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Blog: FCAR
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Testing? YES! -- Standardized
testing? NO!
By Marion Brady
*February 19, 2006
Remember Richard Feynman? Free spirit? Drummer? Adventurer? Teller of funny
stories? Artist? Expert safe cracker? Writer? College professor? Translator of
Mayan hieroglyphics? Member of the team that developed the atomic bomb? Major
contributor to the theory of quantum electrodynamics? Winner of the Nobel Prize
in Physics in 1965?
Remember him? Sure you do! He's the one who dropped an O ring into a glass of
ice water to show the other members of the committee investigating the
Challenger explosion that the rings got brittle and could fail when they were
cold.
He died in 1988. "I'd hate to die twice," he said from his hospital bed. "It's
so boring."
Feynman loved teaching. He said it helped him think more clearly. He also
thought he had a moral obligation to explain very complicated things using the
simplest possible language.
What made him a master teacher, however, wasn't just his words, but his use of
what teachers call "hands-on" activities.
Feynman wrote a stack of serious books with titles like Elementary Particles and
the Laws of Physics and Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry and Space-Time. He also,
however, wrote several not-so-serious books of personal experience, and it's
from one of these -- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! -- that I want to pull a
rather long quote.
He's thinking back to teaching at a university in Brazil, in a building looking
down on a bay. He's remembering handing out Polaroid strips to students and
having to encourage them to actually use them to look at sunlight reflecting off
the water. He follows that with five additional pages of examples of what he saw
as the major teaching and learning problem in higher education in Brazil.
". . . I attended a lecture at the engineering school. The lecture went like
this, translated into English: 'Two bodies . . . are considered equivalent . . .
if equal torques . . . will produce . . . equal acceleration.'
"The students were all sitting there taking dictation, and when the professor
repeated the sentence, they checked it to make sure they wrote it down all
right. Then they wrote down the next sentence, and on and on. I was the only one
who knew the professor was talking about objects with the same moment of
inertia, and it was hard to figure out.
"I didn't see how they were going to learn anything from that. Here he was
talking about moments of inertia, but there was no discussion about how hard it
is to push a door open when you put heavy weights on the outside, compared to
when you put them near the hinge-nothing!
"After the lecture, I talked to a student: 'You take all those notes-what do you
do with them?'
" 'Oh, we study them,' he says. 'We'll have an exam.'
" 'What will the exam be like?'
" 'Very easy. I can tell you now one of the questions.' He looks at his notebook
and says, 'When are two bodies equivalent?'And the answer is, 'Two bodies are
considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal acceleration.'
"So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and 'learn'' all this stuff, and
not know anything at all. . . ."
True in Brazil. True in America. True in schools around the world. Student
ability to merely remember and parrot back words from textbooks or lectures is
mistaken for genuine learning.
The main reason why "hands-on" teaching is much rarer than "talking-heads"
teaching is that it's traditional. Teachers tend to teach as they were taught.
And the main reason "talking-head" teaching continues is standardized testing.
(Be clear about this. Not "testing," but "STANDARDIZED testing.")
Here, in three short sentences, is why No Child Left Behind is dumbing down
America's kids: 1. Teachers always teach to the test. 2. Under NCLB, the only
tests that count are standardized and machine scored rather than teacher created
and scored. 3. Machines can't evaluate and attach a number to complex thought
processes, so complex thought processes don't get taught.
Feynman, wanting to teach about moments of inertia, would probably have just
brought to class a bag of bricks with a way to hook it to the top of a door, and
told his students to get started figuring out the forces involved in moving the
door depending on where the bricks were hung.
And he would surely have considered what he learned from quietly watching and
listening to them experiment and talk about the task a far better indicator of
levels of understanding than anything he could find out from a multiple-choice,
paper-and-pencil, standardized test.
Generations come and go, education-reform fads come and go, education gurus come
and go, critics come and go, but faith in teacher talk, textbooks and
standardized tests goes on forever. You'd think that how little most adults
remember of what they once heard or read in school, compared to how much they
remember of what teachers made them figure out for themselves, would lessen
public resistance to learning by doing.
*Originally published in the Orlando Sentinel. Published here by
permission of the author.
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