Unreal expectations

I stopped writing this blog because I was going to university and wanted to concentrate on my studies.  Now it is time to share some of that information.  The purpose of the blog will change a bit as I will no longer only concentrate on education issues, but will broaden my scope into other issues that I find interesting.

I would like to start by sharing my thoughts about getting a second bachelor's degree in my social security years.  That has, so far,  been a highlight of my retirement and given me much to think about.  One of my thoughts was that college really was not much different than it was when I went in the 60s and 70s.  Certainly American culture has changed and students today have fingertip access to information that would have taken me weeks to find back then.  Still, there were students interested in learning what the professors had to say, some who were primarily working for the credential to improve their lives and some who were in as much a daze as I was at 18 years old.  I don't think that has changed.

One of the complaints about young people today is that they can not read nor write as well as their parents generation.  I question that assessment.  It seems that kids are reading all the time, it just that reading is different with all of the technology.  I have always know people who preferred movies to books, particularly in the fiction genre. I would also say that a student today has probably written far more than I did at that age if they post on social media or text.  Is there quality in what they write, I am not sure how important that is for everybody.  I certainly encountered students at the university in the last three years that could write much better than I ever did.  I will say that this time around I was an English major and almost all of the people in my classes liked to read and write.

Being a grandfather of an almost college aged student put me about one generation away from my fellow students' parents.  That was the generation I taught as a public/private school teacher/librarian.  That was a generation that was also constantly harassed by certain segments of society as not profiting from their public education.  I have never been sure if all of the comparisons are with my generation or my parents' but it seemed to me then as it does now that some liked to learn and some couldn't stand it.  I think that has always been true.   There is a factor which gets overlooked in comparing generations of students in America.  Today we teach everyone and expect them to succeed.  The diversity of the students today was a larger spectrum than when I began school.  That means there are going to be more on the low end but I believe there are also more on the high end of skills and motivation.

I believe that motivation is the key for all learners.  At 18 years of age many people do not yet know what motivates them.   College for many is a test to find that out.  It took me three attempts at college before I was really ready to learn.  Our high schools do not allow students to spend much time discovering what motivates them.  This is nothing new, Dewey proposed this idea in his teachings, demonstrating the links between interest, curiosity and effort.  Perhaps I can best illustrate this with a story about my last education job.

I spent the 2005-2006 school year working in a rural district that basically was one elementary, one middle, one high and one alternative school.  I was the librarian for the district and spent most of my time working with grades 3-6.  The teachers supported a very robust Accelerated Reader program for these students and everyday they would come to the library to choose books to read for the program.  They read and read and read.  They seemed to have a strong interest in reading and I thought they truly enjoyed reading.  These students passed the standardized testing and had high reading scores.

This seemed a success story until I began comparing the amount of reading done at the elementary school with the middle and high schools.  The number of books read per student declined each year.  By 12th grade almost nobody checked out a book from the library to read unless they had to for a class, although as everywhere there was a small cadre of those who loved to read.  Further observation and discussions with students led me to the conclusion that most of them did not like to read.  In addition the middle and high schools were not passing the standardized testing of the time.

I realize there were many other factors involved that I did not consider, but it was undeniable that most of our high school students only read a book if they had to.  It is my belief that we took the joy out of reading.  Is that different from my time at that grade?   Certainly many adults love to read the stories in books and many students dropped out of school along the way.  But we have created a system of schools where the Chancellor of Washington DC schools is allocating 5 million dollars to make sure that those students like school.

It is all about motivation.  If you make someone do something, they will turn against it.  I .  Each individual is different.  But, if we expect to have students with high skills they need to be motivated to gain those skills and punishing them with education will not bring that about.

So what learned this time around in college is that not much has really changed other than society's unreasonable demands upon students.  The students haven't changed.  Read I found a blog by Scott Barry Kaufman at Scientific American entitled Interest Fuels Effortless Engagement for more information about this Thought From Yrisarri.