Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, who has taught English and history for 30 years, writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
The weather is bleak, the government has been shuttered for a month, the president is under mounting suspicion, and the headline event on the National Mall is a YouTube-inflated confrontation between a native elder and a parochial schoolboy. The only good news is Mr. Lincoln hasn’t yet risen up out of his memorial seat and strode off in disgust and disappointment.
Meanwhile public education alternates as usual between recycling bad ideas, commonly known as best-practice innovations, and rediscovering commonsense classroom practices that schools dropped at some time in the past but nobody remembers why or whose fault it was.
Student motivation, or its lack, is one of public education’s perennial hot topics. Even those of us who enjoyed school can remember subjects, teachers, and classes that left us less than enthralled. In the same way, those of us who enjoy our jobs rarely enjoy every aspect of what we do for a living.
Education experts have long chided teachers who don’t prioritize fun in their classrooms. Schools have also ridden variously repackaged waves of “student-centered” education, where children decide what they want to learn. From the resurgent 1960s Summerhill philosophy that rejected any “school lessons unless they are voluntarily chosen,” to the 21st century contrivance touted as “personalized learning,” reformers have attempted to remedy the motivation problem by allowing students to wander academically in the hope that they’ll come home wagging their intellects and a well-rounded set of skills and knowledge behind them.
I’ve even sat through meetings where advocates have asserted that a student’s unwillingness to do his work is a special education “motivational disability.” Naturally, if he can’t want to do his work, we certainly can’t hold him responsible for not doing it.
You think I’m kidding.
I wish I were.
“Student engagement” is the preferred rhetorical fashion today. That’s because motivation sounds too much like it’s the student’s responsibility while engaging students sounds more like it’s the teacher’s job. Motivation also conjures up the controversial schemes that cycle in and out of fashion where students who do their work, or at least some of their work, are rewarded with everything from movie tickets and gaming vouchers to electronics and cash.
Some engagement advocates begin from the premise that “the most meaningful learning happens outside school.” They conclude that engaging students requires connecting what they learn to the “rapidly changing world beyond the school walls,” specifically when they “solve problems, explore ideas, rally for a cause, or learn a new technical skill.”
They cite examples like the elementary student who visited a college biochemistry lab. She was “fascinated by the dry ice bubbling up in water, the multicolored protein solutions,” and the banks of computers, but back at her school science was “boring and irrelevant” because it involved too many “facts and figures and preparing for quizzes and tests.”
Other reformers tout project-based learning where students set out to “solve real world problems.” They spotlight a high school junior who produced an iMovie to promote himself to prospective college lacrosse coaches. Then there’s the case of the high school duo that hacked into their district’s network and came away with passwords, phone numbers, locker combinations, and grades for all 15,000 students. Engagement boosters fault the school for failing to provide “meaningful learning opportunities” suited to the hackers’ particular skills and “tendency for probing boundaries.”
Heading off student felonies isn’t a curriculum goal. There’s more to language and communication than promoting yourself in a video. Bubbling, colored beakers are nothing without science facts and figures.
It’s not that individual student interests and talents never matter. But airy goals like “comprehending everything that’s coming into you” and allowing each student to “own their pathway through the educational system” will inevitably deny children, who are after all not yet educated, the general education that they deserve and that we need them to possess. Our proper task isn’t to make education, meaning the world, relevant to our students. We need instead to make our students relevant to the world by educating them.
Some suggestions for engaging students make sense. For example, proposing that classroom discussions involve “more and deeper questions” wouldn’t be news to Socrates. It’s also advisable that teachers be “transparent” in explaining their purpose in the lessons they’re presenting. Engagement advocates contend that simply saying “it’s in the book” is insufficient.
When I teach grammar, I acknowledge that it can be a dry topic. I also explain that like math it’s systematic, logical, and good training for thinking, which is supposed to be important in the 21st century as it has been in every other century. I remind my class that many of them will one day study a foreign language, and that it’s hard to understand what adverbs are in French if you don’t know what they are in English.
Yes, I try to pique their interest with humor, drama and anecdotes. But in the end I have to hope I’ve earned their trust because much of my ability to lead them into learning comes down to “because I say so,” or because somebody once removed says so.
I’m not afraid to tell them that I know more now than when I was 14.
Advocates like to compare paying me for doing my job with rewarding students for doing their work. Their analogy fails on two counts. First, they ignore the fact that I’m performing a service while my students are receiving a service, just as I do when I visit my physician. Second, my tangible reward for teaching, aside from the satisfaction I derive from working with my students, isn’t my paycheck. My reward over time is the life it allows me to live, the people it allows me to help care for, and their simple freedom from want.
This perspective isn’t popular in these days of instant gratification.
We need to teach our students that their reward for engaging in their education isn’t the feeling they get now.
Their reward is the body of knowledge and skill that’s been refined and handed down through the generations.
As was ours.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Peter Berger: Effective education involves student effort.