Cheating the Kids?

Students Say High Schools Let Them Down
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
A large majority of high school students say they would
work harder if courses were more demanding or interesting,
according to an online nationwide survey of teenagers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/16/education/16STUDENTS.html?th&emc=th

........................................................

Certainly this report accords with what I find as the mind states of my students newly arrived from high school. It is a struggle at the beginning of each class to persuade them that learning can be fun and rewarding -- not simply a routine in which I crank out facts for them to parrot back later to be forgotten as soon as a class final exam has been completed.

This teaching to the test mentality also breeds with it figuring how to cheat on the tests and papers at which students have become quite adept in this era of high technology. I take this up directly with my students who admit to their own cheating and try to get them to realize that cheating now and later is simply going to be self-defeating -- "Do you want to marry someone who cheats?" I design my courses so that cheating is nearly impossible. I still receive some papers that are plagiarized so that a percentage of my students never receive grades in my courses -- in our system grades for uncompleted courses are converted eventually to Fs -- or the students are sometimes allowed to withdraw from a course after the fact and only lose the tuition that they have paid for it.

One of the first courses that I was assigned to teach was philosophy of education. Having no background in this field, I ran to the best philosopher of education that I knew, Phil Phoenix at Columbia Teachers College, for a course suggestions. I had my students (two of whom became teachers of my own children) read the classics such as Dewey and Whitehead. Each has profound, if obvious, things to say about teaching and learning -- particularly that it should be a fun and interesting process that unlocks the natural talents of the student as well as an exposure to disciplines.

I then went on variously to serve on as a philosophy of education advisor to the James Conant (former President of Harvard) Five College Committee of Teacher Education (which focused on both my then teaching college, Vassar, and my future one, Brooklyn College, CUNY) and later for a year with an NEH grant as a philosophy of education advisor to our School of Education at Brooklyn College. That first teaching course along with my own children's early education in the Bank St. School for Children (very Dewey and Whitehead oriented then) reaffirmed the lessons that I had learned myself as a teacher. The point of it all is to teach students how to educate themselves -- not simply to cram into their heads disembodied trivia.

It is ironic that here in the U.S., where we have pioneered such ways of learning, we now do not employ them in our school systems which have been captured by the 'teaching to the test' animal psychology techniques of learning and teaching that superseded our own best philosophies -- but that is another story. See how Thorndike converted our kids to rats!

http://www.answers.com/topic/edward-thorndike

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thorndike
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to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
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Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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