Week Two: In-Class Journal

I've been doing some thinking about the internet and how it affects the way we need to approach teaching our students. We know that students should leave our classes with a deep factual knowledge of the subject area. This, I suppose, was the reason I spent so much time memorizing lists of various things during my time in school.

Take geography, for example. In order to pass geography, we had to take a series of quizzes and tests in which we would have to fill in blanks (The capital of South Africa is ______.) or start with a blank map of South America and name all of the rivers. Even if the instructor sought to contextualize this knowledge by showing us videos or asking us to do projects or read articles, we were evaluated by filling in blanks.

This, of course, is no way to get someone to learn the rivers of South America. There are some people who memorize those rivers for the test and never forget them, but I doubt that there are many. And it seems more absurd now than ever, since just about anyone in America can have a map of South America and its rivers in front of them at the touch of a button.

So I guess what I'm getting at is this question: To what extent has the easy availability of information reduced the need for memorization? To what extent to students have an automatic "deep factual knowledge," especially regarding subjects like geography and history?

I think this is especially tricky in the social studies. My dad's a history teacher and I am a history major who hopes to teach the social studies someday, so that's the lense through which I'm looking at all of this. I got a 5 on the AP Euro and US History tests, and I feel like I don't remember much of anything factual about any of it. It seems to me that the only way someone retains that kind of factual information is by using all the time. If you don't, it goes away.

Given that, what's the point of trying to get students to learn it in the first place, especially in an age in which any factual information is instantly obtainable? As a history teacher, what would be the harm in abandoning my efforts to ensure that my students can name the U.S. Presidents in order and focusing exclusively on their understanding of key concepts and the organization of their knowledge?

There are a lot of problems with what I just wrote, but I'm running out of time.

The organization of knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval point is an interesting one in this context as well. In my opinion, any social studies class needs to have as one of its primary objectives that students are able to efficiently and judiciously make use of the internet. In a sense, this is how our kids will organize their knowledge. It's as if they had all memorized the rivers of South America, but when they sought to retrieve that information, some of it was correct, some of it was incorrect, some of it was advertising, and some of it was porn. I've wondered a lot about who in our schools today is teaching kids how to use all the information that is available to them, and it seems to me that social studies teachers should be doing a lot of it.

As a side note, this is all very scary. I had an adult class that I taught once a week in Japan. What we did there was entirely up to me, and nobody was evaluating my work. I had never really taught a class of any kind before in my life. To make matters worse, my students brought insanely different levels of English into the class with them. I had to figure out a way to keep them all attentive and entertained while doing the same activities. I had never really pondered the intricacies of how people learn things or been taught anything about effective teaching.

That was really hard, but I figured it out and after a couple of months of trial and error, it went alright. One would assume that educating oneself about how people learn would make one more confident when trying to teach, but I'm not sure that's true after this week. This is scary stuff! I've got to evaluate what knowledge my students are bringing into the classroom and adjust my strategies accordingly. I have to make sure that students are monitoring their learning processes. I've got to adjust my methods for students from different backgrounds. I need to make my students feel like their contributing something to others. The list goes on and on, and only after three chapters. I'm wondering if just throwing me into a classroom and having me figure it out wouldn't be better. That's what they used to do, right?

Weekly Assignment #1

The topic that interested me most this week was the difference between experts and novices. This distinction might be more important than ever in the age of the internet. Students have access to a nearly infinite breadth of knowledge on most subjects. With his easily-available pool of knowledge, teaching students to "segment the perceptual field" is essential.

I was a bit confused about conditionalization vs. contextualization. In chapter two, we learn that experts have highly conditionalized knowledge, which means that they have catalogued the contexts in which certain knowledge can be used. At first, when chapter three told me that having over-contextualized knowledge can prohibit transfer, I saw this as a contradiction. I understand the distinction now, but I think more discussion of these two concepts would be useful.

The "Fish is Fish" segment of chapter one reminded me of my time teaching English in Japan. I can think of no better example of pre-existing knowledge acting as a barrier to learning. This problem presented itself in the actual teaching of the English language, in obvious ways like my students' inability to pronounce the letter "l." It also presented itself endlessly in cultural situations where my students' learned cultural standards (more often my own!) prevented them from understanding the stories I was trying to tell them.

First Post

My name is Brian Shephard. People usually end up calling me Shep. You are welcome to call me whatever you like.

I work at AFS Intercultural Progams, a non-profit high school foreign exchange organization. I worked for 18 months as a volunteer coordinator, assisting volunteers in their efforts to find homes for and support exchange students. I'm working for AFS part time now in a different capacity. It's a great organization.

I'm taking this course as the first step on my way to becoming a high school teacher. I was happy to see that it was my first class; I think I'll find it compelling.

My least favorite subject in school was math. I still haven't quite figured out why. Perhaps this class will shed some light on it. I loved most of my classes and was generally a good student. Those things were not true when it came to math. I could go on and on about this.

I suppose my favorite subject was History. I was biased from the start, as my father is a high school history teacher. I've always enjoyed reading about history, and it was one of my majors in college.

I've never taken any sort of Pysch class before, so I'm excited about this. The other class I'm taking this semester is basic Pysch, so I'll be getting a brainful of the subject this Fall. I'm excited about that; people fascinate me, and I'd like to check what I think I've learned about people over the years against the science. I'm also hoping it will make me better at poker.

What else should you know about me? I spent a year on the JET program as an assistant language teacher in a tiny Japanese town. Since then, I've been working in international exchange on the high school and university level. As a result, culture and how it affects learning are of particular interest to me.

I'm not going to pick a topic yet. But as I mentioned above, culture and cultural education interest me. I'm also eager to think about the way that the information/communications revolution we're living through will change the way students learn and teachers teach. I suppose I'll talk more about this in my journal entry, I suppose.

I guess I would prefer to write the journal electronically. I'm alright with either way though.

Have a nice day.