Chad Beehler sent the following letter (response sent from mail@cartalk.com).

"Wait a minute! What about all of the high-achieving, scholarly people who have gone on to success because of good old-fashioned skill drills and spanking?"

Dear Click and Clack,

What perfect timing for this topic! I want to discuss (rant and rave about) my experiences working as a sixth-grade teacher in what you so perfectly pegged as a Little Red School House (hereby called LRSH). Sadly, but not soon enough, June 8 will be my last day as a public school teacher for a while. This was only my second year, and I'm only 25 years old.

Before I completely pick apart the LRSH, I will list my core beliefs of learning. Much of them are similar to yours, but go about them in reverse. The rest of this dragging, verbose letter explains why I believe this way and why too many public school classrooms are a waste of time at best.

Educated people are lifelong learners. They become efficient at turning curiosities of environment into questions that lead to better understanding of that environment. They wonder, observe, infer and predict in a cycle, becoming experts at finding resources to better survive and enjoy their existence.

Eventually, these masters of lifelong learning will understand large amounts of what their culture defines as important knowledge (art, physics, communication, how to match clothes...). Greater understanding of the human environment is achieved because it is important enough to think about in the first place.

I thought all of education was that way when I started a few years ago, thinking that it must have changed since my holding-pen days of being a public school student. Or, better yet, I could make the whole world like this all by myself in my little happy classroom. My sixth graders were so used to the Little Red School House that my (young and inexperienced) way of teaching was Greek to them.

Learning was achieved naturally before public schools, textbooks, worksheets, and BS evolved, just as digestion broke down food before intestinal parasites appeared to aid in the process. Instead of a system to help learners be even better learners (as we did in the Renaissance period), we created a system to Train People to Work in the Industrial Revolution. That old, nasty garbage scow is still the same basic ship our kids sail to this day, with a few decals added to its rotting hulk!

Despite the majority of public schools being this way, a few teachers and schools here and there are superhuman enough to handle the intense teacher workload of simultaneous classroom topic preparation, materials gathering, five hours of student contact, bookkeeping, psychology, police work, curriculum review, fundraising, scholarship, nursing...WHILE allowing students to learn in natural, older-than-traditional ways, plus helping them to be more efficient at it. We all had one or two, didn't we? I thought my ideas would be good enough for my class to be that way. How could a pre-service teaching prepare a person for this? I even read and tried to implement suggestions from Harry Wong's beginning teacher checklist book, and couldn't hack it. There's so much going on that your head spins!

I won't be a teacher next fall, yet I still will cling to what I believe is a virtuous, meaningful and effective philosophy of learning (namely, open-minded, critical, and free thinking).

Whew! I was afraid that all of the indirect truth-masking and brainwashing had scorched my soul. The LRSH does not hold a monopoly on learning. We all went home from school and did most of our best learning without it! Admit it! (So long as our psyche was in good enough shape afterward.)

The LRSH does, however, clench a tight fist on our learners' most precious resource: time. And they're pillaging it like farmers bulldozing rain forests. What do fist-polishing politicians do to alleviate swelling criticism of schools? Make the year longer!

No one would mind going to school all year if thinking was at its foundation. I would have gladly accepted my district's invitation to teach next year if so.

Instead, I have become saddened, frustrated, angry, humbled and gibbering with lunacy from the LRSH mind-set so deeply screeched into the minds of school personnel, parents and students, plus the unbelievable demands placed on a new teacher. I asked my principal (also new to the district, and matching my philosophies) to show me the school's curriculum. They had none. Some people said, "Why, aren't the textbooks in your room?"

Too often, school is much less of a place for thinking than a place for preparing students to persevere in their eventual menial adult lives. That is the San Andreas fault of our educational "system."

Wait a minute! What about all of the high-achieving, scholarly people who have gone on to success because of good old-fashioned skill drills and spanking? If you think about it hard enough, how could you not fasten the words "despite the" over "because of"?

Of the many outside Herculean problems schools face, I believe the following numbered topics are the responsibility of the educational system to eradicate. These faults make schools vulnerable to outside problems and, in the end, largely ineffective--a waste of students' time at best.

All of these things multiply with each other to spread the tumor of LRSH (and student) failure. Any statistics given to prove points are ballpark estimates. They should be close.

1) THE VOMIT CURRICULUM

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Bloom's Taxonomy, Dr. Bloom analyzed all of thinking into six categories. They are listed as verbs:

BOTTOM TIERS (foundations for upper tiers of thinking)
(a) to know (memorizing a symbolic fact)
(b) to comprehend (understanding the meaning of the fact)

UPPER TIERS (learning by doing)
(c) to apply (using the fact in a new situation)
(d) to analyze (breaking a broad concept into smaller, meaningful, organized sets of facts)
(e) to synthesize (putting smaller facts into a meaningful whole),
(f) to evaluate (judging the worth of a fact)

I believe I've heard that evaluation can use up to 7 percent of the brain's neurological powers at one time! This exercise for the brain keeps it in good shape, which is true with other body parts. Challenge keeps them more optimally functional.

LRSHs, however, dally in the bottom tiers. Look up the answers at the end of the chapter. Copy this definition. Fill in the blank. Name the 50 presidents. Fill this worksheet. You got 17 of 25 correct.

Devil's advocates say, "Look at me! I learned this way and I did just fine," or, "It's good for them," or, "These kids can't even do the most basic things in the first place. Why bother with more than that?" or, "How are they going to learn anything without a foundation of knowledge?" or, "They're doing something...with their pencils and sitting still," or, "That's the way it's going to be for the rest of their lives, so we'd better get them ready for it," or, "That's learning," or, "I've gotta give them a grade about something!"

asjlkdfjklfasfdskjl!

These are surface value excuses. True, you must have and understand knowledge to use the upper thinking levels, but this notion is abused so that easy-to-prepare, easy-to-assess nonsense infests our classrooms and detracts from our kids' lives. Of course, I feel like a hypocrite saying that, because I couldn't handle the demands very well either. You see, the whole damn thing is set up for failure unless you are an organizational and thick-skinned-to-your-own-philosophy god.

But God himself couldn't effectively teach with a vomit curriculum (just look at how he has us naturally learn!). A curriculum is vomit if meaning and doing take place later or not at all. This is called "bottom-up" teaching. First the rote skills, then the factory-line practice, then MAYBE meaning and doing for those who are fortunate enough to have been born and nurtured with high IQs and/or persevering qualities. Ha! It's ironic that the kids who need more stimulating visual input to learn have the most difficult time in schools because the upper tiers are seen as a reward, or even as wasteful, to the LRSH thought police. I'll talk about differences in learners in a little while...

"Top-down" learning is the reverse. You start with a meaningful, broad category, then find what you need to know to help answer real questions about it. Anybody who builds a deck, WORKS ON A PROBLEMATIC CAR, uses a computer, rides a bike, analyzes the role of industry in 20th century, etc., starts with a broad curiosity (or nagging problem), then creates their own meaningful path to learn necessary skills and facts about the topic. This is learning, in my opinion. This is what we do naturally.

It's sad to say, but it pops onto everyone's tongue: "So, naturally, it's not done in school!"

No. Traditional schoolwork is historically a load of bottom-up manure, and since people want to see How Their Student is Doing in Relation to the Vomit Monolith, this leads me to...

2) GRADES

The intercourse people have with this bogus philosophy is puzzling.

On the surface, and worshipped by people inside and outside of teaching as the Gospel of Learning, are grades. I was an A/B student. David Letterman dedicated a building at Ball State (my alma mater) to "all C students before and after me!"

"John Doe Troublemaker is a D student at best. How on earth could you give him an A? Did he do A work? That's grade inflation! That's not fair to the people who worked hard and earned real As."

What kind of learner were you pegged at 8 years old? I know a lot of so-called D and F students who are brilliant learners.

Devil's advocates will scamper to their excuse file in defense of this vomit curriculum tool. Here they come! "How else are you going to keep them accountable?" or, "That's proof of how much she's learned," or, "It's a reward for those who work hard and a punishment for those who don't try," or "They're much easier to keep record of," or "Parents expect them," plus all of the "I had it and did fine" stuff that was discussed under vomit curriculum. (Despite! Despite!)

People want to believe that grades stand for an objective amount of learning a student achieves, but it's not true. Recall what I said about existence (too complicated to be completely represented by a symbol) and learning (more than just knowledge) earlier. How the hell does a letter stand for what a person has learned? It has never made sense to me in that context. Admit it! A grade could stand for the amount of memorized facts a person has successfully recalled, but as we discussed earlier, that is merely a fragment of learning.

Beyond measuring pure knowledge, whether or not it is meaningful to the student, a letter grade's objective power becomes subjective, and broad, if based on a higher tier of Bloom's Taxonomy. I say, "Good! Out with it!" You shouldn't be able to hang a clear, unchanging sign on thinking. When you start to think this way, you are on your way to torching the vomit curriculum!

