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I’ve never needed to know how to balance a chemical equation. I am glad that I was exposed to the process & it’s meaning. |
I ran across an interesting Edudemic blog post yesterday, 10 Things Students Won’t Need to Know When They Graduate. I’ve listed the 10 below, but do go and read the article’s explanations. The author, Bob Dillon, hits on something that is central to the motivation that drives much of my work. How much of our children’s precious childhoods are we wasting teaching them things that they’ll never need to know.
Perhaps the most fun that I have in my public speaking is telling stories. The purpose of most of these stories is to trick the audience into a particular line of thinking and then surprise them with the recognition that they’ve been here before – but that they’ve come in through a unfamiliar door and it all looks different from this direction. My follow-up line is, “Now what do our children need to be learning today to be ready for this?”
| 10. | How to use a mouse |
| 9. | The difference between bullying and cyberbullying |
| 8. | Memorizing MLA and APA styles requirements (I’d like to think that I had a hand in that.) |
| 7. | How to find basic reference materials in the library |
| 6. | Developing film, taking the perfect picture |
| 5. | The vocabulary terms land line and dial |
| 4. | The propaganda techniques used in thirty second television commercials |
| 3. | How to read a paper map. |
| 2. | How to place data onto a CD or DVD |
| 1. | How to read the movie listings in the newspaper |
| (Dillon, 2012) | |
I had initially planned to invite you to add to Dillon’s list of things that students won’t need to know. But the fact is that one reason we, as educators, do not readily recognize this compelling truth and try to make sense of its profound implications is that we can not predict what our children will need to know and not need to know. It would be nothing more than speculation.
So again, “What do our children need to be learning today?”
Several ideas spring to my mind as I try to unfold this.
- Our children need to learn something.
- What they need to learn is no longer as important as it use to be.
- Increasing the stakes on what they learn does little more than punish our children for our own arrogance.
- If what they learn today may not be useful to them tomorrow, then how will they continue to learn what is?
- How they learn has become much more important.
- Perhaps the most important thing we can help our children learn, is how to teach themselves.
For the fun of it, lets try an experiment. Rather than speculating on what our children will not need to know, I’d like you to comment on this post with an answer to this question,
What were you taught when you were in school that you have never needed to know?
I’ll post a couple of comments to start things off.
Thanks!
Dillon, B. (2012, August 27). [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://edudemic.com/?p=25495
I have never need to be able to perform 35 long division problems without making a mistake.
I have never needed to balance a chemical equation.
The list would be way too long!
While I never use algebra in real life, my brothers both use it daily. As a virtual reference librarian, I’m not sure why this guy thinks you don’t need to learn citation. I estimate that 6% of all the questions I answer are about citation. Since citation is the basis of scholarship, it hasn’t diminished in importance. Oh, well. Why have a curriculum at all?
@Jude, It’s a good point that you make. The distinction that my own education brings to mind is between learning citation and learning to cite. I was made to learn how to write a book and periodical citation, so that I could write my senior research paper. I graduated from high school believing that the only place that you use citations is for your senior research paper.
I don’t think that our children need to be taught how to write citations (see Citation Machine). However, they do need to learn to cite all their sources in all their writing.
BTW, I discovered a need for algebra 12 years after I graduated from high school, when I started teaching myself how to program a computer.
I have never need to explain why planets behave as they do when orbiting the sun. I never needed to know that. I on the other hand wanted to know about it. I think that is where we miss the bus in education. It is not what they need to know it is how we can teach what will expand there mind, by what they want to know. In other words questioning is the best teacher.
@Travis Carlson, Well said. Questioning is the best teacher, and the best teacher helps learners to see the wonder of something so big as the Solar System so that the learning will question.
If questioning is the best teacher, then exploration, experimentation, and discovery are the best learning tools.
Jude’s comment points out something interesting. We don’t all need to learn the same things. I rarely have had the need to cite anything, and when I do I look up the proper way to cite on the web. The computer allows us to access knowledge much more quickly and efficiently so we no longer need to store so much in our brain. Maybe that’s the shift that needs to happen in education. Our children are still being asked to remember rarely-needed knowledge. Maybe we should focus on learning the oftern-used knowledge and skills, and how to access the rarely-used knowledge when we need it. I would vote to quit teaching standard algorithms, especially long division.
@Dan, I agree that we might stop teaching long division. But it’s still important.
Perhaps we should help students to learn to perform long division, through inquiry, exploration, experimentation and discovery as learning habits – but not so they know how at the end of the year, but so they can re-learn how at the end of the year, or 12 years later.
Citation is irrelevant, agreed on that. Scholarship is not life, nor is it a dominant activity for life, school is a giant funnel or purposed to spit out a few at the end who can go to university and perform certain academic tasks, the rest, who cares? because our doctors can use citation.
