What Do You Truly Believe?

In the movie, "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", a Nazi sympathizer shoots Dr. Jones' father (Sean Connery). He challenges Indiana to go through a series of impossible tests to get the Holy Grail with the statement, "It's time Dr. Jones to ask yourself what you truly believe?" It is a great line and the subject of today's blog.

There is a lot of dissonance between what many of us say we beleive and what we practice. This is true in most areas of a person's life. We call it hypocrisy when our beliefs and practices are in opposition to each other.  In education, it is common for our practices and beliefs to be in opposition to each other. For example, if I ask a room full of high school teachers, "How many of you believe that it is possible for all of your students to earn an A", few hands will go up. Some of these teachers are older teachers, baby boomers. You know, the generation that was committed to changing things and not engaging in old practices that were indefensible. Yet they grade using a practice that seeks to make the normal distribution, otherwise known as the bell curve, a picture of the grade distribution of their classes.

The question that I would ask: "If all students knew what was expected of them and this was clearly laid out in a syllabus and they worked up to the level of high expectation, why couldn't all students earn an 'A'?" The other question that I have is:  "When is knowledge valuable and when should mastery be rewarded?"  In the current system, prevalent in most of the country, knowledge is only valuable on the due date of a particular assignment.  If it is attained a few days later, it is no longer as valuable, depending upon the whims of a particular teacher. It could lose 10% of its value each day.  In some classes, it is not worth anything if it's late. From this I would infer that knowledge and mastery have a mysterious 'shelf life'.

If however, it is important to learn something within a more unlimited period of time (a semester perhaps), then it doesn't matter if the assignment is turned in on a particular date. If it shows high levels of mastery the work should receive the same value, since knowledge does not diminish in value. At least that is the message that I think that we want to send to our students, isn't it? What is my point? It is simply that we need to remove artifical systems that have evolved over time and impaired students from attaining true excellence. If a student doesn't do a particular assignment that is necessary to attaining knowledge of the water cycle and the teacher accepts non-performance as a viable outcome, doesn't that cheapen the value of knowledge to the student? What if students' knew that all necessary work had to be completed within a defined period of time (a semester, perhaps) and that it received full value within that period of time? Might they be motivated to complete it? What if non-completed work never went away? What if you still had to complete it in summer school if it was not completed during the school year, and students knew that this was the consequence? No F.  No Zero. Work completion alone is acceptable.

Back to my point on a syllabus. A syllabus is a road map to success. All assignments are spelled out with clear directions on how they are to be done.  Rubrics that indicate all of the components necessary for excellence would be in the syllabus. Maybe even an exemple or two of what excellent looks like. What if we actually expected students to edit their writing until it became good? What if we expected them to correct their mistakes as an avenue of accurate learning? I think that this is why many of us became teachers.  We didn't want to participate in the same 'sort and separate' system that we grew up in. We wanted something more.  Are we boomers and non-boomers radical enough to implement this? It's time to ask yourself Dr. (Ms. or Mr.) __________, what you truly believe!