Thanks to the United Way for Southeastern Michigan, I had the opportunity this morning to speak to a classroom of 9th graders at Pontiac High School for Career Day. The United Way is involved in a program with troubled schools to increase the graduation rate. Career Day was put together to expose students to potential careers and help them start to think about their futures. While I was only at the school for a morning and spoke for only about 15 minutes or so, I wanted to share some observations because our current high school students are our future workforce…
Environment for Learning
I was lucky enough to speak first and the students were fairly quiet and reasonably respectful. However, there were small disturbances of chitchat. When we were done speaking, the room was fairly loud and chaotic. It was too loud for the teacher to do any lecturing, so individuals had to do assignments by looking up answers in a book. The teacher, who was a substitute, said that this classroom was always like that and had heard similar things from other full-time teachers at the school. The students were very respectful towards the police officer who came in to talk to a few of the students and also to one of the school administrators. Both of these ladies demanded respect and compliance and got it.
If all of your peers are talking and are ignoring the school work, what type of environment is that for learning? How much pressure is there to act the same way?
Technology
The classroom that I saw had one of those digital white boards and one computer. Most of the history books were in poor shape. Another speaker said she was talking to the students about the school paper, which doesn’t exist anymore (but could digitally). A lot of the information about potential careers or getting into college is online. Think about everything that we do online these days. What types of jobs or schooling could you get if you didn’t know how to use a computer or didn’t have access to the Internet?
Topics & Details
Today’s assignment for the students was about American history. I like history and took several Advanced Placement classes in high school (and even snuck in a class in college), but I don’t think I could answer many of the questions on the board. They were fairly picky questions about dates or other specifics. While the details are certainly part of the story, how important are they to the lesson about what happened when we consider the big picture?
I happen to believe that history is very important, so that we know more about our culture, our ancestry and both mistakes and accomplishments that have happened. I think we have both great and sad stories to be told. History gives us inspiration for our own lives. When history is diluted down to some facts that have to be memorized, I think we’re losing what’s important (and instead focusing on the type of questions that are probably on standardized tests).
If my history experience was just a bunch of questions that I had to look up the answers to in a book, would I still be interested? Probably not. What other ways can we teach this material so that it’s interesting to kids and so they’re more likely to retain the information?
What do you think? How can we improve education to make kids ready for the future workforce?
(photo by ASU_PCG, on Flickr)