“An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much
you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you
don’t.”

~ Anatole France (1844 – 1924)

Eduhonesty: Anatole’s quotation is all about critical thinking. Still, I believe I disagree or at least perceive an irony. People who can’t always differentiate between what they know and don’t know are running many of our educational institutions, often for big bucks. No one doubts these people received an education. Credentials adorn their walls. “Best practices” are cited in their emails. Yet in the end, many of these same people supported No Child Left Behind, including even its requirement for all special education students to be fully at grade level by this year. An education SHOULD be about being able to differentiate between what you know and don’t know, and what you can accomplish and what you can’t. Yet the very people who might draw upon this quotation to support the Common Core are about to launch an academic experiment upon America’s children which will give these students a harder test to pass than the annual test that many had been unable to pass previously. Educational administrators are also changing classroom instruction to promote critical thinking to increase scores on the Common Core test.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: You can’t critically think until you possess a real body of knowledge to sift through and organize. America’s problem may be partly a lack of critical thinking skills, but the sheer lack of understanding and retention of facts ensures that critical thinking that does occur will be shoddy or even fundamentally incoherent. Drilling and worksheets are so out of fashion, put down and despised. Everything is supposed to be designed to entertain students. We aren’t supposed to drill according to many administrators.

Ask a pack of 13 year olds, “What’s six times seven?” I received five different answers yesterday in a class shout-out. The multiplication tables (or math facts as some prefer to call them nowadays) are only the tip of the iceberg. Try asking a group of students a year after they studied the U.S. Civil War, “Who won the Civil War? Those answers are terrifying. While I have been entertained by England’s victory, and happy for George Washington’s amazingly long lifespan, the South’s victory is proof we need to rethink our new approaches to education.

I can only wonder what has gone wrong.

“Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.”
Lauren Bacall

To dream requires imagination. Little Jarod must be able to see himself as a fireman. In his mind, he must be able to run into the burning building, throwing people over his shoulder as he dodges danger in the smoky hallway. His dream may be vivd and detailed, flickering burnt-orange flames shattering windows in a blackened building, or it may be simpler. just a sense of himself holding that big hose, wearing a shiny yellow suit as he stands near a big, red truck.

But it all begins with imagination.

Eduhonesty: I observe the lack of dreams. I wonder, does that lack of dreams reflect a lack of imagination? Where are the kites? Schools work so hard on creativity today that I wonder why I don’t see more children building their own gossamer kites, calling on reserves of imagination to decorate the diamonds and boxes they launch. Today’s children have become depressingly prosaic. I wish I knew how to help them find their missing dreams.

I write and submit daily lesson plans. Lesson plans nowadays include content objectives, Common Core standards, state standards, student goals and even the actual material in the lesson, not to mention any and all materials and technology to be used in the lesson. We are breaking this down into different blocks of time. Activity 1 gets 10 minutes, activity 2 gets 20 minutes, activity 3 gets 15 minutes, etc. depending on the school’s schedule. Within the time blocks, we break down whether I am teaching the whole class, I am teaching groups within a class that is broken into groups, or I am helping students do guided practice, monitoring students working alone or some combination of the above.

Eduhonesty: I understand that administration wants to be clear that I am not relaxing and reading People magazine while everybody circles words in a puzzle. But all uses of time have opportunity costs. For the next hour, I will not be planning instruction. I will be writing about planning instruction. I guarantee that tomorrow’s PowerPoint will not be quite as clever and entertaining as it might have been.

The old weekly lesson plans which provided a framework rather than blow-by-blow details served students better that the obsessive-compulsive plans that are becoming the norm in many places today. For one thing, students hardly ever stay with the program anyway. They have a bad habit of refusing to fit Activity 1 into 10 minutes, interrupting with all sorts of questions that destroy the schedule almost immediately. I would be a better teacher if I could use this next hour to plan my lessons, rather than plan the plan of my lessons.

But that daily lesson plan needs to be done. Time to get started, I guess.

“Harlem” is another title for the poem below.

A Dream Deferred
by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Eduhonesty: I believe some dreams dry up so early and so thoroughly that the once-dreamers no longer even remember that they once dreamed.