There is general agreement that many youngsters learn very little in school. One explanation often given is that the kids spend a lot of class time doing undemanding, rote work. After they've plowed through 50 math examples in which they multiply two-digit numbers, they turn to the next page of their workbook where they find ... 50 examples that call for multiplying three-digit numbers. And when they go on to language arts, they open another workbook and fill in 50 or I00 blanks with the correct verb or pronoun. Such mechanical, boring tasks are unlikely to teach kids much--indeed, they will probably turn youngsters off learning. Why are they so common?
Poor teacher education is often named as the culprit. You hear that teachers have been so badly educated and poorly trained that they think this kind of seat work is an effective teaching technique. I doubt it. No ed school in the country would call it good practice. In fact, I'm sure that no teacher comes through one of these schools without hearing this kind of thing condemned.
Or perhaps standardized, multiple-choice tests are to blame. These tests ask kids to feed back bits of information; and low-level, repetitive assignments look like an obvious way of preparing kids to handle them. But this theory doesn't hold up either. There's no doubt that teachers spend time preparing kids to take standardized, multiple-choice tests. However, there is little evidence that they select work sheets or pages of examples to correspond with the tests.
In fact, there has been widespread opposition to the use of workbooks and ditto sheets for 30 or 40 years; yet the practice persists. And when people persist in something that is generally condemned, there is a good reason. What is it?
The experience of many beginning teachers is similar to mine when I started teaching in the early 50s. I tried to give my sixth-grade class the same kinds of lessons that my very best teachers had given me. Many of the youngsters were attentive and interested and I'm sure would have gotten a great deal out of the lessons--but for two or three kids. These youngsters became impossible to manage whenever the class was given anything stimulating to do. I'm not talking about ordinary kids with high spirits that can be channeled into learning but about kids who took advantage of any opportunity to turn the class into a zoo.
I was in constant fear that the principal would walk by and see that there was pandemonium in my class. So I asked other teachers what I should do. And they said, "If you want the kids to be quiet, give them lots of seat work."
Teachers in many schools soon discover that, when they have a couple of these kids in their class, generous doses of seat work are the best way to keep the lid on. This of course is a technique for maintaining control, not a technique for teaching--it's the school equivalent of a prison lockdown. But teachers know that no one will notice if their students learn less than they might. On the other hand, if the principal finds the class in chaos, the teacher could be in a lot of trouble. So in many classes and schools, techniques of control take precedence over techniques of teaching, and the great majority of kids learn far less than they could.
There is an alternative. We could get rid of these disruptive youngsters. I'm not talking about youngsters who occasionally act up or have problems with one teacher; I mean the kids who consistently disrupt other students' learning. When this is suggested, we are generally told that there are no facilities for these kids. But the big argument against it is based on fairness. We are told that it would harm youngsters to label them as disruptive and that, if we put them in with other youngsters who behave the way they do, we wouldn't be helping them overcome that behavior.
Unfortunately, although we would like to think that we have a win-win situation here, being "fair" to the few disruptive kids means being very unfair to all the rest. On the long chance that two or three youngsters can be rescued if they stay with the class, we are willing to risk the education of 25 or 30 others.
I think I could have reached 90 or 95 percent of the kids in my class and raised the achievement levels of those who were not performing very well if I hadn't had to use techniques of control because of the few disruptive ones. Most teachers would tell you the same thing. It's time to rethink a notion of fairness that disregards the interests of the majority of our students even without any evidence that it helps the few.