More Coffee, Please

One of the great design elements of MC² is the time available to work with the students to come to an understanding of the material. In the traditional high school, with its goal of covering the curriculum assigned, there’s less time to sit down and meet with students. Even when we do sit down and meet with them, it often feels wrong, or isn’t viewed as real teaching.¹

But it’s only in those conversations that we find what the kids need in order to understand. And it might be the smallest, tiniest piece that a kid is missing that makes all the difference—and we will never know until we talk to them.

Today I had a conversation with a student about China and the United States—and the advantage that population plays, as well as potential markets for goods. I kept saying “three hundred million” and “one-point-two billion” and yet, for some reason, the kid kept maintaining that the United States was the place to be.

I was tempted to ascribe this to youthful patriotism (love of country is something I can get behind) but then the kid, just as frustrated with me, said something along the lines of, “By your own arguments, the US will be better because there are so many more.”

I stopped. “Which country has more?”

“The United States. Three hundred million to 1.2 billion.”

A long pause. And then, as kindly and gently as I could, taking everything that eight years of teaching had taught me and thousands of interactions with students, I said, “A billion is bigger than a million.”

Pause. “Oh… right. ‘B’ before ‘M’, so billion is more. I always forget that.”

It’s not hard to imagine this happening in a regular classroom—and the kid staying very confused? It happens all the time—and my conversation above is a very minor example.

How’s this one? I was talking to a freshman student who had notes due in class. The problem? He didn’t know how to set up the notecards, didn’t know what was meant by a fact, and thought that if he copied the words down by hand, then that was okay.

See, the student was told to not copy and paste… and he wasn’t.

I’m sure this student isn’t alone—I know he’s not, I had seniors in high school who couldn’t define what a fact was—and every year, and in multiple classrooms we tell the kids to write research papers or anything else without being sure they have the skills to do it.

Seriously, how many people will just know this stuff? What is a way to organize their notes? What is a way to take citations? There are wonderful tools out there, and any of those “low tech” solutions would work.

Never mind the question of when we’re going to teach them how to do real research, and be able to really keep it under control.² That type of skill isn’t on anyone’s radar—the curriculum says, “research paper” and nothing else.

Which is fine—they should do a research paper. But whoever we decide should teach them how to do research needs to figure out a year-by-year breakdown of how that should look—and what steps should be present—and then everyone needs to get on the ball and require it. If the school decides that every piece of research done will be via note-cards, then everyone should require that—it’s the only way to get the practice in the basic skills that will be the engine to drive success later.

Too often, a student is given an assignment, and not the understanding to get it done—but we can fix that, as long as we recognize that this is the area where we need to focus.

1 The classic example I can think of is my first year teaching: It was 8th grade English, and the big project for that year was the walk to, and time spent, at Mt. Caesar Union Cemetery. This was (and, I believe, still is) a key part of an 8th grade English class, and the final piece (after doing some research and some investigation) is the creation of an original story about the person in one of those graves. I spent a week having one-on-one conferences with the kids and giving them feedback on the work they’ve done. Still, at the end of the week, the comment was, “well, what did you teach?” If teaching is always being in the front of the room, talking, then I think there’s a need to stop and look for the student to learn, and make sure we provide time for that. ↺

2 In college, my wife started a paper that climbed to over a hundred sources, and she started organizing them all by hand. I nearly died… I couldn’t imagine doing that. When I find a source, it goes into software to keep track of it. How else is there to do it? I have thinking and writing to do… What am I? A neanderthal? ↺

Gregarious

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