Back to the Basics

Give a Person a Fish...

...FEED them for a day, TEACH a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.

Something I learned when student teaching in Spring of '96, is not to (just) give them students information. Make them find it themselves. A class discussion or lecture is okay for adults, but for students-- not so good. Even though they may be staring right at you, their attention is elsewhere.

• what was the name of that website I was at last night?


• I wonder if I clean my room this weekend if my mom will buy me that new cellphone?


• I am soooo hungry, I wonder if he'll let me go to the bathroom and then I can buy chips?


• Should I ditch 5th period? I don't want him (the teacher) to give me attitude about not having my homework done again...

Project based learning is the Cadillac of assignments. You give the kids choices of topics, a grading rubric that tells them explicitly how it will be graded, and then give them a block of time and resources in which to create a project. Another term for this is Constructivism, where they are actively constructing meaning out of material. Projects can be done alone or done with others. The best ones are also tied to solving or investigating real world problems.

There are major caveats to this kind of learning however. Many 14-15 year olds think that if they cut and paste well enough you won't be able to tell that they copied the whole thing. You tell me, can you tell which was written by a 9th grader and which was written by a college educated adult-- examples

a) Students are using a new ring tone to receive messages in class -- and many teachers can't even hear the ring. Some students are downloading a ring tone off the Internet that is too high-pitched to be heard by most adults. With it, high schoolers can receive text message alerts on their cell phones without the teacher knowing. As people age, many develop what's known as aging ear -- a loss of the ability to hear higher-frequency sounds. The ring tone is a spin-off of technology that was originally meant to repel teenagers -- not help them.

b) There is this really cool ring tone that you can get now that is to high-pitched for teachers too hear and this way you can text you're friends and your teachers aren't going to know. We can hear it because we aren't old yet, but old people can't, hear it.

Tough call huh? Catching plagaiarized work is like identifying the John 3:16 guy in a rainbow wig at a convention of morticians.

Other problems with projects is that while many will shine and do a great job, some are so daunted by the magnitude of a project that they turn in nothing. They may have worked on it in class, have rough drafts, but at home they are either paralyzed by fear, or just default to their usual M.O., "no mom, I finished my homework at school." Finally, you get some students that fixate on one part of the project (the cover, a chart, etc.) and forget the bigger picture, to make meaning of all the parts and come up with some new insight.

Of course I could do something clever and ask to see their work 3 days before it's due but then it's a chorus of "I left it at home mister", some actually did and others left nothing at home. What's the solution? For me it's vary the types of assignments -- essays, posters, presentations, quizzes, questions from the book, and more.