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 #3:  So what’s the next hoop we have to jump through?    

 I hate to say that education is trendy…but education is trendy.  In the world of education, we go from crisis to crisis, supposed failure to supposed failure.

We sound the alarm bells and assume a panic posture more often than Miley Cyrus’s press agent.

We do this with the misguided belief that the secret to great teaching is somehow like discovering the Toll House recipe for chocolate chip cookies.  We tell ourselves that if we could just discover the right recipe and share it permissively with every teacher in America, then every teacher could be a master chef.  Success will proliferate and the failures of the outside world will no longer impact the inner-reality of our classrooms.  But all of this is predicated on a false belief that there is a magical methodology out there, that a great elixir exists in the world of education and we need only discover it and share it.

We equate teaching movements with immunization shots, hoping beyond hope that some day we will be immune to the failures that have plagued us for so long.

In the 1980’s we stressed cultural literacy, next came outcome based learning and the push for standardized education, and now we stand on the cusp of the next significant movement in education, the common core. I remember as a second year teacher reading the complaints of the American business community and academic intelligentsia that our students can create power point presentations on The Globe Theatre or can act out Don Quixote in Spanish but can’t define photosynthesis or identify the capitol of Nevada.  So we change the teaching formula, we tinkered with the recipe, we commissioned studies to support a new method that stressed standards and test-taking aptitude.  So we stressed content, we drilled and drilled and drilled information into their heads, we made sure that when test time came they knew the information the state said they should know.  And now what do we hear?  We are now told that the regimen of rigid testing destroys creativity and critical thinking skills, that our students are losing out on music and art because they have to double down on English and Math.  And so we are in the midst of another change in the recipe.

Click here for tip #2.

Jeremy S. Adams is the author of HOLLOWED OUT: A Warning About America's Next Generation (2021) as...

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