This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
The other day, a colleague at work asked me, did I know the formula for the volume of a cone. We don't work at Coldstone. My gut, though, told me "two scoops."
Not what he was looking for, but if I worked in a cone manufacturing plant where we manufactured cones of a specific roundity and standard pointiness, I still would not be able to tell you what is the volume of even one cone. I could probably tell you how many were left if Jason had 18 cones and gave 10 of them away at gunpoint to an armed cone dealer on the schoolground, but that's about it. There's a reason I can't get a job at Coldstone.
But really, how did I graduate high school? How do I even make coffee every morning with the measured scoops and cone filter? I can get a DVD to slide out of a machine outside the grocery store. Isn't that enough? Do I also, at this age, need to know how to figure out the something cubed of a cone? The Cash Cab driver doesn't even ask stuff that complicated.
It reminded me of the kind of questions thrown at you on standardized tests, the ones you take every year from grades one through 12. You'll be skipping through the math problems, filling in the bubbles, when all of a sudden they want to know "How many Icha Bods in a crane?" Are they just checking? To see if anyone in the second grade can actually answer correctly? Perhaps they don't know and are hoping to coax an answer out of the nation's school kids.
And who are "they" anyway, these ones that decide what a person ought to know at what age. I've been reading a lot lately about the "phenomenon of the Teenage Brain." It's a mystery alright. So, they can maybe tell us the volume of a cone but can't figure out the kitchen trash can or the washing machine. Phenomenal.
At the same time, they want third- and fourth-grade kids to read a passage and "summarize" the main point? Are you flippin' kidding me? Have you ever listened to your kids? When my daughter starts a story, I hold all my calls and pack a lunch. The main topic is every word uttered during things like play dates, recess and sleepovers, and no matter how infinitesimal the detail, it may not be omitted, left to the imagination, implied or inferred. If it's missed, the story has to begin again, pretty much from the beginning. Of time. It's just not natural for people this age to be brief. "Summarize" to kids is what they do from June to August.
Often, they are required to compose essays – on the spot. I know from experience that it takes two hours, eight snack breaks, two jumps on the trampoline and a couple time-outs to pet the cat for a fourth grader to cobble together one sentence. How do they expect them to generate a complete essay without anyone telling them what to put after the instruction "Identify a theme and explain…" Snapchat what? I don't want to underestimate any part of this learning process, most especially the intelligence of my own kid, but they do have a limited "word threshold." In my house, anything after "I need you to…" is floof. How do their heads not explode by the time they get to "...how the author supports the theme through character development and…"?
The math problems are more straightforward and unlike Language Arts (ie, reading and writing), classroom learning has provided you with definitive tools to find the answers. Math, even story problems, cannot be interpreted differently by different people. Well, unless you're me, and then, just be glad you're not. There's no 'theme' in math, nothing inferred or implied, alluded to or symbolically represented. Which is fantastic. Because if you had to do all of that and calculate the area of a baseball diamond based on the distance between home plate and second base, you'd have to imagine the diamond as the "circle of life" and that the pitcher fears death before invoking the pythagorean theorem to solve the problem. Meanwhile, fourth graders don't know their street address or where they left their lunchbox.
All of this is not to say these skills aren't important, even vital in some cases for lifelong success. My experience with these same little people, however, does not suggest evidence of that level of analytical thought process. First you need a modicum of interest. The average fourth-grader is interested in YouTube, sugar, recess and trading BFFs like pork bellies on the futures floor. Then you need focus. A 9-year old girl has the metabolism of a humming bird and the attention span to match. Of course, it's important to measure the effectiveness of our country's education system and logically, you'd do that by measuring student success. I just have to wonder about the criteria and whether or not it's realistic for kids this young.
These children aren't ever going to voluntarily analyze contemporary fiction or solve for the "y" of any equations explaining density, volume or gravitational pull. Ever. They will, at this age, build a fort, invent societies and magic tricks, forget to feed their pets and leave the hose running. They will wade in toxic flood water, build rocket launchers from empty Coke bottles, try to stay awake past midnight, sneak cake in bed and straighten their hair with your clothing iron. All of which seems contrary to what we're asking them to know now, and retain for what comes next.
What the fourth-grader needs to know is "equal." They have to know "exact." These are the concepts that will inform them whether their piece of cake is the same size as that of the kid next to them. If they get the same amount of time flying the drone as their brother. They have to be able to assess whether their clothes are not better or worse than their friends but the same. Identical. Exact. This is the math that motivates children.
