Balancing Act in Action

This post is wrapping up my teacher-talk on planning and NCLB. When last mentioned, a question about "What Ought to be Taught" loomed on our collective horizon.

This question has two sides, as I see it. The first, I shall term Accountability. The Accountability side of the debate centers on, well, accountability. "We need accountability for students, for teachers, for administrators and for schools, and shoot, while we're at it, we need accountability on the policy-makers and politicians setting this whole system up too," might be the call to arms for the Accountability Camp. They might take issue with what exactly should be assessed, but some assessment is better than no assessment, and let's be honest, this is a work-in-progress folks, so they will take the TAKS test, they will take the NY Regents, they will take the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, they will call for greater state-to-state alignment and national standards. They will call for merit pay because we should reward teachers who actually, well, teach...well. They will call for high expectations; high expectations for student learning, high expectations for teacher performance. The end game for Accountability is an excellent product; in this case, graduates that are capable of doing anything and everything and contributing to society (I assume.)

The somewhat-opposing view I will label as holistic (Note: I am completely making this stuff up. I am trying to put to words the sense I have of how things work, and I don't know how well it conveys the true nature of things.). This view is that students are Individuals, people. They have desires, needs, dreams, and education should lead them to self-actualization so that they can choose for themselves the path for their lives. As a teacher then, my role would be to help students to understand the world and their place in it, to help them learn to ask and answer questions that they themselves pose, to give the skills they need to relate to the world. Testing does not really fit into this structure.

I don't know that I have ironed out exactly what my view on the role of education is, but I know that Pure Accountability makes me feel empty when I teach, while Pure Holistic denies the reality of the system and gatekeepers that students must pass to advance into college or whatever.

A couple of weeks ago I had a lesson that did a pretty good job of balancing these competing purposes.

The lesson was the first of three or four dealing with the equivalence of rational numbers; this idea that fractions, percents and decimals all communicate the same amounts, parts of a whole, but are written in different forms. The objective for the lesson was for my students to see that all the numbers work the same way, and that we can compare them.

The lesson started with a situation.

"You just got a graduation gift of money. How much money do we have?"
Answers would range from $100 to $600. Surprisingly not one class went crazy on this.
"Okay, we have $500 dollars. We are going to put it in a bank account. Does anybody know why we might want to do this?"
Answers included so that we can write checks, to get a credit card, to save it for later. Roughly 20% of my students knew that bank accounts actually pay interest.
"Well, banks actually pay us to put our money there. If we leave our money in the bank, it will get more money for us and we don't have to do anything. So we have three banks to choose from. They have different savings rates. Which one should we choose?"
Kids knew that they wanted the most money possible. That was easy.

So, I conveniently changed the savings rates to easier numbers (none of this 0.32% crap), and made each bank use a different form of the rational numbers. As a class we went through and computed the first banks interest. As a table (group of 3ish), students did the second bank. As individuals, students computed the third bank. This took about 20 minutes.

"So which bank should we put our money in? Oh yea, Bank 3 gave us the most money! Cool. So let's review. We had a fraction a decimal and a percent, but they all gave us about the same amount of money. Hmm. We just spent 20 minutes figuring that out. Do you know we could have figured it out in 2 minutes?"

Groans echoed through the room. "Mister!" came the call from exasperated students.

I now introduce the idea of comparing rational numbers by changing them to the same form. We change them all to percents in 50 seconds, and have the best account in 70.

It was an early release day, so class was over at this point, but my students left knowing something real about the world (saving money in a financial institution helps me not to spend it AND it pays me money) and the saw something true about problem solving (there are many different ways to solve problems, just some are faster than others) and something content-wise (to compare rational numbers I need to have them all in the same form).

I felt extremely satisfied at the end of that lesson.