But make them master it
Rote learning and busy work are underrated. If we want kids to learn things, we have to give them the discipline to learn them. Most kids obviously don’t have it on their own. Many things that need learning are unpleasant and difficult, and most kids naturally won’t do them on their own initiative. If something is important enough to teach, it’s important enough to make sure they know it. The making sure part is harder than the initial instruction but just as important. We teach them a lot of things that we proceed to allow them to forget, and then get irritated when they forget them. The problem is certainly not lack of testing. The problem is lack of practice. Too much teaching new things, not enough mastering the old things.
I see this in Writing when teachers are appalled that 5th graders still write the personal I with a lower-case letter. I see it in Math when teachers are frustrated that students attempting to do long division and simplifying fractions don’t know their mulitiplication facts, when knowing your facts makes later math quicker and easier. We want them to retain skills but we don’t spend nearly enough time practicing the skills during school. We teach them something once and reinforce it through one or two homework assignments, then move on to something that doesn’t necessarily require the same skill, and then by the time we move on to something that requires the original skill, half or more the students have forgotten it. I believe they haven’t so much forgotten it as they didn’t solidly have it in the first place.
Where to find the time to get this practice in? At my school, students arrive from 8:25 to 8:40 and first period begins at 8:45. For students arriving at the first bell, that gives at least 10 minutes, allowing for things like doffing coats and copying homework and sharpening pencils, to do some kind of morning work. If we want them to memorize their mulitiplication facts, why not give them a facts worksheet? If we want them to practice writing sentences with correct capitalization and punctuation, give them a worksheet that has them practice that. They could have a worksheet that includes a few items from each of the core subjects, or they could alternate. Such worksheets should be fairly easy to replicate for the whole school year, as they would apply the same basic skills regardless of where in the curriculm the class currently is.
There are other times to practice. I’m a big fan of the drill. The first five minutes of class can be a management nightmare anyway. Students coming in acting like it’s party time, students coming late, students demanding to go to the bathroom or nurse, students saying they have no pencils and so on. Having something for them to do helps settle them down – a nice bonus for something that gives them what they need academically anyway. “Sure, go ahead to the nurse. You can do the drill for extra homework…. What’s that? Oh, think you can tough it out? Good for you!”
It’s not as easy to do this as it sounds. Most people I talk to basically agree with the need for more practice and basic skills. But the system pushes us in another direction and, to create the appearance of success, we follow it. We move on to new material without mastering the old stuff because we’re preparing for a standardized test that includes the new stuff. We have to make sure the students at least know enough to be proficient on the test. If they end up forgetting most of it later on, at least we have the paperwork saying they’re proficient for now. Testing is not necessarily the problem. It’s what we’re testing. We try to teach them too much and they end up learning too little.
