by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 29, 2016 | Issues in Education
To begin this post, two anecdotes.
The first one comes from Shamus Khan’s Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. In the book, Khan recounts the following story about a graduate of the uber-elite St. Paul’s school in New Hampshire:
“I don’t actually know much,” an alumnus told me after he finished his freshman year at Harvard. “I mean, well, I don’t know how to put it. When I’m in classes all these kids next to me know a lot more than I do. Like about what actually happened in the Civil War. Or what France did in World War II. I don’t know any of that stuff. But I know something they don’t. It’s not facts or anything. It’s how to think. That’s what I learned in humanities.”
“What do you mean, ‘how to think’?” I asked.
“I mean, I learned how to think bigger. Like, everyone else at Harvard knew about the Civil War. I didn’t. But I knew how to make sense of what they knew about the Civil War and apply it. So they knew a lot about particular things. I knew how to think about everything.” (44) (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 14, 2016 | Blog, Issues in Education
In continuation of my previous post, some thoughts on one of progressive education’s favorite tools: group work.
A good deal of fuss is currently being made of the importance of preparing students to work collaboratively in groups, in preparation for the twenty-first century economy. In the context of these discussions, group work, much like “critical thinking,” is typically presented as a formal skill that can be developed in the absence of any specific context.
On the surface, this is one of those claims that seems eminently reasonable. Because many well-paying jobs in the current economy do in fact require some degree of collaboration among workers, it seems logical that children should be trained to work collaboratively. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 13, 2016 | Blog, Issues in Education
About a week ago, I was wasting time browsing articles on aldaily.com, and I happened to stumble across a link to Hannah Arendt’s 1954 article “The Crisis in Education.” I’ve had a minor a fascination with Arendt since finally getting around to reading Eichmann in Jerusalem a couple of years ago (and discovering that “the banality of evil” doesn’t quite mean what it’s usually understood to mean), and I had no idea that she had ever written about education in the United States. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 5, 2016 | Blog, Issues in Education
A couple of days ago, I came across this article from Boston WBUR, courtesy of Diane Ravitch’s blog. It tells the story of David Weinstein, who has taught first grade at the Pierce School in Brookline, MA, for 29 years but is retiring because he can no longer tolerate being a data-collector for six year-olds.
As Weinstein explains:
[Retirement is] something I’ve been thinking about for a long time now, just in terms of how the profession has changed and what we’re asking of kids. It’s a much more pressure-packed kind of job than it used to be. And it’s challenging. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 2, 2016 | Blog, Issues in Education
This is the second post of a two-part series written by a friend and colleague who teaches at large public school in New York City. Part one described some of the changes brought about by the introduction of the evaluation system known as the Danielson Framework as well as the continuing pressure to involve technology in every aspect of the learning and teaching process. Here, the writer discusses some of the effects of those changes, on both a small and a large scale.
The abandonment of chalk and talk for the Smartboard has had some strange consequences. Screens have a passive, television-like feel to them, which is reflected in students’ reactions. Often, when I write something on a Smartboard, it does not occur to students to take notes from it (why take notes from a TV?), and I have to force them to write it down. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 29, 2016 | Blog, Issues in Education
The following guest post was written by a friend and colleague who teaches at a large, selective New York City public high school. Over the last several years, her descriptions of the changes wrought by various new technologies, the imposition of Common Core, and an increasingly byzantine evaluation system that effectively punishes teachers for teaching, have provided me with an illuminating glimpse into some of the more alarming changes the public school system has recently undergone (and continues to undergo), and piqued my interest in understanding how standardized testing fits into the secondary landscape as a whole. I have found her insights invaluable, and I invited her to write this two-part series because I thought that it was important that those insights be shared with a wider audience.
Twice a year, during parent/teacher conferences, I get to meet you. I get a fascinating snapshot of your families, and what my students convey to you about my particular classroom. During these brief moments, I often wonder how much you really understand about how differently your children’s educational experience is from your own. Today, I would like to clarify how profoundly different it is.
Perhaps you read the educational pages of national newspapers. There you will find desperate appeals to revamp education. Some of the themes you see are as follows: (more…)
