I woke up this morning thinking about teaching, no doubt the effect of all those talks and conversations with colleagues yesterday. What I was thinking, though, was that enjoyable (and worthwhile) as they mostly were, none of them addressed (save perhaps implicitly) what I (and a few others) have found to be a much more fundamental flaw of our school system. It can be put succinctly in a single question: How would you do things differently if your students took your final exam a year after they finished your class?
I teach many students two years in a row; the best (or at least, most advanced) of my students three years in a row. What the students don’t remember from the previous year(s) is distressing. A kid who made a 5 on the BC Calculus AP (which, since it’s the highest grade possible, would probably be thought to indicate mastery of the subject) cannot remember some pretty basic things about four months later.
The positive aspect of this situation is that relearning the “pretty basic things” is much faster the second year. But it’s also true that none of us (unless we have an effectively eidetic memory) remember much of what we learn that we don’t in some way continue to use or find intrinsically interesting. Language teachers are perhaps most familiar of all of us with this issue.
One aspect of this I have noted in my literature and philosophy course, which tries to be interdisciplinary, is that our current approach to history courses–huge sweeps of time covered in a year–leads to very little retention a year later, with the result that when I want to make a connection to something they’ve already seen (in World History in sophomore year, for instance), only a few have much recollection.
All of which leads to a point that several people have made before but that I echo strongly: decide what you want your graduates actually to know and actually to be able to do and build your curriculum around those points. Too much of what we teach now has the effect of simply being exposure.