So, if you're a staunch vomit curriculum teacher, your letter grades stand for a load of BS anyway. As you diverge from this, the letter couldn't stand for the wonderful things a learner has discovered about existence, and grading becomes subjective and difficult. Either way, they're not the best way to assess a learner's progress.

A reward/punishment? "A" students do not usually work their best for As, so are rewarded with excellence for doing less than their best. Is that the message we want to send? The middle students try their best, only to be told it is worth an average grade. Gratifying. I won't even go into the poor souls who try their best, improving themselves proportionally as any other student who tries hard, and get a D or F from their bastard teacher. Most of these kids only need a few of those blows to the psyche before giving up altogether and becoming a behavior problem. Yet, they are expected by the Wilford Brimley Teacher's Union to stick it out for 10 more years, getting poor grades for their best effort. Rubbish!

How about this instead: Keep a folder for the student's actual work with the skills checklist on the inside front cover. As the parent comes in, the student takes over, going through the checklist to explain how much she has learned since the year started, then displays her most favorite, meaningful projects. After the year is over, two or three of the projects are copied and kept in a K-12 file, checklist following, and your record of the exact skills she has conquered is on record. People love schools, and politicians extend summer vacation, much to the students' chagrin.

No crunching of meaningless numbers. People see what the student has actually done, rather than just "B+." Time is saved and learners do better work and master the necessary communication and logic skills because people see the list and it means more than extrinsic motivation!

This, simply, is what portfolio assessment is about.

It does requires a ton of modeling and preparation, plus an understanding that it does not fit the standard American definition of learning. However, doing the vomit curriculum requires just as much effort, if not more, and is less gratifying.

Naysayers: "But there's no way these kids would do decent work without being held accountable! They'd just goof around without the structure of grades, tests,..." I wholeheartedly disagree. The checklist (buzzword3DRUBRIC) is more and better structured than what the grading system offers. It allows the learner to work optimally at his own pace. That leads me to my next point, which devastates the psyches of the majority of students...

3) IGNORING RESEARCH ON LEARNING STYLES

Let's pretend a coach makes all players on a team lift the same exact weights while conditioning. Ha! That's absurd, isn't it?

Making every learner sit and listen to the same vomit curriculum in the same way is just as silly. Yet, it is common practice in "education."

More quotes: "They're not trying," or, "They're just scum!" or, "She's not up to level," or, "It's all the same stuff! Two plus two still equals four no matter who you are!" or, "There's no way a teacher can do that many things at once," plus all of the perseverance-is-a-virtue-for-its-own-sake oversimplification.

The human brain, our most complex object in the known universe right now, should be the center of what's happening at school. Included in its complexity are the differing ways each one brings in stimulus, processes it and acts upon it. You could think of the different brain functions as tools for learning.

You shouldn't be surprised to hear this by now, but most of what happens in a classroom suits the least number of participants in this regard. The auditory mode is, by default, the most used. Sit and listen. Pay attention! It is believed that 80 percent of students in a public school do not process stimuli through the ear nearly as well as visually, through movement, or combinations.

More manure: "But just look at them! They're scraggly, loud and can't sit still! If they would just try, they'd understand." No, they've just given up after years of being forced to use an inferior tool to learn. When you have the wrong wrench, you put it in the toolbox and find the right one. No one would use a Phillips screwdriver on a straight screw, but 80 percent of kids are forced to keep using it!

For once, I will agree with a devil's advocate quote. Teachers cannot stand there and lecture (some people's definition of "teaching") about more than one thing at a time. Here's my suggestion: Students need to learn about learning so they can be responsible to teach themselves through their optimal mode of stimuli. They already do this before school labels them a failure.

So, I need to close off this monstrosity. We must purge the vomit curriculum, and remember what separates us from most of the animal kingdom: our ability to think and what the essence of thinking really is. I truly believe that more people will be knowledgeful of the things on your Educated Persons list if schools stopped hating kids under the 80th percentile of auditory learning.

Other topics I haven't brought up: Tenure (who else, besides Latrell Sprewell, keeps their job for not doing it right?); dismantling public schools beyond elementary school and forming thematic, vocational junior high and high schools; and how this all relates to the do-it-yourself fixings of automobiles.

I'm just kidding, Car Talk guys! Your eclectic topics on Car Talk every week further prove (or disprove?) my point about learning being a lifelong, top-down, learner-interested process.

Thanks for even reading one page into this!
Chad Beehle

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