Making Connections

I’m reading “Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain” by Renate Nummela Caine and Geoffrey Caine. I’m only 43 pages in so far, but I’m constantly thinking while I read “Why wasn’t any of this covered in my education classes in college?” The text originally came out in 1991, so there was plenty of time for the BSU ed department to adopt it. But I didn’t hear of it until I was team-teaching a methods class in 2001 when we used Jim Burke’s “The English Teacher’s Companion” as our class text.

This book is opening my eyes and challenging how I teach. But many of the things are likely outdated now since it’s 15 years after its publication. They mention multiple intelligences, integrated curriculum, and brain plasticity - concepts I never heard whispered in any ed class I ever took.

Instead of focusing on how to teach and how students learn, my education classes did everything but. Dr. Halcrow (who was the head of the ed department at the time) in “Human Relations” compared race relations to vegetables and meat in a refrigerator (the African Americans were the vegetables in the bottom drawers and they were angry at the dominant white culture who were the meat sitting in the lofty top shelves). It still stands out as the all time worst metaphor I’ve ever encountered. And he was head of the damned Education department! Then in his “Measurement and Evaluation” class, he constantly talked about actively engaging students and getting them out of the classroom, all while he lectured to us for 50 minutes three times a week in a small cramped closet on the third floor of the ed building using an overhead projector and pile after pile of transparencies. I guess the irony was lost on him.

Next, I had a class in discipline taught by a female professor whose name escapes me (just like the class’s name). We role played a lot (this must be standard procedure at all universities. Without fail, any time we meet for our history class through Hamline, all the teachers groan when the professors come up with some role playing activity! They know the routine too well! That reminds me - in that class we had to ad lib a skit as at their desk and an angry student. We had to do this in small groups - each taking a turn doing their skit in front of the class and the professor. I was stuck in the role of teacher. I had no idea what my partner (the student was going to do). The professor wanted to see how we would react. When it came our turn, I sat at my 'desk' and the student stormed in. I asked him what was wrong and he suddenly raked his arm across the desk, knocking all the books, tablets, binders, and bottles of pop/water to the floor. I didn't know what else to do, so I said, "Thanks. I've been meaning to clean and re-organize my desk." I had the entire room laughing so hard - including the disgruntled student that we had to end the skit. I got applauded for using humor to diffuse a tense situation. Now if one of my students actually did that, would I react the same way? No. I'd consider throwing him out the damned room and dragging him down to the office, but I couldn't do that bakc then).

In addition to role playing, we had this ludicrous CPI training (don’t ask me why I remember that name). CPI included ways to physically handle disruptive student behavior. This included learning such strategies like if a student bites you, grab the back of their head and hold it to your arm. The reason being they aren’t expecting that, and the worst thing to do is follow your instinct amd pull your arm away quickly. That only leads to torn muscles. There was another technique to deal with a biting student - rub the space above their top lip and below their nose. The sensation is so unexpected and odd that it will invariably cause them to stop biting and shake their head. The other training has been forgotten.

Guess how much of that I’ve ever used - yep - zero. Yet, the bulk of my education classes all dealt with crap like that. Why? Who knows? The education professors are failed high school teachers who are so out of touch with reality that they simply don’t know what else to teach? Or maybe they view themselves as so superior to high school teachers that they are stuck in idealistic views of education? Again, who knows?

But in 43 pages of this book, I’ve learned more about learning that I ever did in roughly 30 some credits of education classes at BSU.


******

Kevin, my brother, is a higher up at the beet plant in Crookston. He is now taking graduate level courses in chemistry. The beet plant is paying him to go to school. That’s gotta be nice. He and ten others are taking classes for eight hours a day. It is part of a three year program.

His job is basically to watch 8-10 computers that monitor the beets as they are processed. He has several people working under him. Kevin, who never attended college, but who is one of the brightest people I know, had an interesting observation on our education system.

He said, “In high school you’re given the questions and then you are given the answers. In college you are given the answers first in the form of lecture and then you are given the questions in the form of tests. In the real world, the questions come at you first and you have to find the answers as you go.” I was shocked. For the most part he is right.

In all the best classes I’ve ever had and from which I learned the most - I was pushed to solve my own questions and come up with my own answers. Or as the authors of "Making Connections" observe when discussing the featurs of Taxon Memory and how it's used in public schools, "students memorize for tests instead of seeking to understand ideas." In only a few classes was I ever pushed to seek and understand ideas instead of worrying about passing the midterm and final. Unfortunately, I can count those classes on one hand.