I just had an epiphany. I think I get where these project based peoploe are coming from. When kids complain about learning something hard, and what the kids say is "when am I going to need this in the real world" these people believe that the kids are really articulating what the problem is. Wow.
In my experience (and I know there are teachers who agree with me, as well as others who don't) the complaint "when am I going to need this in the real world"" is secret code for "I don't want to sound stupid, or like this might be my fault, but I don't understand this". I have found that if you attack the not-understanding, the complaining tends to go away. I know from sad experience, that if you attack the "real world" part of the complaint without addressing the not-understanding (and while keeping the same content), the complaints do not go away.
I think the project based people may have come up with a third alternative: if you both address the "real world" part, and you seriously reduce the content, then all the kids who tend to complain cease complaining. Whadaya think?
Monday, September 1, 2008
lsquared on project based learning
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment