TWO PHILOSOPHIES OF SCHOOL (24 january 2004)
I was a teacher for thirty years, which was long enough to experience two different philosophies of teaching that were upheld successively.
The first will be familiar to almost anybody: the teacher discusses a subject, the students do some exercises using what the teacher has just discussed; later the students are supposed to have another good look at the subject and to do some more exercises at home.
In this set-up, an important part of the teacher's task was the presentation of the subject-matter. But as far as presentation is concerned, teachers were faced with more and more competition. Just to mention an example, many tv-programs are presented by a team of professional presenters, and their texts are written by professional text writers.
It is clear that not many teachers can compete with television and other media.
A second problem is that modern homes offer so much diversion that homework easily gets into a tight corner. Television and the computer tend to fill the time that used to be spent on homework.
Some ten years ago schools were increasingly faced with students who hardly did any homework. At the same time more and more students were experiencing concentration problems.
In vocational schools the solution was sought in practical work: let the student make things with metal, wood or other materials. In the process, they'll learn a lot of useful skills. Besides, it's not very difficult to judge its quality.
This may be a good solution with rather manual skills. With subjects like languages this is often not so easy to realize. As a colleague teaching constructional engineering once remarked to me when I was a teacher of English: "In my class, students work four hours on something that I can assess in a few seconds, whereas you spend fifteen minutes correcting something that took them less than an hour."
These days, quite a few language teachers ask their students to write letters at home. This has the added advantage that students can spend as much time on it as they need.
A disadvantage is that it is not always clear how much of the work that the teacher gets to see was actually done by the student. I have seen examples of remarks of high praise that teachers wrote under work that was mainly done by someone else than the student who handed it in.
Language teachers who still assess their students with letters written at home usually employ two arguments to contradict the argument that there is no certainty who has really written it:
-
"I can see from miles away if the letter has been written by the student or
not."
(Does the teacher also see if 10% of the work was done by someone else? Or 20%, or ...)
- "The students has his/her own responsability
about what he/she really learns."
(If that's true, what does the school's diploma stand for?)
