Week 5: Reading Reflection

In the article "Put Understanding First," Wiggins and McTighe argue (correctly, I believe) that high schools teach skills too much "in isolation," and without providing a context either for using the skills or for appreciating that they are important. As I read, I was thinking about the (many, many, many) instances of this facts-without-application problem that I've encountered, as well as situations where a teacher managed to circumvent it, whether intentionally or by accident. The one that most stuck in my mind is actually a case where I don't think the authors of the article would have, at first glance, thought anything good was happening--but to me it suggests that there are more factors to be considered than just changing the way we give tests.

The article uses history classes as examples several times, and the subject seems to present an unusually thorny issue for educators. I think much of the problem comes from teachers and schools not wanting to appear to be pushing an agenda. The examples Wiggins and McTighe give of how to be a better history teacher would have to be followed very carefully, with lots of emphasis on the students forming their own conclusions, or run the risk of biasing the lesson. I'm not for censoring teachers, really (the teacher I describe below definitely had an agenda, even if it was mostly just to poke fun at any historical personage who took his or her own ideology too seriously), but there's enough of a battle going to keep creationism out of science classrooms that I don't fancy giving prejudiced or highly religious teachers an open license to revise history. We have required curricula for a reason. We just need to figure out a better way to teach them.

More than once, the article references the history class scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I only vaguely remember the film (despite having seen it about fifteen times--why did all my high school teachers think that was the one movie they should show the day before Christmas or after AP exams? Did they think it made them seem edgy to show a movie about skipping school?), but I get the reference: monotone teacher drones on and on, answering his own questions.

Weirdly enough, I had a history teacher like that, but he was anything but dull. He was such an odd man (he'd come back from Vietnam a bit shell-shocked, looked like a cross between between Lurch from The Addams Family and Henry Blake on M*A*S*H, and was known for spending any time he wasn't teaching napping in his hard wooden desk chair), and his teaching method--a detailed outline of the day's material on the board, with blanks where names, dates, and figures would be filled in as he lectured--was so clever (the need to know what went into the blanks was irresistible), nobody ever zoned out in his class. He'd been using the same outlines and the same exams for decades. When the Emperor of Japan died in 1989, he simply crossed out 'Hirohito' and wrote in 'Akihito' on the typescript of the test (I hope nobody got that question wrong)... and was still handing it out with the Scantron sheets in 2001. He rarely asked questions of the class, and when he did they were more or less rhetorical. But it worked. He told stories as he lectured, some of them about his own (absurdly-exciting-for-a-suburban-teacher) life, some quirky, non-textbook side notes to the historical data (I distinctly remember him raising his eyebrows and making a crack about the dubious paternity of Genghis Khan's oldest child), and some that I'm pretty sure were just made up. It was riveting. And by being so clearly fascinated with his subject, and so unapologetically confident that it was of utmost importance to living in the real world, he made us believe it too.

I'm not sure how to address the issue of "transfer" with Mr. Gillespie's classes--the teaching and testing were at first glance exactly what Wiggins and McTighe take issue with. But there's something to be said for being able to capture the unwavering attention of a two dozen fifteen-year-olds for an hour a day, five days a week, nine months a year. In some cases, really good, retention-building teaching is just about being a good teacher. And just because we've realized that we need some new methods of teaching doesn't mean the old ones never worked.