forgetting to remember

thanks to sarah for posting the article about bill gates, and thanks to jessica for pointing out the comments in response to the article. i always enjoy reading the comments after articles that seem polarizing or somewhat controversial and trying to figure out what kind of people are reading and responding.

this sentence in the middle of one of the longer comments jumped out at me:

there is no linear correlation between quality of teaching and student performance, and for one very good reason: nobody has the slightest idea, beyond common sense, of what constitutes quality teaching.

i agree with the gist of this statement, although i would argue that nobody has the slightest idea of what constitutes quality teaching because no one is using common sense. when i think about the teachers i had in grade school/middle school/high school, most of the ones that come to mind didn't teach subjects that i loved or even did spectacularly in -- instead, the ones i remember as being great teachers are the ones who worked hard to find ways to facilitate understanding in those students who didn't "get it" the first try, and the ones who didn't balk at getting slightly off-track or incorporating digressions and slightly unorthodox activities into their lessons if it was going to help people learn.

it's hard for me to believe that the people who think standardized testing is a good way to measure teacher quality, let alone student achievement, have ever taken the time to reflect upon their own experience with teachers in schools. what can we do to make them remember?

more comments

i don't know what's going on with my blogger account, as i'm still not able to post comments on anyone's blog. i suppose for the moment, i'll just have to keep reacting via my own blog. i wanted to remark about two posts in particular. first, lee's post about AR apps:

when lee was talking about this the other night, i was a little confused about what an AR app would look like, but reading about these apps cleared things up for me. i particularly like the "nearest tube" app -- i would totally use something like that. this also made me think of gis (geographic information systems), a program that a lot of my friends who studied geography in college used to make these crazy-detailed maps overlaying various sets of data (normally dealing with the distribution of resources).

also, i liked sarah's post about "cyberped and revolution." this reminded me of an article i was reading in the new yorker the other day about mo ibrahim. he's a sudanese man who is largely responsible for the presence of cell phone towers in many parts of africa. he's made a whole bunch of money and is now giving away his fortune chunk by chunk to african leaders who reveal themselves to be genuinely for democracy and to have the interests of their countries' people at heart... i'd recommend checking it out, there's a very interesting correlation between political reform, youth engagement, and technology suggested there, too.