Me? Math is largely irrelevant, I teach Drama and need basic dimensions. I have team mates who do the specifics. Dispersed knowledge > expertise.
@Carl, Sir Ken Robinson, in his landmark creativity speech at TED (see below) says that if we were all doing our jobs perfectly in education, all of our students would graduate and become college professors.
I think that rolling what and how we teach under up under the “scholarship” label is part of the problem. We graduate from school thinking that citation and content evaluation are just something that you do when you’re writing a scholarly paper.
Today we are all conducting research in order to solve our problems and accomplish our goals. Research skills should be taught as an everyday working skill, not just something that scholars do.
Citation is important, because if you write down what you learn for others to learn from, then your citations help your readers to validate what you are sharing. Citation is important. Having your commas and parentheses in the right places is not so important 😉
Robinson, K. (Performer & Writer) (2006). Schools kill creativity [Web]. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/hius
@David Warlick, While I completely agree that the “job” of education is to teach students to think for themselves and to develop inquiring minds, I have to disagree with your last point here. It’s grammar and punctuation and a good writing style that make your blog and your books so enthralling! And,by the way, I’ve loved reading the gardening book you left with me the last time you were in Lubbock! And I love following your posts.
Hi David,
I’ve never had to know about anything relating to trains or their relative movement in opposite or similar directions 😉
However, I think all too often we get caught up in the minutia that encompasses education. I believe we need to reconsider what learning looks like and realize that it doesn’t always have to occur sitting at a desk, arranged in rows, staring at a teacher, waiting for “learning” to happen. . .when we can have a new schema of what learning looks like, we can design better and more relevant learning experiences for kids.
@Jeffery Heil, Very well said. I believe that we only need to look to ourselves to see what learning looks like. We all continue to learning after we graduate, because we encounter new problems and need to accomplish new goals, and our conditions are constantly changing. How do we learn in the real world? Why should learning in school be so different from the authentic learning of adulthood.
I’ve often thought that the mistake we make in math is thinking that we have to teach the math first, and then give kids the moving trains problem. Perhaps we should start with the problem, and then help our learners to invent a solution.
Mathematicians don’t do math. They invent math.
I need to say that I am speaking (writing) in broad strokes. There are all kinds of exceptions, but part of teaching is knowing when it needs to be taught and when it needs to be discovered.
Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.
@Steve, I do love, you love, loves, we love, ye love, they love via translate.google.com 😉
@David Warlick, 5 years of Latin = 1 minute of Google Translate – surely ‘here endeth the lesson” was never more appropriate
@Steve, I never had the opportunity to study Latin but I have often thought it would be interesting to have the background information on word origins. I never really “needed” to understand English grammar so much as when I started to learn a second language. Exposure to a broad range of topics is the only thing that will lead us to what is truly our passion. The processes that we learn are so much more important than the actual content. I taught secondary math for years and often the best answer I could come up with for the “when will we use this?” question was that the logical process they learned would be far more important than actually memorizing the formula. I also often had students who just wanted the formula rather than understanding why it worked and how to derive it. They didn’t have Google though. I wonder if today’s learners are more interested in deeper understanding.
I struggle with this.
I never needed to know how to use a band saw in industrial design class (which was required when I was in grade 8). I never needed to know the capitals of all 50 states all at once in a 15 minute time slot (particularly because I was/am Canadian, but also because by the time I was out of university, Google could tell me). I definitely never needed to know conics, yet an entire unit on them was required as part of grade 12 math.
However, if you’d asked me, I would have told you at the time that I didn’t need or want to know how to solve algebraic equations. I would have told you I didn’t need to know why the addition of NaCl to water lowers the boiling point. I would have told you I didn’t need to know how to shoot a layup in basketball. I would have argued hard and fiercely against learning each of these, telling you I’d never need to use it, that it was a waste of my time, and that I just didn’t care.
But all of those things in that last paragraph are things that *have* in the end, been useful to me at some point. Solving algebraic equations taught me how to problem-solve when I was missing a variable — even for something as simple as measuring spaces to fit furniture in my house. High school chemistry, as boring as it was at the time, taught me how to be a better chef. P.E. class – including basketball — taught me that the difference between being an overall “good athlete” and a skilled player is in the repetition and practice of those very specific skills.
If I had been given the option, I never would have learned those things. Where would I be now? I suppose one could argue I would have learned them somewhere else. Yet I still remain appreciative that I learned them when I did.
Conics, a band saw, and memorizing all 50 states, however… ehhhh, still nope.
So how do we know? How can we really know what students need to know?
@Adrienne Michetti, They made you learn the capitals of the states in Canada? I’m scratching my head in bewilderment.
