Generic commentary on teaching methods and curriculum relevance

2 Teaching Minds First, we must establish whether students can learn whatever it is that you want to teach. I always wanted to teach my daughter to throw a ball properly. She threw a football astonishingly well at the age of 6. But, she never got it about how to throw a softball. I don’t know why. She just couldn’t learn to do it right. She can’t do math either. Believe me, I tried. Second, we must determine whether what you want to teach can be taught. Not everything can be taught. It is hard to learn to be a nice guy if you are inclined to be nasty. You can learn to be nicer, or at least to fake it, perhaps, but certain things are hard to learn after a certain age. You can teach a 2-year-old to be nice—a 22-year-old is another story. Third, we must figure out what method of learning actually would teach what we want to teach. This is an important question that is made more important, in part, by the fact that the learning meth- ods available in schools tend to be of a certain type. The things that schools desire to teach are of a type that conforms to the available methodologies for teaching. Content that lies outside the range of the currently available methodologies typically is not considered some- thing worth teaching. Fourth, we must decide whether a selected learning methodology actually will work, given the time constraints and abilities of the stu- dents, and other constraints that actually exist. This is, of course, the real problem in education. It is easy to say that students would learn better if they had real experiences to draw upon. This isn’t that hard to figure out. What is hard is implementing this idea within the time con- straints of the school day and the other demands of the school year. Fifth, we must determine a way that will make what you want to teach fit more closely with real-life goals that your students actually may have. By real-life goals I mean things like walking and talking (and later driving). Why is it that teachers, or more accurately school systems and governments, want to teach things that are not in ac- cord with a student’s real interest? While we argue about how best to teach algebra, no one ever asks what to do if a student doesn’t want to learn algebra. The question is so weird; the possibility that you could skip algebra because it doesn’t interest you is so remote that we don’t even think about this in any way. What is the real cause of this prob- lem? Why can’t we just let students learn what interests them? Are the people who run schools simply out of touch with how learning really works or how actual students behave when faced with something they HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023748