Some of the concepts taught in third and fourth grade definitely serve us – once we become parents. If the kids need "equal," we need are fractions. But create a math test that's relevant, would you? It's not as if you ever have to do anything as simple as calculate how many slices you need from a pizza to feed eight dinner guests. What you will have is seven pizzas and eight guests, one with a gluten allergy, one who doesn't eat cheese, another who doesn't like anything but cheese and two who are paleo. What you need to know is what percentage of your mind you are losing at what rate, to make sure you have enough left to drive the little cretins home later.
I'm not convinced that even the teenage brain, a "learning" brain, a "developing" brain – now ascribed with having "power and purpose" – needs quite the level and depth of knowledge forced on it. Think of the excuses we give for kids doing poorly on these tests: "He's the smartest person I know, but doesn't test well," or "She's so intelligent, just not book smart." We know at home, the really smart kid puts a cat on a trampoline. She's equally smart at school but doesn't remember Pythagoras. Who cares? If our teachers are doing a good job, our children are compatible with others, participative, contributing, collaborative and confident. They're not anxious from age 5 to 18 because they have trouble producing an essay comparing one irrelevant thing to another. Especially if, at 18 you're going to be using that phenomenal brain learning to drive, we really need your total focus on the car – or building – in front of you. Not so much the character development in Beowulf.
My daughter’s class has "Random Acts of Kindness" week. That's gonna go a hell of a lot further than cursive writing and acute angles. Teaching sustainable energy and conservation is going to have more bearing on their lives than long division or parts of speech. It used to be that "Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten." Because it's during that time kids are taught things they will actually use in their lives, like sharing and caring, tying their shoes and turning off lights. Even eating glue leaves a lasting impression. Why disturb the natural order of things by having kids memorize the chemical composition of glue per the periodic table?
If as teenagers, the brain explodes with the vital development that is now thought to trump hormones in dictating behavior, are we to relax because the majority of them have demonstrated on tests that they can solve for y? At least once a year. It seems when these tests were revamped to also be "relevant" to kids in depressed, rural and less fortunate school districts, they might have used that moment to define what is relevant. Period.
Sure, someone's got to know all the stuff about chromosomes and DNA, about matter and gravity, at some stage, probably not when they're 9. At that age, they should know generally why you can't put metal in a microwave, or why it's a bad idea to eat raw poultry. Truth be told, I was not required to diagram sentences from Macbeth until seventh grade – exactly the right age to cultivate that skill. And I'm glad I did, as Shakespearean English is making such a comethback.
At some point, someone will figure out that what we didn't learn in kindergarten we're taught again by our kids. "Remedial Life." We will continue to learn from them the kinds of things we could never capture from a classroom or a field trip to the post office. On the one hand, it's gonna be some math revision – I certainly didn't get it the first time. On the other, it will be more ephemeral notions you can't measure or duplicate on paper. Just this morning, my daughter taught me how to make a paper frog that jumps. My son demonstrated how to swipe the frog and hide it when she wasn't looking.
In school, they are learning to measure the distance their frogs can jump when not squashed by another student. The frogs are made of dozens of triangular shapes and none of the kids knows how large or small or what angles comprise them. However, when my frog jumped off the counter and landed, presumably dead, on the floor, my daughter said, "Oh mommy, he died. I'm sorry for your loss."
I find these interactions intensely meaningful, and they certainly offer greater insight into what's going on in a young person's mind than annual exams that test for formulaic response and measure how adept the child is at taking a test.
As they become tweens and then teens, they'll be testing their limits and ours. They'll be expanding their boundaries, exploring new ways of self-expression that make all manner of quadratic equations seem like pathetic attempts to evaluate progress.
I have no idea how my children performed on their tests this year and I'm not particularly concerned because they're very intelligent. Most of us are, even if we never had any interest whatsoever in knowing how to calculate the volume of a cone, and cannot recall it today. Possibly my peers and I would have made a point of knowing all about the cone if the one in question was a bra cup, but it was never put to us quite that way. As a mom, I know the volume of the cones in my life are either two scoops, the head under a party hat or the ones our kids will use to practice parking near and not driving over.
I guess it's a good thing I'm not a school teacher. Or scooping ice cream at Coldstone.
