Back
March 2nd, 2009It’s been awhile.
After any hiatus, especially an unplanned one, there’s always a certain difficulty in getting back into the swing of things. February was full of changes—to put it mildly—and though some of the changes were certainly good things for me and my family, others were much more difficult and for more people.
But that was February. March will, one hopes, be better.
Did anyone catch The Simpsons Sunday evening? There’s nothing better than good satire to show how absurd something is, and Sunday the show took a good look at standardized testing.
Nobody liked standardized testing,¹ and at this point, it’s become so easy to poke holes in it that it’s hardly humorous anymore. It wasn’t all that daring or subversive for the show to pick on testing, but I do like the way they did hammer home what better education can look like.
I’m laughing at the scene where Principal Skinner uses “the principal of conservation of angular momentum” to turn a giant container that threatens to harm one of his students—and the kid’s response: “That is so cool… why don’t they teach us that at school?”
Skinner’s rejoinder is brilliant, “We do teach this in school! You’re too busy eating sugar snacks and horsing around.”²
We do teach this in school—but for many of our kids, seeing it up on the board, or hearing about it from a teacher, isn’t enough to let them see how it affects them. It’s not the kid’s fault—how many of us really got interested in something until we saw how it made an impact on us personally?
All of which is the point of extended learning opportunities (ELOs). They’re that hard part of teaching—of getting the kids outside the classroom, and involved in doing real work. Too often, our kids watch the teacher do the work—and though there is a time and a place for the lecture, for the diagrams on the board, this happens too much. One of the best, most exciting things that happening in the building is that everyone is talking about ELOs—and starting to wonder how to create their own.
The problem is providing the time—which is not always, or even often, the choice of the classroom teacher. One of the things we’ll need to change if we’re going to do more with our kids is provide more oppurtunity to do it in. But that’s another conversation.
1 Even when we do really well on them. ↺
2 You can watch the segment here: It’s at the 17:31 minute mark. ↺
