Canaries in the Classroom

I watched Bella as she sat quietly at her desk, looking at nothing I could perceive. She had done nothing in my class during the first quarter. I knew it was not just my History class, she was like this in all of her classes. It was almost time for report cards and I was discouraged that nothing I said, nothing I did could penetrate the armor she put on each morning before she came to school. I thought I would try another tact, “Bella, what are your parents going to say when you come home with all Fs on your report card?”

She looked at me in a way that spoke to her lack of emotion and replied, “They can make me go to school, but they can’t make me learn anything, can they?”

In my 31 years of teaching I encountered many Bellas, children traumatized by going to school. I did not love going to school, the same with many of my friends. However, I was not traumatized by the experience in the way that Bella was. Why do children choose to follow a gang leader rather than a teacher. What are schools doing that make them such a terrible place for some of the children in America?  

Perhaps a clue lies with another problem I had as a teacher. I taught U.S. and World History to 15-18 year old high school students. Part of my class included testing. Those terrible evaluations that teachers use to prove how little their students learned over a period of time.  I always included some type of question that required a written response. I was always amazed at the number of students who did not even attempt to answer reply to those questions. It was usually the same student who did not participate in class discussions nor particularly care what grade they received. It was the same symptom Bella displayed.

It is important to understand that not all students shut down like Bella, but I believe most students feel this way, even many who thrive at school.  Students like Bella are sending a powerful message to all of us. Something is not right in our education system and they are the first to let us know.  

So, what do we do, we label them, put them in special programs, take away privileges, demean, tutor, and provide all manner of treatment that seems to cause the disease of hating school to spread. It is a virus that has gone viral in our schools. Today we are holding the entire education system hostage until these students perform at 100%.

It seems that society has turned against it’s young, demanding that they be ready to solve the problems we have caused. Somehow our method of making this happens seems convoluted.  We continue to do more of the same, pouring knowledge into the brains of our poor canaries expecting them to sing upon demand, and sing better than all the other canaries. We place them under great stress by expecting everyone to perform in the same way.

In one respect Bella was wrong. She didn’t realize she couldn’t not learn.  

Book Review

Daniel T. Willingham is a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Why Students Don’t Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009). I have always been intrigued by the question of "liking" school. In my experience most people do not like doing things they do not want to do. School seems to be a place that fits that profile for almost everybody at some time during their education. I disagree with the premise of this book. Children do like school! They like meeting their friends, they like learning new things, they like activities, they like some teachers, they like some subjects, but they do not like all of school every day. In other words they feel about school much like adults feel about work. This book presents some other ideas about "liking" school.

Willingham brings some important ideas to the classroom teacher. As a cognitive scientist he discusses the importance of story, emotion, memory, context and routine in building knowledge and developing learning experiences. He also dispels some cognitive myths that pervade the teaching profession. He shows that learning styles are much less important than the fact that people’s processes for learning and thinking are more similar than different and he provides information about the plasticity of the brain and intelligence.

Willingham’s most important argument has to do with his definition of thinking. He argues that the brain has limitations in terms of our ability to think and that if we do not teach with this idea in mind, children will not like school. His definition of thinking is that working memory receives input from the environment and then connects with long term memory to begin to create new neural pathways that remember this new information in the context of our old information. This seems logical and I think it is a useful way to define thinking.

The limitation is that our brains are not designed for thought, but for the the avoidance of thought. Most of our brain is devoted to seeing and moving and those functions operate efficiently and reliably while thinking is effortful, slow and uncertain. One of the problems is working memory, remember the model of how thinking works? Working memory is at the center of that process. One of the things neuroscientists know is that working memory can only hold about 5-7 thoughts at a time. So if thinking is retrieving information and procedures stored in long-term memory to create something new and working memory has limitations, how do we make thinking easier. Willingham believes that one must know the information and procedures well in order to come up with something new. It is our background knowledge that facilitates thinking.

Despite the brain’s limitations Willingham stresses that hard work in the form of practice pays off. IQ is not totally genetic and has been steadily rising around the world for some time. The message this should send to students is that the only limitations they have are ones they place on themselves. But, this work coupled with lots of practice that is too hard cause students to not like school.

In my opinion Willingham has overlooked the importance of motivation and seems to believe learning core knowledge is at the heart of student success. The pursuit of core knowledge often kills motivation in children. It also seems that a person can only obtain this information in school through hard work and it must be learned at a determined rate to be successful. Students will tell you they like to learn but want to have fun. Willingham believes that if the work is too hard it turns students off and if it is too easy it turns students off. I believe that if the students enjoy most of the work they will not be turned off!!