School: Mix it Up!

Over the holiday season, I had the opportunity to sit down with my two children and make some delicious sugar cookies. As we were making our cookies, laughing, telling stories, and having a great time….. I was struck with a metaphor.  

Let me explain.

I have been very critical of our current education system, as I believe it is failing to prepare our students for their futures. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is the fact that we have somehow managed to isolate our subject areas, to such an extreme that our students do not see the interconnectedness between them.

As a science teacher, there have been many times that I've had students in my classroom say things such as:

“Why are we writing so much, this is science not literacy?”

Or, the times when we were learning about punnett squares and students would say:

“Why are we doing math? I thought this was science.”

Seriously?

Over time, these comments forced me to take a step back and figure out what was going wrong.  I decided to give each of my classes a quiz, which asked them about the different content areas.  The quiz looked like this:

1. What is science?
2. What is math?
3. What is art?
4. What is literacy

    etc…………..

After doing this several times, the most common answers students gave to these questions, by far, were responses such as:

1. My 3rd hour class.
2. My 5th hour class.
3. My 1st hour class.
4. My 7th hour class.

    etc………....

Ouch!

The severity of this issue began to sink in.  The students honestly didn't “get it”. They didn’t understand that each of these content areas represented an extremely important skill, which we were trying to help them attain.  They didn't realize that each of these skills is a critical piece to an important puzzle, called REAL LIFE.  How can we expect students to care about learning these skills, if they don’t understand the purpose for learning them?  Letter grades have effectively (and maliciously) forced students to comply….as they successfully answer questions in order to pass the test.  This has been creating the illusion that everything is okay.  It isn't!

As I reflected, and examined my class, I admit that I wasn’t doing a good enough job of collaborating with teachers from other subject areas and creating a truly interdisciplinary educational experience for students.  Sure, I was incorporating other disciplines into my class, but that wasn’t enough.  That just made me look like the “crazy guy” who was trying to teach multiple things at once.

In order to get this concept across to students it is going to take a much bigger, much more collaborative, effort.  

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Now, back to the sugar cookies.  
As I sat and looked at the ingredients…..

flour
baking soda
baking powder
sugar
butter
vanilla extract
an egg

… I thought about how disgusting and unrewarding that it would be to eat any of those ingredients alone.  Give it a try.  Grab two cups of flour for a quick snack.  Chew on a half-stick of butter.  Pour some vanilla extract on your tongue.

By themselves, these ingredients are unfulfilling. They are not delicious. They are not fun to eat.  However, when we mix them all together and heat them up, they create some absolutely delicious sugar cookies.

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Later that day, as I sat and ate some of these delicious cookies with my children, the metaphor was complete.

Our education system needs to mix up the ingredients.  
We need to combine these different subjects together, so that the whole is much larger than the sum of the parts.

We need to make some damn cookies...
...instead of forcing baking powder down their throats.

Our students deserve this.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this issue.  We need this conversation.

Please check out some of my other LinkedIn posts: 
62% is a Scary Statistic - about the negative effects of grades.
What is the Purpose of School? - the most important question in education.
The Most Important Thing I Learned at ISTE, was in a Taxi - remembering why we teach.