You make an excellent point, that we don’t know how or why we will need to know something in the future — especially with a future that is as indefinable as today’s future.
However, I would suggest that your teachers should have been able to illustrate why you will need to know this in the future. We need to be able to illustrate relevance.
I think that our problem is believing learning and memorizing are synonymous.
We (in the U.S.) teach so that our children can recall the answer during the end of the year testing. We teach to memorize, when we should be teaching to expose our children to the intensely wondrous and exciting world that they live in. They need to leave school knowing that they can work their world to answer questions, solve problems, accomplish goals, and be a part of the wonder and excitement.
The literacies they learn should be learning literacies.
@David Warlick, I definitely agree with you when you say the problem is believing learning and memorizing are synonymous. I also agree with you about learning literacies. To be fair, your post did ask “What were you taught when you were in school that you have never needed to know?” 🙂 Knowing and understanding are very different things. When answering, I was thinking about knowledge — the lowest level of Bloom’s, if you will.
I’m not sure I can *ever* tell my students for sure why they’ll need to know something in the future. So where does that leave me? and them? It’s a best-guess scenario, I think. We’ll never get it just right because we just can’t know.
And yes… in Alberta, at least, I had to memorize all 50 state capitals. I can still remember most of them, though that party trick wore off long ago. 😉
We could perhaps ask them ( the learners) what they would like to learn… As from my post above, I spent 5 years not learning much Latin. My study options at 12 were, Latin, Metalwork, Woodwork or Art. I was much better at the other three subjects but was considered ‘academic’ and so was given no choice in my option and ‘did’ Latin. (Despite my protestations, my parents sided with the ‘experts’). I have in my adult life learnt and applied far more engineering, carpentry and art on a daily basis, than ever I have used Latin “in totalis”. If only they had listened to the one on the receiving end…
@Steve, I so identify with what you are saying. I took Latin because I’d planned to going into a field of science. The ‘experts’ said that Latin would be useful because so many terms in science were based in that language. I believe now that Latin was merely an attempt to perpetuate a curriculum (the classics) that helped to distinguish the “educated” elite from the commoners on the street, not help children to become competent, compassionate and contributing citizens.
I do want to try to comment on one statement you make, and do so without diluting the power of your story. I believe that to many educators believe that engaging our students means addressing their personal interests. It seems to me that engaging learners involves help our students to become interested in what’s important.
Again, thanks for your story.
Most definitely. I agree with what you say about ‘personal interests’. It is of course impossible/impractical/undesirable for schools to provide a curriculum based solely on the personal interests of the students, given the requirement for education to produce balanced citizens who are able to contribute to society. However, there are too many involved in the system are quite happy to restrict education to a ‘one size fits all – sure to work this time’ solution, that can be packaged (or re-packaged) and sold at a fixed per pupil price by ‘Educational Publishers’.
It’s strange how technology has replaced so many basic skills we thought you couldn’t survive without. However, I think technology use has helped kids feel comfortable with learning, even embrace it!
While reading through some of the comments, I agree it all depends on personal interest and the jobs we end up doing. However, I don’t think it is important what the task they learned, what is important is the thinking skills associated with the tasks. For example, citation, not everyone will need to do citation, but everyone will need the skill of organizing information into a way that is easy to find later on or by other people.
The way I differentiate a great educator from others is how he/she focusing on teaching skills, instead of tasks.
Hmm. Lots of good stories here. You are all illustrating the point David is making exactly. Some of the things many of you say you never use, I actually like to do. Like balancing chemical equations or algebra. I think they are fun. But my ELA drive isn’t at the same level.
My point being that as educators we should demonstrate our passion and illustrate the relevance for the content area we love and try to pass on the passion to any student that we can get it to “stick” to. But it won’t stick to any of them by “teaching” esoteric facts, but by turning on their passion and teaching them how to discover the content area for themselves. (Remember “give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.”)
As mentioned above the habits of mind and lifelong learning skills are so incredibly important now.
@john armentrout, (see. I used passion too many times. I see my ELA teacher’s red pen marks now. 🙂
I found no use for long divion. Although cursive hand writing was fun to learn and use i have no use for it now days. I have never used chemistry, or biology in real life either. Not to say no one needs to learn any of these but i believe every child learns and strives in different directions. So maybe that why they teach us a variety of different skills as children because you never no what you will be when you grow up.
I remember spending hours of learning cursive. I have only used it to sign my name on documents and understand my oral communications teachers instructions on the white board. Other than that, I do not see why classrooms at large need to learn this information. It is almost a foreign written language. It is like learning glyphs so you can read ancient texts. You only need to know cursive so that you can read diaries of our ancestors. …Well, and to sign your name.