Our house is consumed with "finals." Final exams, final harvests, final days of middle school, finally running the marathon... we sit on the precipice of a lot of ends.
Watching my children cram for their finals has frustrated me to no end. I don't have the cramming spirit in me, I never have. Cramming involves trying to stuff tiny bits of data into a stressed and overloaded brain. It's one of the things that drives me CRAZY about our western format of education. It's all multiple-choice and formulas. Sadly, doing well in this paradigm does not mean you are well educated.
I worry that we have "educated" ourselves right out of the ability to reason. To think. To figure out.
The things that matter in life, require such effort. Plugging numbers into a formula may help you figure out the radius of a circle, but let's face it, until you're sewing a giant tree skirt you'd be hard-pressed to find a real-life application for that formula.
When all is said and done, I'm not sure I care if my children can select the right bubble on an answer sheet. I do care if they can tell me why three of the bubbles are the wrong answers. I care if they can give me another example of a right answer. I care if they can design their own botanical fashion lines.
I want my children to reason. To understand WHY they hold opinions. WHY they think the things they do. WHY they know the things they know. None of that stuff is testable on a bubble-sheet, it requires articulation, nuance and facets. It requires holding convictions that were forged, not borrowed.
They'll get through finals just fine. In fact, a monkey could get through bubble sheet finals pretty well. My hope is that these concepts are not actually Final, after all.
There are fields where the radius of a circle is important. One of my old boyfriends used to make fun of me for how much time I spent on calculus homework. He once asked me what I would ever use it for in "real life". I told him you need it to build a bridge. He insisted he could build one without it. And I insisted that I could build a better one with it. Turnes out if I didn't know calculus I could never work as a civil engineer, not that I ever really will because I want to be a stay-at-home mom. But the point is, I could and I would need to know all of those "useless" equations to solve all of the engineering problems in this world.
Lisa Marie
May 25, 2010 at 12:07 PM
Amen Sister!...and if our children (and ourselves) do not learn how to apply the knowledge we gain (mainly by jumping through hoops and filling in bubble sheets rather than hands on skirt sewing experiences) eventually apathy solidifies and attitudes of why even bother learning anything sets in.
Suz
May 27, 2010 at 2:07 PM