One of these assignments asked students to write about their educational history up to this point, including their grades, extracurricular activities, and the most important things they learned both inside and outside of school.
All of them could tell me their grades (either by naming specific letter grades or by telling me if they were good, bad, or "decent"). But I inadvertently stumped my students by asking them what they had learned in school. Not a single one of my 28 students could tell me any specific content lesson, activity, or specific content factoid/trivia that they thought was the most important thing they learned in school. Not one student gushed about the parts of an essay, extolled the virtues of the stages of protein synthesis, lauded the causes of World War II, or rambled on about how to solve systems of equations.
I know that 28 does not a sufficiently large enough sample size make, but I still find my students' responses very telling--especially when it seems some teachers spend a lot of time and energy trying to find the best way to deliver the "stuff" in their content area to kids to the exclusion of other needed skills. And yet when students are queried about the most important things they learned in school, the content stuff we try so desperately to get students to remember is nowhere to be found.
I think one student's (uncorrected) response is quite revealing about the impact our content stuff has on students:
I would say from when i started school till now the most important thing i have learned is , well as i think about it i honestly don’t know. Of course i have learned little things here and there, but really when it comes down to it there’s not really one thing that sticks out to me the most. I believe all the things i have learned are important. When i am not in school i like to learn about how things work, engines, carpentry etc. I guess you could say i like to learn about things i will need to know later on in life.
I could write volumes here about how this student's response indicates the need for content relevancy in curriculum, how it provides evidence that real learning often occurs outside the classroom, or how it further indicates that the people who write the ginormous documents filled with "important" one-size-fits-none content standards aren't always right. But I won't, because I think those topics have been discussed in great detail by other bloggers better than myself.
There are, however, two things I want to point out. First, the fact that students could recall their grades but couldn't recall anything specific they had learned to get those grades is disconcerting to me. This alone makes my right eyebrow involuntarily raise, pondering what grades really mean and how "learning" is taking place in schools.
However, it's my second point that is probably going to make some people uncomfortable: Our content isn't as important as we think it is. And it's time we started looking at reexamining how to make it important to students--and that doesn't include doing the same thing we've always done dressed up in a different outfit.
What it does include is involving the students--asking them not only what they have already learned, but where they want to take their learning. Then we can start designing learning around those ideas, rather than someone else's ideas of what's important for students.
Maybe then students could tell us the important things they learned in school when we ask them.