Who was FDR? (or: substitute teaching, day 3)
Today I entered the world of the 8th graders, one which is markedly different from their peers' a mere year behind. 8th grade civics was the subject, and economics the busy-work topic. I'd like to note that the teacher (he was there the first few minutes), who seemed quite capable, decided on the textbook pages to cover with the comment, "There's a lot of good stuff in here [we're skipping], but they're not covered on the SOL. And," he added with a sigh, "what we care about is the SOL."
Part of the work involved defining vocabulary terms like recession and business cycle -- definitions which students copied straight out of the glossary, unsurprisingly. I decided to do one of the response questions with the whole class as a way of ascertaining if they were actually understanding the concepts or just scribbling definitions and committing them to short-term memory. The particular excercise involved matching problems during the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal solutions (as an aside, more than one 8th grader asked me, "Who was FDR?"). Here's the way the conversation went:
Me: "So, what was started to deal with the problem of bank failures?"
Class: *Scours the book for a bit* "The FDIC!"
Me: "Great, can you read the sentence where you found that?"
Class: *Reads aloud that the FDIC was created to insure bank transcations*
Me: "Ok, can anyone tell me what that actually means? Beyond just the textbook definition, what does the FDIC actually do?"
Class: *Silence*
Me: "Ok... let's start with this: can anyone tell me how a bank works?"
Class: *Silence*
Rinse and repeat that with the Security & Exchange Commission, Civilian Conservation Corps ("a dam? Why would you ever need to build a dam?") and social security. There was an utter absence of not only functional knowledge, but any sort of contextual knowledge. If I wanted to actually teach about the CCC in an economic sense, for example, I would have the students do some sort of project involving unemployment. Part of the assignment would be to research the history of the federal government's involvement in handling unemployment, which would require the students to reckon with the CCC, except in a meaningful and integrated fashion. Problem is, all that the SOL cares about is that kids can answer the question, "Which of FDR's New Deal policies was designed to fix the unemployment problem?"
I know the view I'm getting is slightly skewed because I'm only a substitute and the work is necessarily less intense, but my point is this: What I've been talking about on this blog for a year -- the lack of critical thinking skills in the classroom, the degree to which setting our assessments at low levels leads to teaching at low levels -- is not abstract. It's real, it exists, and, if only for a few hundred students at one middle school in central Virginia, I've lived it.
Part of the work involved defining vocabulary terms like recession and business cycle -- definitions which students copied straight out of the glossary, unsurprisingly. I decided to do one of the response questions with the whole class as a way of ascertaining if they were actually understanding the concepts or just scribbling definitions and committing them to short-term memory. The particular excercise involved matching problems during the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal solutions (as an aside, more than one 8th grader asked me, "Who was FDR?"). Here's the way the conversation went:
Me: "So, what was started to deal with the problem of bank failures?"
Class: *Scours the book for a bit* "The FDIC!"
Me: "Great, can you read the sentence where you found that?"
Class: *Reads aloud that the FDIC was created to insure bank transcations*
Me: "Ok, can anyone tell me what that actually means? Beyond just the textbook definition, what does the FDIC actually do?"
Class: *Silence*
Me: "Ok... let's start with this: can anyone tell me how a bank works?"
Class: *Silence*
Rinse and repeat that with the Security & Exchange Commission, Civilian Conservation Corps ("a dam? Why would you ever need to build a dam?") and social security. There was an utter absence of not only functional knowledge, but any sort of contextual knowledge. If I wanted to actually teach about the CCC in an economic sense, for example, I would have the students do some sort of project involving unemployment. Part of the assignment would be to research the history of the federal government's involvement in handling unemployment, which would require the students to reckon with the CCC, except in a meaningful and integrated fashion. Problem is, all that the SOL cares about is that kids can answer the question, "Which of FDR's New Deal policies was designed to fix the unemployment problem?"
I know the view I'm getting is slightly skewed because I'm only a substitute and the work is necessarily less intense, but my point is this: What I've been talking about on this blog for a year -- the lack of critical thinking skills in the classroom, the degree to which setting our assessments at low levels leads to teaching at low levels -- is not abstract. It's real, it exists, and, if only for a few hundred students at one middle school in central Virginia, I've lived it.
This entry was posted
on Monday, March 13, 2006 at 3:56 PM.
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