Gaps in Education
I enjoyed reading Tremmel’s essay which focuses on the gap or disconnect between high school instruction and college instruction in the area of composition. She argues that:
Writer teacher education for secondary teachers should not be a completely separate enterprise from writing
teacher education for first-year composition. The writing curriculum should not be severed between grades 12 and
13. (368)
I agree there is a gap, and would further argue that there are as many gaps as there are schools or even instructors. For me, the whole article got me thinking about the competing value-systems between any two educational systems or between any two teachers for that matter.
First, the whole idea of a segmented education is rather curious. We talk of “middle schools” and “high schools” and “colleges”, but can we rethink this kind of segmentation to some degree? I work in a private K-8 model, for example, which allows our school — in theory, anyway — greater control over what is taught and better continuity from grade to grade. The problem is we don’t work in a bubble, and so we have to constantly ask what is going on in other schools. To be more specific, we have to ask what is going on in the high schools. There is a practical reason for this, and that is we want to be sure our students are prepared for the next “level” of their education. At its worst, this system relegates our school to the position of a farm team for the local high schools. In this scenario, we ask the local high schools what skills they want our students to have, and then we make sure our students have those skills. Questions of value may never enter into the equation. We may never ask, “Why do you think that skill is important?” Worse, we may never say, “Yeah, we don’t teach that skill, and we don’t plan to either.” The degree to which a school structures its curriculum to adhere to the next level of education speaks to the school’s identity. Is this a school that considers itself a stepping stone? Or is this a school with something to say and some gumption to push back and sell itself when it believes the next level of education has got it wrong?
For me, the danger lies in reinforcing and propagating skills that are so deeply entrenched in our cultural psyche that we don’t even have the awareness to question them. Schools don’t so much stand for anything as they do cave in to unquestioned assumptions or values about the skills being taught. Tremmel’s concern about the grade 12 to grade 13 disconnect can also be generalized and applied to the grade 16 to “real world” disconnect. Ultimately, and probably unfortunately, our entire educational system seems to be a hermetic top-to-bottom or trickle-down model, whereby everything we teach and value is dictated by what the colleges are requesting. How many times have we heard a high school or even middle school teacher tell the students to “Pay attention, you’ll need to know this for college.” Who is asking if the skills colleges are teaching are fully enmeshed and in line with what is happening in the “real world”?
“Striking a Balance — Seeking a Discipline (2002) by Robert Tremmel. Excerpted from The Norton Book of
Composition Studies (Vol. 1, pp. 358-371). London, England: W.W. Norton, 2009. Susan Miller (Ed.).
Writer teacher education for secondary teachers should not be a completely separate enterprise from writing
teacher education for first-year composition. The writing curriculum should not be severed between grades 12 and
13. (368)
I agree there is a gap, and would further argue that there are as many gaps as there are schools or even instructors. For me, the whole article got me thinking about the competing value-systems between any two educational systems or between any two teachers for that matter.
First, the whole idea of a segmented education is rather curious. We talk of “middle schools” and “high schools” and “colleges”, but can we rethink this kind of segmentation to some degree? I work in a private K-8 model, for example, which allows our school — in theory, anyway — greater control over what is taught and better continuity from grade to grade. The problem is we don’t work in a bubble, and so we have to constantly ask what is going on in other schools. To be more specific, we have to ask what is going on in the high schools. There is a practical reason for this, and that is we want to be sure our students are prepared for the next “level” of their education. At its worst, this system relegates our school to the position of a farm team for the local high schools. In this scenario, we ask the local high schools what skills they want our students to have, and then we make sure our students have those skills. Questions of value may never enter into the equation. We may never ask, “Why do you think that skill is important?” Worse, we may never say, “Yeah, we don’t teach that skill, and we don’t plan to either.” The degree to which a school structures its curriculum to adhere to the next level of education speaks to the school’s identity. Is this a school that considers itself a stepping stone? Or is this a school with something to say and some gumption to push back and sell itself when it believes the next level of education has got it wrong?
For me, the danger lies in reinforcing and propagating skills that are so deeply entrenched in our cultural psyche that we don’t even have the awareness to question them. Schools don’t so much stand for anything as they do cave in to unquestioned assumptions or values about the skills being taught. Tremmel’s concern about the grade 12 to grade 13 disconnect can also be generalized and applied to the grade 16 to “real world” disconnect. Ultimately, and probably unfortunately, our entire educational system seems to be a hermetic top-to-bottom or trickle-down model, whereby everything we teach and value is dictated by what the colleges are requesting. How many times have we heard a high school or even middle school teacher tell the students to “Pay attention, you’ll need to know this for college.” Who is asking if the skills colleges are teaching are fully enmeshed and in line with what is happening in the “real world”?
“Striking a Balance — Seeking a Discipline (2002) by Robert Tremmel. Excerpted from The Norton Book of
Composition Studies (Vol. 1, pp. 358-371). London, England: W.W. Norton, 2009. Susan Miller (Ed.).