A Reflection on Teaching.

Having taught in another country now, it occurs to me that there are some very great flaws in our thinking regarding how we teach. I have been reflecting on just how punitive our system of education is. I would like to propose the following:

1. There is a difference between a mistake and a crime. Western education does not understand this important distinction
2. Mistakes should be corrected.
3. Crimes should be punished.
4. When, as educators, we punish students for mistakes, we encourage them to commit crime.

Mistakes are important. They tell us where a student needs help and where, as teachers, we need to put more of our energy. When a student makes a mistake, we should only have them correct it. If we treat them like a criminal and punish them through a bad grade, by shame, or by any other psychological means. We will make them avoid the pain in the future, and they will simply copy or cheat to do it. Teachers tend to believe that the student will avoid being punished by working harder and doing better next time. I do not believe that is so.

When I was in college, the student paper did a very extensive study on cheating. About 65% of my fellow students self-confessed to cheating. (They are the honest ones.) I recall a certain class I was in as a freshman. It was one of those large survey classes you take where the grade is based on five major tests and only the four best tests are averaged for a final. The class was packed on the first day and dwindled down to about ten or fifteen of us. But on exam day the place would be packed. This went on for most of the semester and finally at the end, I asked someone, whom I knew had never been there and got an "A" on all the tests, how they did it. She said it was easy. "You just go down to the local copy store and ask for copies of the tests from last semester, study the answers, and take the test."

By crime, I mean the breaking of basic human ethical codes, or legal codes. Cheating, in that sense, like plagerism, is a crime, and that is not the same thing as a mistake. And yet cheating is a rampant practice among the students who are in our schools and universities. I have begun to wonder what we, as educators, are doing, because we seem to show moral disdain for such practices, and yet we perpetuate a system that rewards it, and the cleverness of students who seem to find more and more ingenuous ways to cheat.

I have been talking mostly about tests, really. We are test crazy and yet I have completely lost my faith in tests as having any meaning at all. I no longer believe that are an effective means of evaluating anything and they certainly have no value to the student for learning much of anything. A student retains very little from cramming in the long term, and seldom really looks at the specifics of the results which might help them, but why should they? It will not change the grade that punised them for the error they made.

It might seem silly, but I propose that if a teacher is going to offer a test, he or she should grade the test, enter the results, hand the tests back, ask the students to correct the errors and pass them in , check to see that the mistakes are corrected and give full points for all corrected errors.

If that is too much work, then the teacher should give the test and have the students correct their own work when they have finished. That way the students can see what they are doing wrong, and have a chance to learn from their mistakes, and get immediate, direct feedback; while at the same time, the teacher can see where the students need more work and adjust his or her planning accordingly.

But they might all get "A's"!

What's wrong with that? Too easy for them? Do we think the quality of education will suffer? Or is there something darker going on with a statement like that? Like we expect only a few to truly succeed. Perhaps the truth is we expect education to be a cruel, sadistic, soul draining proposition where only the fittest survive.