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A Modest Curriculum Proposal
May 17, 2007 | | Leave a Comment
I plucked this from an article the edutopia website . I think it is a brilliant analogy as to where we need to be going in schools…
“In discussing the need for hands-on science learning, Nichols asked us to imagine parents at the dinner table asking their young son or daughter that age-old question “What did you learn in school today?” The child shrugs, as children often do, and says, “We learned to play basketball.” The parents then ask, “How did you do that?” The child answers, “Well, we sat in the gym and the teacher passed out these books, and we turned to chapter one, about passing the basketball, and we learned there are three types of passes: the bounce pass, the chest pass, and the one-handed pass.”
“OK,” parents would say, wanting to know more, “what happened next?” The child continues, “We read the next chapter about dribbling. And another chapter on shooting. We learned there’s the set shot, the bank shot, and the jump shot.” After a few minutes of this recitation, the parents, increasingly exasperated, challenge their child: “But did the teacher ever give you a basketball and let you go on the court and play?” “No,” the child says with a sigh. “We just read the book until the bell rang.”
Nichols said that no parent in America would stand for this, for sports to be taught to their children only through reading and through memorizing basketball terminology. Sports require observing oneself performing and watching others perform. Coaches and athletes routinely make use of videotape analysis of games to improve performance. Yet millions of parents settle for science, mathematics, history, and many other subjects taught through rote memorization of vocabulary from textbooks, and students never get a chance to actively perform real science or conduct authentic historical study.”
By Milton Chen, executive director of The George Lucas Educational Foundation..”…
It got me to think about other subjects such as Drama, Art and Computers, and how students create or re-create a performance for feedback, analysis, and personal gratification. I think about students attitude towards these subjects and the effort they put into them and how they never fail to remind me that it is time to go to the lab, or its time to do art. And why is it that if a student isn’t very good at playing an instrument or at drawing and colouring we just chalk it up to “oh well, that kid is never going to be an artist!” But if someone struggles in Algebra or Geometry or Grammar we worry beyond belief, have in-service days on improving our assessment and evaluation, and say things like “we need to get back to basics”. I think some serious adjustments need to made to the organization and structure of the school in order to prepare our students for the future.
