Wrote learning?
I was flipping through some of my old drafts and came across a little something I wrote about this article by Erin O’Connor. I don’t know much about education, but it’s something I find myself mulling over more and more. While I tend to agree with the thrust of this piece, I lean more toward Kathy Sierra’s view.
O’Connor makes a good point about the “do what you will” attitudes of our education system, but I think she over-emphasizes just useful how rote learning and worthless drills are. Methods just aren’t as important as abilities. Take her initial premise of long division. To this day I have no idea how to do long division, and you know what — it ain’t hurt me one bit! In fact, not learning it turned into one of the best I ever did. Long division confused the hell out of me when they used to drill us on it, so I did the only thing I could: I sought out a shortcut and figured out why it worked. I didn’t come up with the shortcut, but in digesting it and QA’ing it to make sure it could do everything they wanted me to use long division for, it lodged itself in my brain.
I often bore people with the story of how I took my GRE — I applied to grad school on a whim so in a rush, I had to fly blind on the test. I’d heard it was a lot like the SAT, and I did pretty well on that, so I signed up and showed up, ready to go — pencils and calculator in hand. I didn’t realize it was on computer-based test — but no big deal. I didn’t realize I couldn’t use a calculator — yeah, that one stung a bit. For brevity’s sake when relaying this, yet another, story of my stupidity, I just say “I had to reteach myself long division”, but to be honest, doing division on paper was about the only thing that came rushing back to me. Obviously addition and subtraction came pretty quick too, but it was multiplication (of bigger numbers) that I had to futz around with forever to relearn.
The bottom line — while I never learned long division, I learned division — not just the how, but the why. I understood why it worked, and had to to get around learning a much more complex system. All because I was lazy. This Erin O’Connor would have you believe I was intellectually lazy, but I beg to differ. She’s right that schools are effectively lying to parents about kids’ abilities, but she misses the point of just what is necessary. As an English prof, grammer matters a good bit in her world, but in the real world, grammer has but one legitimate use — to ease communication; to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the message. If your grammer suffices to achieve these ends, the means don’t matter.
No doubt, the old there/their/they’re confusion, among others, can drive a reader up the wall as well as slow reading comprehension. But these are common mistakes and are easy to fix; easier still for a reader to ignore. The fine grammatical nuances of the English language are of very little use outside the walls of an English class or a courtroom, and we all know it. Just like long division, I couldn’t tell you what a present tense participle actually is (just the first example of grammer jargon that popped in my head). Does this have any impact on my ability to use proper grammer in writing or speaking? Probably not — pattern recognition comes a lot more natural to humans than memorization, and as such, is the sole source of my understanding of grammer.
Does it matter? It hasn’t yet, and probably never will, so long as my message gets across clearly. Besides, if it’s important enough, it can always be once-overed by a grammer-nazi. Or not — hell, some people are more effective without grammar at all…
Starting sentences with words like ‘and’ & ‘because.’ Conversational. Breaks the rules of grammar. Hey, screw spell check!
I know the above diatribe is about methods and not ideology of school choice or the voucher debate, but as a pure-breed public pupil, I tend to associate most the absurdities of my education with public education, though I’m sure they have no monopoly on incompetence…
I find it absolutely fascinating the amount of money poured into (poorly) shaping these young minds!