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Blog: FCAR
Speakout
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What can a 6-year-old and her buddy
teach us about learning?
By Marion Brady
*July 7, 2002
I got an e-mail a few days ago from Andras, a friend who lives in a village just
north of Budapest, Hungary. Andras teaches probability theory in the math
department of a university.
I got to know him, his wife, Mari, and their three daughters when he came to
America about a dozen years ago as an exchange teacher. My wife and I have
visited him and his now-larger family twice since he returned to Hungary. The
second time, we slept in a new room they had just added to their house, one with
lots of windows. They call it their "Florida room."
When Andras arrived in America just before the start of school, his daughter
Panni, 6 years old at the time, was put in a first-grade class in the elementary
school nearest their house. Her knowledge of English began and ended with the
single sentence: "I love you."
As might be expected, getting class under way left no time for the teacher to
give Panni individual attention. So she did the best she could given the
circumstances: She gave Panni a 6-year-old buddy.
There was, of course, no available formal language instruction, no
English-Hungarian dictionary, no useable textbook, no worksheets, no oral
exercises, no vocabulary lists to study, no rules of grammar to memorize, no
one-on-one with the teacher. There was just Panni, her buddy, and a roomful of
first-graders.
Never mind. When we got together during the Christmas holidays that year, Panni
chattered away in English. No trace of an accent, no hesitating for an
unfamiliar word, no hint that English wasn't her native language. By the end of
the year, the teacher considered her one of her best students.
Panni still speaks English like an American.
A whole philosophy of education could be built on what Panni accomplished.
Our present approach to education could be described as "highly structured." If
you're born on a particular day, school attendance is required. If you're born a
day or two later, you wait for a year to be enrolled. There's a prescribed
curriculum. Ages are matched to grade levels. A minute-by-minute schedule
dictates when to work, play, eat lunch, take a nap. Routine says when to sit
down, stand up, line up. Deadlines are in place for the mastering of particular
skills and for demonstrating knowledge of particular facts. If deadlines aren't
met, there are consequences.
From the structure, learning emerges. But do this: Start with what kids learn
from school. Subtract what they forget. Compare the total with what they learned
on their own just in those first four or so years before formal schooling began.
Out of the formal, structured experience comes, mostly, some basic skills and
the kind of stuff from which multiple choice tests are constructed. Out of the
unstructured experience comes everything else, everything from the learning of a
difficult language to a working knowledge of an entire way of life. Some of the
complexities of that way of life were noted by Robert Fulgham in his, Everything
I really needed to know I learned in kindergarten.
I wonder. Do we vastly overestimate the value of structure and routine in
learning, and underestimate the value of chaos and complexity? Do chaos and
complexity force kids to think, to search for sense-making patterns in the world
around them? And is that seemingly haphazard search a major source of
intellectual growth?
I don't know the answers, but the questions may deserve a lot more attention
that they get. If the answers are "yes," or even "maybe," there are practical
implications. It could mean, for example, that the time devoted to classroom
work and the time devoted to field trips should be reversed. Maybe on a typical
day kids should be outside, poking and prodding the real world and seeing for
themselves what makes it tick. Maybe sitting all day in a box passively studying
secondhand opinions in textbooks doesn't make as much sense as we think it does.
Maybe the classroom should be just a convenient place to visit occasionally to
clarify tasks, summarize findings, make presentations to parents, or perhaps
pick up checks from local businesses or other organizations in payment for
research projects completed and other services rendered.
Less structure? More structure? Which would be better?
We'll probably never know.
*First published in the Orlando Sentinel. Posted here
with permission of the author.
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