Tutoring Sam - Frustrations

            A few weeks ago, I was concerned that my student was not getting enough opportunities to practice the English that he has been attempting to cram through rote memorization.  My week’s assignment for him was to find some activities or regular social encounters where he could meet a variety of people with whom he could chat. I sent him a fairly exhaustive e-mail with links and contact information for possibilities ranging from churches to on-campus interest groups.

            My concern has turned to frustration as he has not made any progress in this area and insists instead upon spending several isolated hours in a Starbucks, memorizing decontextualized phrases. I tried to explain to him, that even if you memorize an entire book, if you never use it in a meaningful way (i.e. in the context of a speech act), you might not internalize it and you may forget it (to which his previous educational experience can attest). I told him it didn’t have to be so difficult. He could learn more naturally and perhaps faster by spending time listening and interacting with English speakers. That is why he came to study here, is it not?  I can’t help but think that what he is doing now (attending English class, “studying” all day in a café, and watching TV in English) is not terribly different from what he could be doing in Korea. Essentially, you could do these things (which are good) anywhere, but the language acquisition process would be increased exponentially through regular social interaction.

So, once again, I encouraged him to find speaking opportunities both on and off campus, “Learning English doesn’t have to be stressful, Sam. Try to think of things you enjoy doing. What do you like to do for fun? Just do those things in English- you’ll learn, you will and it will be much easier.”

I realize my student is very shy and not terribly secure with his language skills, but I think inactivity will just exacerbate stagnation. I sent him another e-mail with such suggestions as tennis club and http://www.meetup.com/. Learning through doing…and maybe even having fun?

Educational Liberalism

A fellow MAT student and ESOL teacher posted this video on Facebook:

Changing Education Paradigms

There are several principals, that we were experientially taught at SIT; working in small and large groups, pairs, and alone (reflective writing); learning happens in collaboration and in community; heterogeneous classes (part of the richness of my graduate school experience was the fact that my classmates came from diverse backgrounds and brought a broad range of experience and perspective to the program); and finally, ideas such as Suggestopedia and the Ecological Approach address what Sir Ken Robinson mentions at the end of the video regarding the “culture…habits…and habitats” of institutions.

Upon further perusing of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce’s youtube channel, I viewed the following:

Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

While the presentation is mainly intended for an audience concerned with economics and better management, I couldn’t help but see the parallels within education.

1. The suggestion that mangers and superiors should stop treating their employees like “smaller horses” is reminiscent of Freire’s objection to the “banking model”; i.e. the teacher, as sole possessor of higher knowledge, pours learning into the student as if the student were an empty receptacle awaiting fulfillment. bell hooks describes her disappointment in higher education; “ Most of my professors were not the slightest bit interested in enlightenment. More than anything they seemed enthralled by the exercise of power and authority within their mini-kingdom, the classroom.” She was later relieved to “encounter” Paulo Freire because she “needed to know that professors did not have to be dictators in the classroom.”

2. Autonomy: I have already addressed this topic in the previous post: Students need to be intrinsically motivated and given the freedom to explore and chart their own learning. This way they can better forge their own meaning making and the learning experience becomes more significant and genuine.

3. The main idea is that autonomy, creativity, and mastery trump artificial incentives (i.e. money). What are artificial incentives in education?  I propose grades.  SIT has a pass/fail system; you are thus given a greater latitude of responsibility for your performance (autonomy) and what you produce is solely a reflection of your intellectual processes (not necessarily an arbitrary outside assessment) so you are intrinsically motivated to show creativity and mastery. At least I was. Grades always presented a source of stress and outside pressure (extrinsic). While the Chancellor’s List was somewhat motivating, it was more about getting a gold star and less about the value about my education. It was an affirmation for hoop-jumping and perhaps more honestly, an excuse to compare myself with others.

At first I was resistant to the lack of grades, having experienced that educational framework for 16 years, but as I eased into new ways of thinking about my own learning, I had a sense of freedom. It was not freedom as in lack of responsibility or lack of accountability; I think these were in fact increased because my success was not a matter of “making an A” but of producing something meaningful with “purpose”. 

In addition to the pass/fail system instead of a graduated scale, SIT was anti-exam. That is not to say there was no formal assessment. We were assigned final papers, final projects, final presentations and take-home exams which we were required to self-correct and re-take, sometimes multiple times. Interestingly enough,  Harvard has recently decided to adopt a different policy regarding exams:

“Dean of undergraduate education Jay M. Harris … told the faculty that of 1,137 undergraduate-level courses this spring term, 259 scheduled finals—the lowest number since 2002, when 200 fewer courses were offered. For the more than 500 graduate-level courses offered, just 14 had finals, he reported.”  

As with any kind of progressive change, there will be opposition.

I find it ironic that Mr. Finn and Mr. Muldoon despite their criticism of Harvard’s decision acknowledge the possible pitfalls to exams:

            “Granted, testing is complicated. How to assess a semester’s worth of learning in 180 minutes? How to probe what one has learned during three years as a history major? How, simultaneously, to measure the accumulation of knowledge and the development of analytical skills and effective expression? How to distill course themes into challenging essay questions or problem sets, and how to grade them fairly?”

What’s more revealing is their apparent support for standardized testing, which is seen as a problematic aspect to public education by many.

Finally, I must disagree with the crux of their position:

“It was finals that forced us to think, to synthesize, to study, and to learn.”

No. Finals caused heightened stress and anxiety (Affective Filter) and generally forced me to memorize material only to subsequently forget the information with the relief of having finished and passed (like all the birth and death dates of Medieval French poets). True thought and synthesis occurred in the form of paper writing and project or presentation preparation; this was where I was pushed to form thoughtful connections between the material and other relevant ideas (Connectionism). It was with these connections that meaningful retention and thus true learning occurred.