There’s a good chance that many readers of this column could distinguish between formal language, jargon, colloquial language and figurative language.
Discerning the difference between limited omniscience, a cliché, a proverb, a paradox and an oxymoron might be a bit more of a challenge but given time and a hint or two — no problem.
Maybe some readers can calculate the surface area of the right square-based pyramid with a base length of 10 centimetres and a height of 12 centimetres.
Would it be SA=2(10)(12)+(10x10), or something else?
As my Grade 10 son prepared for his exams, I was of limited assistance with any of this, but had not yet given up offering to help him.
Then came science homework, and whether it is dentrification, sedimentation, nitrogen-fixation, or leeching and runoff that converts atmospheric nitrogen into a form plants can use.
Son, with all the wisdom of a 15-year-old, had realized by now that dad was way out of his depth and should go back to his newspaper.
There is a misinformed school of thought that claims the B.C. school system, along with the newly hatched B.C. Education Plan, is leading kids away from facts and content into a delusionary mire of methods, rather than measurable specifics.
Some commentators fear that the best-known thinkers in education regularly play down the importance of facts and knowledge, and focus instead on the so-called processes of learning and that, as a consequence, kids are missing out on knowing stuff and are drowning in edubabble about methodology disguised by vague and poorly written curriculum guides.
Wrong. Just plain wrong.
True, some education gurus like Alfie Kohn, well-known for his sizable body of writings, have, as one writer put it, “made a virtual industry out of finding interesting and provocative insights in the psychological literature” as it applies to education, and following those theories about learning “off the edge of a cliff.”
Mind you, it’s not as if the establishment did not need some prodding, but when Kohn and company explain that for today’s kids, more is needed than just facts, dates and rote learning, that suggestion is widely misinterpreted.
In fact, today’s kids have more access to facts and content — useful, misleading, biased, challenging and applicable to the problem at hand — than children have had since they sat in a circle and listened to Plato.
The content is there, but the process of finding it, analyzing it, synthesizing it and making meaning out of it is what writers like Kohn are advocating.
Teaching kids how to do that is not easy and it does not diminish content as a foundation for learning.
The B.C. Ministry of Education website should reassure anyone.
Grade 8 students need, for example, to be able to use Pythagorean relationships to calculate the height of a building. I remember doing that.
But they are also required to “wherever possible … demonstrate numeracy through real situations and problems that can be solved in a variety of ways. Students should … suggest other situations where similar methods might be useful.”
I do not recall having to accomplish any of those processes in Grade 8. Maybe later in Grade 11, but even then, we just used a piece of paper, drew a diagram and handed it in.
We were never required — nor did we have access to information to make it possible — to “find the cost of an item in another currency (e.g., cost in Hong Kong, in Hong Kong dollars) convert the cost to Canadian dollars, find the cost of the same item in Canada, compare the costs and explain what factors contribute to similarities or differences in cost.”
Grade 8 kids do this now, and to accomplish it practise independent research, verification, calculation analysis and synthesis.
In my day, we just answered the questions at the end of the chapter and checked our answers at the back of the book.
That was so easy — no heavy thought involved.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
