Paulo Friere identifies the practice of teachers speaking at students as "narration sickness." Narration sickness happens when a teacher performs a predominately speaking role, requiring students to be listeners who absorb information only.
Standardized testing encourages narration sickness. The treatment of knowledge as formalistic, devoid of substance, to the end of performing acceptably on a standardized benchmark requires narration sickness. Because in this way, students can memorize structures and sounds and appearances in order to better fill in circles of a machine-readable answer sheet. No Child Left Behind links this behavior to the school's survival, making it necessary for educators to engage in narration sickness.
In 2006 I took a geometry class, mostly on the subject of axiomatic systems. The teacher did not fully engage in narration sickness, but the classes were very tightly controlled. By tightly controlled, I mean the hour schedule of class was carefully planned to fit the lecture that was given. Students rarely had a chance to ask questions and discussion was not factored into the lecture time.
The concepts being taught required greater depth, but unfortunately it was presented in a more formalistic and concrete way--which included demonstrations for homework assignments which we were to essentially mime. Most learning, it seemed, came from reading the class text with other students in the class while working on homework assignments. I would have preferred the class been given the depth it needed during lectures at the very least, or perhaps if more discussion had been involved we would have reached the deeper ideas. I found the teaching style to be a disadvantage to learning.
The year before, I was taking Calculus I and II in the spring from a different professor. The professor was extremely knowledgeable about the mathematics--and clearly enjoyed teaching the subject. He presented the mathematics as a series of concepts and relationships. We were encouraged to ask questions at several points, and the resulting discussion was always harnessed to be of benefit to the rest of the class. Disagreements were welcomed, even with the organization and choices of direction for instructing the class, and these were patiently explained--which typically the majority of the glass came to agree with.
One disagreement was interesting: Why demonstrate the proofs of calculus, rather than memorize and compute results to problems, on exams? The student had taken calculus in high school in Sioux Falls--he claimed to already know much of calculus and anticipated college level calculus to be very similar in its instruction and testing. He argued that in high school, they had been shown the proofs for derivative rules, and simply had to memorize and use the rules to compute results. Why couldn't college level calculus be the same? Several more recent high school graduates supported the question.
The professor told the student, and the others, that mathematics is not just about computing and memorizing. Mathematics is about ideas--limits, infinity, and the derivatives--not just their actual application. Proofs represent the underlying ideas, the most important point. One cannot just be told to memorize some things, memorize them, and then use them. They must be earned. We did earn them. But only used them in order to accomplish higher level proofs.
The class, its methods of being taught and the subject matter, changed the way I thought and is one of few classes that I can fairly say have been valuable to me personally and professionally.
I believe the Athenians would have upheld the idea of problem-posing education over the banking concept of education. The visigoths would not have appreciated or been interested in the depth of knowledge, much less its education to others.
This year, I am lucky to have most of my classes, with the exception of Web Design, as involving discussion and problem-posing. Web Design permits questions and discussion, but the coursework isn't smoothly organized (some students have really struggled) and follows the textbook too closely to be of much better value than memorizing code and following instructions.
"The class, its methods of being taught and the subject matter, changed the way I thought and is one of few classes that I can fairly say have been valuable to me personally and professionally." This was a fair and objective assessment of this class. I am pleased you took advantage of it.
ReplyDelete