Written on Wednesday about 2 p.m.
As I sit here in a house that has been without power since the storm passed through around midnight last night, home sick from work, I ponder some odd elements in our educational system. My daughter managed to flunk out of both semesters of American Citizenship during the regular school year, so she had to retake them both during summer school. And at 11:15 on the second day of summer school she called to say she was done with both semesters’ classwork.
She was taking the courses via computer at the school as part of a summer school program. So I called the school to talk to a teacher (I didn’t even know at that point any name for her teacher) to find out if this was so. The teacher confirmed. If you know the material you can choose to test out of it. So in less than two days’ time she tested out of the material for an entire year’s school work.
We saw a pattern during the school year – she would do well on most tests, but have issues with assignments being turned in or completed. This is what usually caused problems with her grades.
The question comes: how important are those assignments, the “busy work”, as part of the learning process. Some of it obviously can be important to internalizing the information as more than just mere facts. But if she is able to fix an entire year’s failure in two days of testing out, it seems to negate some of the busy work of those classes.
Another possibility: is it the type or way of learning that is the problem for particular students? Is that why the year’s course was a failure, but the testing out was a success? My curiosity is what practical grasp for applying the information has she gotten from either method of learning.
This blog is really a lot of questions, more than observations or answers. I would be interested in the viewpoints of other people, and discussion on this.
At The Rainbow 