Right Wing Nation

Ken DeRosa and the Instructivist both comment on this parent’s article about project-mania in the schools.

It can wreck marriages and destroy family life, and it’s more burdensome than travel soccer, football practice, or the Boy Scouts: It’s the school project.

Ask a bunch of mothers how they spent their week, and they will tell you that they built the Parthenon with sugar cubes, the Pyramids from milk cartons, and Mount Olympus using Cocoa Puffs.

Consider a recent Sunday evening at my house. The kids had gone to bed, and Mom and Dad were relaxing in the living room. But suddenly, a voice cried out from upstairs.

“Mom, I forgot I need to bring a hot glue gun to school tomorrow for a project. We are making African masks in social studies. And, oh yeah, Mom, I also need pipe cleaners, a box of sugar cubes, and some wooden spoons - you know, the kind they use with those little ice cream cups.”

Half-dressed, I hopped into my minivan and searched for a hardware store open late on a Sunday. Thank goodness for the 24-hour Walgreens, where aisles are filled with construction paper, glue sticks, and pipe cleaners - but, alas, no hot glue guns.

Please, oh please, dear curriculum developers, give us parents a break: Ban all make-work projects. Parents have jobs, too, you know. We do our children’s homework. We serve on school boards, coach basketball, and volunteer with the Boy Scouts. Now you want us to be creative?!

I am (ahem) old enough that nothing like this was never forced on me, but I do have some personal experience with this sort of nonsense. Back years ago, when I was coordinating a writing program in an academic ESL program, one of the many things that floored me — and there were many, many things, but this was the number one most mystifying — was that most of the writing teachers were doing little, if any, writing in their classes. Does this not seem bizarre, that a writing teacher would be loath to write in writing class?

You are, of course, wondering what these teachers were doing instead of writing in writing class. Any sane, rational human being would wonder the same. And the answer is that they were doing the functional equivalent of “projects,” known (at least then) in the ESL world as “activities.”

When doing my MA, I was fortunate to have the sane instructor for my teaching practicum, the one who had no use for educration fads. However, he went out of town once, and we got the Educration Queen as a substitute. That’s the day I found out about “activities,” and was permanently, psychologically scarred by the experience. Indeed, for at least ten years, I had nightmares so horrifying that I woke screaming.

We arranged our chairs in a circle (so trendy!) and then one picked up a pencil, handed it the next person, and said, “This is a pencil.” The next person then took the pencil and handed it on to the next person, saying, “This is a pencil.” And on it went, all the way around the circle. We then repeated this with: a pen, a sheet of paper, a book, and God knows what else. Maybe a teddy bear. I’ve tried to wipe the experience from my memory, as I’m sure you’ll understand.

It’s an excellent way to make undergraduate-age ESL students feel like kindergarten students — not to mention morons. I had trouble thinking of a good use for it other than that.

And what this had to do with writing — since writing pedagogy was supposedly the topic that day in the practicum — the Educration Queen never explained. I’m sure there was a good reason for that, too.

Fast forward to when I took this job coordinating the writing program (that was, by the way, the stupidest thing I have ever done, but that’s another story). I had for some years been teaching writing courses at all proficiency levels, but concentrated in the upper proficiency levels, teaching academic writing. In my classes, we worked on things like logic and syllogisms, logical fallacies, the development of ideas, organization, coherence — and yes, citation and doing research (I’m not quite so conservative that we did context-free work, like sentence-combining exercises). And what did we do in our writing classes? Usually, we wrote, while I conferenced at the front of the room with individual students and gave them feedback on their writing.

We did not “brainstorm,” or have otherwise pointless discussions. We did not have “read-arounds” or “write-arounds,” nor did we have discussions about “sensitivity.” We did not write on “The three things I miss most about my home country” (one of the most popular and banal writing topics in the program), nor did I particularly care what they missed. Personal opinion had no place in their writing: I not only did not solicit their opinions; I did not care about their opinions. I was their writing teacher, not their therapist. It was an academic writing class. They were given a topic, based on the topic of the content course they were required to take, and they wrote on that topic. I was there to teach them how to write in an academic environment; I couldn’t have cared less about their creativity, or whether they wanted to write on the assigned topic or not, or whether they were having fun. When did “fun” have anything to do with work?

