Learning vs. Teaching, part 1

Hello everyone,

Do your students really learn from you?

If you are "teaching," and your students are not learning, then you are like a rabbit in a cage that runs and runs but gets no where.

That reminds me of one of the greatest things I ever learned in a science class. My science teacher taught us that work is accomplishment. If a car is stuck in a snow bank (you can tell I didn't grow up in California), and we grunt and strain at getting the car out of the snow bank; indeed, if we come near to killing ourselves to get that car out of the snow bank, and the car doesn't move, our effort was wasted and no work was done.

It's the same thing for teachers. If we slave away on lesson plans and bulletin boards and PowerPoint presentations, not to mention worksheets and manipulatives and best practices; if we do all of those things, working far more than the contract requires, and our students don't actually learn, then we are not doing work.

Of course, there's the old adage that "you can take a horse to water, but you can't make him drink," and there is some validity in it. There are simply some students that we will not reach. Some students will choose to fail our classes.

Still, we can have the satisfaction that, if a student fails to get a passing grade, at least the student will have learned something. The student ought to confess that the fail was a result of the student's personal failure to do required work, not because we failed to teach.

This has been on my mind for a few days. I don't mean to imply that all of you are failing to teach. It's probably on my mind because of a private conversation I had recently.

I still think it's worth considering.

When you begin a class, is your objective clear? Do your students know exactly what they are supposed to learn that day? Do they actually learn it? If not, does your lesson extend beyond the first day?

Of course, I can think of days that I "taught" something, and my students didn't learn it. Almost every grammar day was that way. I decided that grammar was something that we would cover at the beginning of the year, then practice in speech and writing for the rest of the year, so I effectively expanded my grammar lessons throughout the entire year. Sometimes you might do that. It depends on your subject.

As always, feel free to email me your comments; let's discuss it. At least I exorcised that demon.

Jeff Combe