just assigning something where
you say pretend we are writing this to the local paper, actually write it to
the paper. Connecting lessons to current events, make school about the outside
world we are preparing them for. And of course the 5 minute break down at the
end of class, where what was learned that day is addressed and the importance
of it is uncovered. What are some ideas that you may have to make school about
learning and not about grades?
On a side note, I type
into google, why do we study literature, and I got this dry, boring reply: http://www.ask.com/question/why-do-we-study-literature.
As a high school student asking this question, I would have replied, “why does
any of that matter in life?” I’m beginning to think that school and “real life”
are two different things and that there needs to be a bridge over that gap
connecting the two.
This is one of the main reasons why I am so disillusioned with the current state of education, and not only at the high school level. As a college student who is paying for each and every course I take, I don't want to be told that I don't have choice in my courses. For example, coming in to college, I knew that I wanted to study history, English, and secondary education. Unfortunately, rather than being able to delve right into the things I actually WANTED to learn, I had to take course after course in general education that I had no interest in. I felt like I was taking my hard-earned money and basically putting it to the torch. This, to me, can be connected back to the high-school curriculum as well. I know that students need to exit school with a basic understanding of many disciplines, and that this is the reason for the current system where students take courses in a variety of subjects. This is where you get students who coast by, just trying to make the grade; students who fall victim to the "hidden curriculum" you discuss. I would argue that the more electives we cut, the more music, art, and different classes we get rid of, the more standardized and boring education becomes. Each student emerges a jack of all trades, but a lifelong learner of none. Students need more active involvement in things that connect to life outside academia, and need to know that learning isn't about what you know, it's about what you want to know.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about giving students real world assignments and connecting things to the outside world. A very popular question in school is always "when are we going to use this in life?" and from what I can remember, the teacher would never really give much of an answer. I think when students are learning things that they don't ever expect to use again, they do just do the work to pass the class and get the grade. But if they understand how what they're learning connects to the real world, then they would be more interested in learning how to do it and it would no longer just be about doing the work, getting the grade, and forgetting the lesson. I can remember my 8th grade math teacher teaching us how to balance a checkbook. We got fake checks and made fake payments and everything. And I still remember the whole class being way more interested in that lesson than the lesson about slope. So I definitely think that the more the students understand why what they're learning will benefit them and the more it applies to life outside of school, the less it becomes about grades and the more it becomes about learning.
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