It was quite a shock the first time — that would be right after I started — writing teachers came to me and asked, “What should we do in class today?”

Actually, that wasn’t too much of a shock, though why would I have known better than they what they should be working on in their classes? The shock came when after trying unproductively to talk to them about what to do — as in actual curriculum things to do, you know, things that have to do with writing — I found that they were utterly mystified when I suggested that they write in writing class.

It had, apparently, never occurred to them to write in writing class. (You think I’m making this up, don’t you? I’m sad to have to say this, but I’m not.)

The second shock came when they replied with, “But what activities should we do today?”

You know, activities. Like passing a pencil around the room. Activities.

My response, that perhaps actually dealing with the class content — you know, like writing in writing class — might be a better use of time than activities, well, you’d have thought I had suggested they sacrifice babies, or something.

“But that wouldn’t be any fun!”

Granted, these activities are not the exact equivalent of projects. As far as I knew, nobody was having students build houses out of Cheetohs (though that wouldn’t have surprised me). But activities are the pedagogical equivalent of projects.

Activities and projects are time wasters. That’s why they exist: To keep students busy doing something that isn’t learning. They exist to be “fun,” because these days, learning isn’t the mission of the educration system; having fun is the mission. Why expect your students to actually learn and know something, when they could be having fun gluing macaroni and glitter to toilet paper tubes instead? And of course then, you could give them all gold stars for those projects and make them feel really good about themselves!

It’s not unusual for an undergrad to come to office hours and say something like, “Is there anything I could do for extra credit, like a project?” It’s only recently — after starting to pay attention to what a loony-bin of meaningless “creativity” our secondary schools have become — that the full impact of that question has hit me. The students want a gold star for some meaningless and pedagogically useless substitute for what they don’t know — because (usually) they were too damned lazy or poorly prepared to actually study and do the assigned work. (And anyway, in my mind, at any rate, extra credit — which would not include any sort of project — should be reserved solely for students who studied and did the work but still fell short, if it exists at all, and not for students who didn’t turn in the assignments and failed the exams because they didn’t study. And if you think that’s grumpy, you should hear me on the topic of “learning disabled” students.)

Now, before you think me just an awful curmudgeon, projects have their uses — for children. We did projects in grade school science class. I built a volcano. But projects were an addendum, and not a substitute for learning. We had already learned — and yes, memorized — Newton’s Laws before we did projects, and the projects existed only so we could see those principles at work. And yes, we were tested on what we’d learned, and yes, nearly all of our grades were based on those tests.

And the result of all that un-trendy “rote memorization” education I had — you know, that type of education that educrats forever claim “didn’t work” and is “unsuited” to the twenty-first century — is that I don’t need a calculator to figure out what that 15% tip should be, while my students — who went through all this “higher level thinking” nonsense and spent their time in school doing projects — can’t make change.

Projects, as I discovered, are also the darling of the Educration School classroom. No, I don’t mean that ed majors are told to do projects in their classes, though they are. I mean that PhD students do projects for PhD classes.

Even PhD students are treated like blithering idiots in ed schools. It’s no wonder that they come out of those ed schools as drooling morons.

The fundamental problem in the Educrat Bureaucracy — that includes ed schools, primary and secondary schools, the state and federal educration bureaucracies, the teachers’ unions, and the administrations — is the scorn they have for learning. Every other problem — and there are many — is secondary. You want to know why your sixth grade son still can’t add? It’s because his teachers sneer at learning (that, and because many of those teachers can’t add either). And as long as this negative attitude toward learning exists among educrats, the schools will continue to be a failure.