11B: Reflection on Readings

“Put Understanding First” by G. Wiggins and J. McTighe was an interesting read. It’s all about how students in school learn how to do things, but they don’t truly understand it nor are able to apply it. It talks about how students always ask and whine about why they have to learn something because they won’t ever use it in the future. The truth is, they will someday down the road. Except for when it comes to math. I gotta say that I haven’t needed any math skills beyond basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division since I got out of high school. The only time I needed to know more than that was when I took the GRE. So in this respect, it is true sometimes that you won’t always use something you learned in the future. Plus, it’s math. History majors don’t need math. This is a long time running joke among history majors, but it actually does ring true.

The article states that the central mission in education is “learning for understanding” and to accomplish this teachers need to be able to help “students (1) acquire important information and skills, (2) make meaning of that content, and (3) effectively transfer their learning to new situations both within school and beyond it” (page 37). Reading about this makes me think of Common Core Math. When I first looked at the math, I couldn’t understand at all what it was doing, and then someone explained it to me. I now get it, but I don’t know if it’s the best way to teach the students. A lot of students don’t get it, and it has caused way more work for them. Common Core Math is pretty much about rounding up to count things. You have 18 items and need to get to 30. Adding 2 makes the item total 20. To get from 20 to 30, you have to add 10. So the answer is 12. 18+12=30. I get the idea, but the work is a lot more than if just do the simple naked math that we were originally taught. Common Core Math is actually how I add and subtract as an adult; I wasn’t taught to do it that way, I just somehow started doing it that way. But I acquired basic skills in how to add and subtract, and then I later transferred that learning to a new way of counting in the future. This is what “learning for understanding” is all about, to see connections in things and to be able to apply them. I’m also reminded of my integrated math classes in high school, specifically integrated math 3. My integrated math classes actually fit in with this “learning for understanding” mission. I remember in the 3^rd class we were learning about revolutions per minute which dealt with the size of a wheel which determined how fast it moved, and for a long time I couldn’t understand it, until the professor explained it by using real world examples such as some kind of car part and a ferris wheel. After reading this article, I now understand what integrated math was all about, but I still hate it.

In the book, “Understanding By Design” by the same authors of the article above, they open up with examples of how students are being taught, but not really learning anything at all that they can actually apply in the real world. One student became valedictorian because he could memorize easily, but didn’t actually understand the material; that his “brain was a way station for material going in one ear and (after the test) out the other.” (page 1). This by no means is a valued way of learning and teaching. I know exactly what the student was talking about because I would study for my Spanish, French, and German vocab tests 10 minutes before the class started, take the test, get an A, and then forget all that I had memorized later that same day or a couple of days after that. Memorization is not absorbing the material and understanding it. So what did I take away from German class? Fluency in the language? Definitely not. I only remember a few vocab words. Pretty much all I can do is count to 10 and I can tell you what parts of speech a word is, but I can’t understand the sentence as a whole. In reality, I learned nothing, but that was my fault for not constantly learning and memorizing the vocab. Another scenario asked how many buses do 1,128 soldiers need if each bus carries 36 soldiers. Students answered with 31 remainder 12. The real answer of course would be 32 buses. I know that I would have done the same answer, because I wouldn’t have understood it to apply it to the real world. In fact, I’m sure I’ve had similar questions and answered them exactly like that.

Reading this book has really caused me to reflect on how I learned in the past. Back in the day, I thrived with school work that required memorization. I was an ace at it. But when it came to hand-on experiments, I floundered. Part of it was because I was (am still?) a perfectionist about stuff and would erase and erase drawings or markings because they weren’t straight even when I used a ruler, and therefore I would be way behind in a craft project. But now? Not only do I see the benefits of hands-on or real world applications (performing an action as a way to learn and understand stays in your memory longer than mere memorization), but I am better at them than I used to be. But I don’t know why.