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| I’m a professional writer and editor, not a teacher. But having spent most of my life on one side or the other of the educational process, I have some thoughts I’d like to share. 1. The first is that teaching isn’t just telling. Teaching is a communication process. If the person on the other end hasn’t heard and understood, you have failed to communicate no matter how long you’ve talked. That’s why the best teachers are artists--creative people who use everything their fertile minds can think of to motivate students to learn. Whether the students are children or adults, using visual aids, stories or dramatic readings and drawing on their own experiences can enrich the learning process. 2. The second is that you can’t test what you haven’t taught. Testing is destroying education in our nation today. Teachers are spending all their time teaching students to answer specific questions on specific tests, cheating them out of the basic purpose of education--learning to think for themselves. Sure, there is plenty of factual subject matter we need to know, but no one can learn it all. And there are vast resources, both in libraries and on the Internet, to look up facts when you need them. You need to learn to think when you're young, or you may not learn to think at all. To arbitrarily determine that a person of a particular age should master a specific list of skills and information is almost certain to limit them. And to require students to pass tests over material they haven’t learned almost certainly leads to a sense of failure and a hatred of, or at least indifference toward, learning. Many students can't read well enough to understand the test questions in the first place. Others lack the vocabulary to make fine distinctions. So much depends on the educational level of the home a person was reared in, that depending on tests to determine success perpetuates an underclass in much the same way that raising taxes on the poor and cutting taxes on the wealthy does. 3. Third, education trains students to think. Much of education, far from being simple facts, has to do with how we put those facts together. The best education helps the student combine what they already know with new facts and resources to think through questions and explore the world around them. People are naturally curious, and the best education stimulates that curiosity and encourages them to pursue various strains of inquiry. Student-directed learning will be more effective, because we all retain much more of what we figure out for ourselves than what we’re merely told. 4. Finally, effective education takes into account the variety of ways we learn. Different people learn different ways. Some recall much of what they’ve read. Some recall most of what they’ve done. Very few recall what they’ve heard. Probably the best education combines all three ways. Education is an important part of all our experiences, but the most effective is creative, builds on what we already know, draws on all our resources and stimulates us to want to learn more. The world has become so complex that we all must be lifetime learners. It helps to learn to enjoy it! |
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| Billie Silvey |
| What Is Teaching? |
| September 2006 |
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