Cooperate and Graduate

I don’t think that anyone will ever challenge me for being too with-it (or whatever the current phrase is; ‘down with it?’; ‘ashamble’? Don’t know, and yes, I made that last one up). But I realized that we have made a couple of minor steps into the current environment when I suggested, without thinking ‘aha!’, that my wife and daughter take the laptop over to the library, where they would be going to garner the last answers for the project from hell (about which, more later). I didn’t even have the reflexive thought that ‘when I was a kid, we did this with index cards’, although I did tell that story to my daughter as a form of a ‘aren’t you lucky’ statement; she nodded, accepted it, and, as they say, got on with her life. But the concept of bringing the PC along (and where, I now wonder, was the WiFi access hotspot?) seemed so natural, and convenient, that we dropped right into it.

About the PFH: the Language Arts teacher (that seems to be what the English teacher is now called, though whether that’s intended to reflect a blending of conceptual areas or just a new phrase for the old job, I’m not sure; I think mostly the first, a bit of the second) came up with a project wherein the kids had to take fifty questions and research them. They had, I believe, three weeks to do this. Strictures were placed: they had to use multiple sources; they could not rely predominantly on one source; each source had to documented to an excruciating level of detail – sufficient so that the teacher, should she desire, could go find the book/web page/whatever and return the same information.

Most of the questions were reasonable, and some were even interesting (for which read: I learned something I hadn’t known, and which I found intriguing). The goal was to train them in doing research, but what I think it taught them that there are multiple sources for answering a question, that those sources occasionally are missing, incomplete, contradictory, or obscure (who knew that a ‘watershed’ was a ‘hydraulic device’? Not I, scoffing –but a web search for ‘watershed’ and ‘hydraulic device’ did in fact turn up pages with those words, though I think that they meant ‘device’ as shorthand for ‘a method of doing something or causing something to occur’, not a physical device), that questions can't always be answered by yes or no, and to read the question carefully and completely. Useful general knowledge, but fifty questions was overkill, by far. And it was a killer, time wise, too: the offspring spent about ten hours on it, and at the end, we were all working on it; spreadsheet, laptop, let’s Google it and just say you found it in the dictionary, you read/I’ll type, and all.

My conclusion, shared with the offspring and the partner, was: next time, if there is a next time, cooperate and graduate. Divvy up the work with kids you trust, split up the research effort, share the results. Which I will just bet is not what the teacher had in mind, but, which, I understand is how it's done in the best law schools, medical schools, and similar areas of intense and rapid learning. Which apparently includes middle school.

There are more arts to success than just Language, teach.