Love the book, the blog, and all of your work. Please keep it up!

We spend far to much money and time teaching our youth how to take standardized test. In his recent book, Linchpin, Seth Godin wrote: “We train the factory workers of tomorrow. Our graduates are very good at following instructions. [...] So, it it any surprise that people have learned to fit in, do the standardized test, keep heads down, obey instructions? … ” He goes on to say that, “Well-intentioned teachers don’t want to do this, but the system often gives them no choice. The work of creating positive change in a class room is daunting, and without enough time and support, it’s a tough slog.”

It is very frustrating. Class time is not available to invest in innovative teaching because it has to be used for programmed teaching and preparation to take ‘the test’. I believe change is possible, but it will take a lot of work. We must be engaged!

Great post … thanks for sharing.

Rick

I had a college professor (of special topics in theater history) of whom it became known rather widely that his grading was, let us say, pretty flexible. Your paper could wind up being on a thesis, or topic, completely different than the one he’d approved. If you stumbled across something tangential in your research that you were more interested in, you could just ditch your actual topic and go with that. I saw classmates’ presentations of papers in which they said, essentially, that they felt they completely failed to argue what they had set out to. Basically, if you wound up saying something interesting or original, you’d get an A, even if what you did didn’t particularly conform to the assignment.

It would be easy to think that this would be an encouragement to slack off and half-ass the work for this class, but that’s not what I saw happening. I absolutely agonized over my papers for this class–I wanted to write something true and meaningful and well-supported, even though I knew that he was going to be pretty lax about how the paper itself turned out. What he cared about was whether you wound up more knowledgeable and a better reader, and most importantly, more interested in the subject.