I got frustrated today, as I do most every day I teach. I had just started class and was asking the students how many cells meiosis produces, giving plenty of time for the response. The answer is fairly literally in all of their notebooks as it was dictated to all of them. (The correct answer is 4.)
A couple seconds after I asked the questions, numbers came spewing out. The first number gets repeated by 10-15 other students. It's always incorrect. Then the guessing gets going. It's actually quite incredible how many wrong answers they can come up with, as if they knew the right one all along.
And I know that just coming up with the right answer isn't good enough, which is why I wait.
But what ticks me off is that they don't look in their notebooks. They don't even try to think. I know this because they tell me. On some level, I knew this too. I knew the majority of my students would sit in class every day looking to do anything but pay attention. And I pander to them, teaching so rudimentally and slowly that if they're not keeping up, they MUST be left behind. I pare down the curriculum to skin and bones so that I'm essentially only teaching one "thing" every day, and most refuse to try and understand that one "thing".
Simply, it comes down to one thing. Desire. I may make the lesson as exciting as possible and the reasons to know the material as urgent as possible, but when it comes to understanding, there's no sense of "I want to understand that." There are a few students who ask intelligent questions, but then (like all of the others), simply try and memorize the answers. I know that if I put information in a table and later ask any question associated with the info, I'll get back the table. It's how my students were taught to learn. Can I turn things around in two years?
Peace
John
