Yikes
Teacher’s night on Jeopardy, & one of the categories is “alphabetically second.” Meaning the correct answer is the second item in an alphabetized list.
Question: What is the second book of the Pentateuch?
Answer: What is Deuteronomy?
Three teachers onstage, and not one of them knows the sequence “Genesis, Exodus.”
Shortly after writing about the pedagogical conundrums that arise when students don’t do the reading, I encountered this passage in Tristram Shandy—which suggests that it’s all part of one big, ever-repeating cycle:
I was reading the other Katharine’s post about the learning pyramid, which reminded me of my 1st or 2nd favorite scenario re: not committing anything to memory because we can always Google it.
Here’s the hypothetical:
If I know nothing about the Revolutionary War, how do I Google it ?
I wonder what Google thinks is wrong with “happen.”
I had a funny moment last night… I had the TV on in the background while I was dealing with the dogs, fixing their food bowls & the like, also cooking spinach because spinach is my new Health Plan …
Point is, I wasn’t paying attention to the television.
And I happened to catch a line.
Alex Trebek was interviewing the contestants, and I heard one saying (this is close to a direct quote): “. . . so I assign a lot of projects. They do a lot of independent learning. I guide from the side.”
That was the contestant’s wrap-up.
I guide from the side.
And that was it, back to the game. No particular reaction from Alex, who, I think it’s fair to say, did not look enthusiastic. Then again, he didn’t look unenthusiastic, necessarily, either.
Two thoughts popped into my head at the exact same moment, then ping-ponged back and forth, vying for dominance. (Maybe spinach will fix that.)
My first thought: Common Core doesn’t seem to have put much of a dent in constructivism. Not that it was supposed to, really, but CC did have instructivist elements. Plus a friend of mine, who teaches in the city, tells me kids there are now being taught phonics, so I was thinking there’d been some progress.
But maybe not.
Maybe it’s constructivism that’s on the rise.
I’ve always found it telling that no one ever calls himself, or herself, a constructivist. Yet here was a young teacher announcing, on national television, that he’s a guide on the side. He didn’t sound defensive.
Anyway, that was my first thought.
Constructivism, still here.
Possibly more here.
My second thought: You’re on Jeopardy, bub.
Jeopardy, for pete’s sake !
People win Jeopardy by spending hours and hours and hours memorizing stuff.
Then, after they win on Jeopardy, they post Jeopardy book lists to help other people memorize stuff.
There is no constructivist path to victory on Jeopardy.
I don’t get it.
The contestant ended up losing pretty badly, which–I won’t lie–I enjoyed, but not before giving me a scare when he pulled into 2nd place after correctly answering a couple of big-ticket questions while his two opponents flubbed theirs.
But in the end he closed out the game with $500.
Compared to the winner, who had $13,601.
Bonus points: I read a journal article on neoliberalism the other day, which pointed out that no one ever calls himself a neoliberal, either. Hah! I guess not. Of course, maybe I’ll turn on Jeopardy tomorrow and hear a contestant telling Alex he’s always been a big fan of the Phillips curve, ever since he was a little kid.
Katharine mentioned earlier that we’ve been thinking about worldly knowledge and dreamy children.
The idea that there exists a category of knowledge (worldly knowledge?) that’s important to success on ACT/SAT reading but can’t be acquired through a rich, knowledge-based curriculum had never crossed my mind.
That said, our conversations reminded me of a story a friend told me some years back.
His wife, he said, was profoundly dyslexic. She was so dyslexic that she read nothing at all–at least, nothing beyond what she absolutely had to read for work. She’d gone to college, and had been able to get through her textbooks, but reading had never become anything more than a chore, and she never, ever read “for pleasure.”
The result, he said, was that she “didn’t know anything.”
Meaning: she didn’t know anything anyone talked about at parties or over dinner. She didn’t get the references.
My own head is so stuffed full of useless knowledge (I have a soft spot for Cliff Clavin, kindred soul), that I had trouble even imagining what my friend was talking about. So I kept asking for examples.
Finally he said his wife had never heard of J— and L—– B—–.1
Now that got my attention. At the time, the entire world was talking about J&L-B–literally the entire world, if you believe Wikipedia, which I do–yet my friend’s wife did not know who they were.
She didn’t know because she didn’t read—-anything. No newspapers, no women’s magazines (which still existed then). If she was standing in the check-out lane at the supermarket, she didn’t pick up the Enquirer and speed-read the stories so she wouldn’t have to pay for it; she didn’t even scan the headlines. She didn’t read.
“Doesn’t she watch TV?” I said. “Doesn’t she hear these things on TV?”
She did watch TV, my friend said, as much as anyone else watches TV, but she still didn’t know anything. It was amazing how little information a person actually picks up from TV.
I’ve been thinking about that ever since.
Do we really absorb next to nothing from casual television watching?
Compared to casual National Enquirer skimming at the grocery store?
And if so, would that have changed with the advent of multiple cable news channels and “infotainment”?
Here’s my question: is there a kind of “junk reading” that we think of as a waste of time but that actually serves a purpose — and might come in handy on college entrance exams to boot?
1. I’m using initials instead of names because there’s no reason these two need to see themselves on our blog or anyone else’s. I know next to nothing about the “right to be forgotten,” but I’m probably in favor. So: initials.↩
Catherine & Katharine 