"Assumptive Teaching" Helps No One

I'm trying to get my posts together. This post originally showed up here.

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Title: "Assumptive Teaching" Helps No One
Current mood: exanimate

As a woman in the sciences, I found it appalling in Chapter One of the Pennsylvania Literacy Framework to find that "very few people are 'science literate'" (Dugan 4). The example that was cited, the Harvard graduates explaining why it is hot in the summer and cold in the winter – most of them incorrectly – is a grim situation. I learned the concept of seasons back in the second grade, and all my teacher had was a globe to demonstrate the tilt of the Earth and the orbit around the Sun, with the more prominent hemisphere being the hotter region, [all due to the Earth's tilt]. Nothing too fancy, no multimedia projects or hands-on demonstrations, was needed. I do believe that teachers have a difficult task of presenting the immense science curricula, with some of them barely grasping the concepts themselves.

It can be done though. I am proof.

I am an anomaly as a woman in the sciences, according to the Pennsylvania Literacy Framework.

Ironically, I do not think that the American education is as bad as it is made out to be. More subjects are taught than ever before. More American kids (and adults) are going to college than ever before. To make it to college, a student will have to demonstrate competency in literacy: Reading, writing, speaking, listening, etc. According to the United Nations' Development Programme Report of 2005, the United States has a 99.9% literacy rate. Of course, looking at it from a technological stance, I do think we are in trouble. It is true that our rate of U.S. graduates in the sciences is staying the same or slowly decreasing, and many of the graduate students attending mathematics and science doctorate and masters programs in the U.S. are foreign born, many of them from China. In UC Irvine's physics and astronomy graduate program (and many graduate programs across the nation) an American student would need to get a score of 150 or above, or around the 50th percentile. The typical Chinese student would need to get a score of 190, or the 90th percentile. Since the U.S. only lets in a certain amount of students from each country and the demand from Chinese students is so high, it has made the testing more cutthroat for them. So unfortunately by just comparing rates (and assuming they remain constant), it looks like the Chinese will soon be dominating the U.S. as the technological leader in the global economy.

The rate of U.S. born mathematicians and scientists can be increased if we are able to address sciences learning early in the system. **By second grade, students have made up their minds already whether they enjoy doing math or learning science.** Most of the time, they hate it. And many students (and people) hate what they don't get or understand. But I think these views can be changed. I did not always want to study physics; I wanted to be an artist, and I was very good at drawing even at the age of eight. I was bored by the repetition of math as early as the second grade. I would complete about half my learning worksheet, usually with many rows and columns of addition or subtraction problems, and then just tune out. I already knew how to do it, and it was boring. I also hated turning in an incomplete assignment. So I wouldn't turn in anything. It didn't take long for my mom to figure out this was going on, and she sat me down and did some simple averages with me. "Danelle," she said sweetly but firmly, "if you have turned in 5 papers with 100% correct, but don't turn in another paper, it gets a zero. You average them together," and she took the time to work out the average on paper in front of me, "it's 500 divided by 6, which is 83%, the grade of a low B. But if you turn in that last assignment and it gets 50%, now the average is ... 91.6, an A-. So what do you think you should do?". She was a helpful mother, and my grades improved. And who knew she was demonstrating the coaching skills discussed in the reading, modeling and talking aloud while problem-solving?

Since I did have good parental involvement in my education (and it seemed to help), I think it's easy to take the blame stance, the assumptive teaching, and put a lot of the blame (or praise!) on the parents. As I have found by reading "Real Writing, Real Teaching," this stance does not address the problem, and it definitely doesn't fix anything. Rather than dreaming about what things could be and assigning the blame when they're not, a teacher needs to take responsibility for his or her students and the classroom and try to delve deep.

Unexpectedly, incorporating more writing and more "coaching" can help in teaching a variety of subjects. Students need to be involved in the process of learning, not just repeatedly questioned. Teachers should "model" what the subject requires, sometimes by thinking aloud while solving problems, and teachers should present strategies for writing and problem-solving for a variety of conditions. And from Roberta's view, that can be an uphill battle until around mid-December, when the class just seemed to get it and learning started to become much quicker. It always seemed that she would have to cut out a unit because the class pace was so slow before December. But she used a "road map," because she knew where she was and where she wanted to go with the class. It is important to have a destination in mind, and a vehicle of sorts to take you there. She would think aloud with her students, not just posing questions, but show them how to get to an answer, how to read charts and understand the text, not just expect them to read it alone and know all the answers. And then they began learning how to do it for themselves, and soon she was able to add in additional units with the new-found time.

Some of the major strategies of lifelong learning come from excerpts in the "Real Reading, Real Writing" book and "Writing to Learn Mathematics." Coaching rather than just being the quiz master is an excellent strategy that I never consciously thought of doing. It just happens when you are tutoring one-on-one, but it should be applied to the classroom. Writing to learn math is a great way to present the subject, and students will automatically "delve deeper" in their writing.

I have even been on the receiving end of this teaching process in 9th grade Algebra I. Mrs. Willis, our math teacher (and, against the norm, most of my math teachers have been female), had us do weekly writing assignments on the chapter we covered, discussing each section. I remember learning about parabolas and asymptotes, and then trying to describe them. It was hard, I just wanted to draw a picture and put down the equation and say," There you go." But then from the writing exercise, the knowledge began to stick and it was extremely helpful. (I won't lie, it was tedious and definitely not my favorite part of the class.) More interestingly is that when the students are writing, they begin to realize what they know and what they don't know, identifying the gaps in their knowledge. Then they can fill in the gaps and not be blind-sided on an upcoming test. Writing also helps to connect prior knowledge to what is being studied.

I believe that frequent writing in general can help with lifelong learning. Many times I will hash something out in a blog or an email or in a journal entry and I will even get up from what I am writing to research more about the things I don't know so I can write more clearly and more deeply about them. Many times my perception ends up changing because I know more about a subject or I was thinking incorrectly about it previously. If these kinds of writing and critical thinking skills are picked up by students during school, then it will start to become an unconscious reaction and they will become lifelong learners, maybe without even realizing it. That is why it is so important that we as teachers use our writing skills and have our students develop them.