I have been quiet on the whole “our Glorious President is going to speak to our schoolchildren on 08SEP” thing, simply because I have no school children, but Traction Control brought something interesting to my attention. The Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, sent out a letter documenting proposed teaching plans for educators to use before, during, and after the speech, and one of the “before” activities for the 7-12 grade group caught my eye. Bear in mind that this is for junior high an and high school students, and I am not editing or abbreviating the proposed plan at all (you can find the proposed plan here, in all its glory):
Quick Write or Think/Pair/Share (Students spend a few minutes Thinking and writing about the question; Paired with another student to discuss, then Sharing their ideas with the class as a whole). What do we associate with the words responsibility, persistence, and goals? How would we define each term? A teacher might create a web of student ideas for each of the words.
So… what caught my eye? Well, what is missing from that paragraph? Our Secretary of Education would like our teachers to have our students think about what “responsibility, persistence, and goals” mean, and then have the students share their ideas for the definitions of those words with the class. What else do we need?
Well, how about the actual definitions of the words in question? How about a study of any of the number of writings on those topics? How about an examination of what philosophers, past leaders, and other such folks thought of those words?
But no… we only care about what our students think… or what our students feel… And there is no sense in troubling their little heads over stupid little things like “facts” and “definitions” and such, is there? That certainly explains why some anti-rights activists cannot tell fact from fiction.
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