SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

So what happens after we’ve got students “engaged”?

To be honest with you, I’m glad I’m not a high school teacher any more. I don’t know if I would be up to the challenge of getting today’s highly distracted students “engaged” with trigonometry or computer science.  But I do remember that when I succeeded in interesting my students, invariably discussions would head in the direction of topics more advanced than were being discussed in class.  For example, a student’s question in a grade 11 algebra class might lead to a brief discussion of calculus or set theory.  This must be happening all the time in today’s elementary schools which leads me to wonder how well teachers who have been taught that process is more important than content are handling these situations.  I agree that it’s unrealistic for elementary teachers to have subject matter mastery at, say, the post-secondary level for all the subjects that they teach, but it would be interesting to see how well these teachers would score on tests of their mathematics, science, history, geography and literature knowledge at the grade 10 level.