Last week, in my own weekly mailing, I quoted the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “Much learning does not teach a man to have intelligence.”
About the same time, as if to illustrate, I received an email from column reader Dan Felshin containing an anecdote that scientist Isaac Asimov used to tell on himself: Asimov’s car mechanic runs a riddle by him and catches him on an obvious blunder. The mechanic claims he knew he’d catch Asimov. When asked why, he replies: “Because you’re so &*%^$ educated, doc, I knew you couldn’t be very smart.”
The humor here underlines the distinction between knowledge and intelligence (or maybe just common sense?). It is not new territory, but is worth re-exploring in a slightly different way, as it relates to learning and (sound familiar?) what we want our students to know.
The Mar/Apr ’89 issue of Missouri Schools contained an article entitled “The Shell Game”. I still have some quotes, as well as the column I wrote for the Branson Daily News back then, so I think I’m safe to summarize.
The author’s main premise was that teachers should inform their students of precisely what material should be ‘mastered’ before a test, and then test them on exactly that material. Any other approach, he claimed, makes the teacher guilty of what he called ‘the shell game’: forcing the student to try to choose what they are supposed to know (italics mine) from too many pieces of information.
He accused some teachers of engaging in ‘unscrupulous classroom games’ when they play this shell game and he urged administrators, in an effort to correct this practice, to “question the teacher’s preparation and planning” and demand to know the “dates, facts, procedures . . . emphasized during the lesson.”
Now, I certainly don’t believe in trying to trick students, but I don’t think trying to authentically assess student learning is a ‘trick’. I’d really like to think this article wasn’t too representative of prevailing wisdom in 1989, but I wonder what we would think now. Two questions arise:
- Is there still any feeling that “dates, facts, and procedures” are what students are “supposed to know”? In this highly technological, instant-fact-finding society, is that still (was it ever?) what we think constitutes becoming educated? Should I fear the answer?
- If/when we test students on ‘facts’, especially those that we’ve just made sure they ‘know they need to know’ what are we really assessing? Are we assessing their ‘knowledge’ or their ability to memorize for the short term? Is ‘mastery’ the same as ‘learning’? It seems that one of the reasons the whole assessment question is still so controversial is that it’s just not as easy as checking-for-fact-knowledge, and to believe so is to oversimplify, and therefore complicate, the problem.
Perhaps the real shell game occurs any time any of us – teacher, administrator, parent or citizen – still hide from ourselves the fact that learning is more than collecting facts, teaching is more than doling out facts, assessment is more than testing over those facts, and being educated is more than knowing a collection of facts. Ask Heraclitus or Asimov’s mechanic.
