Race to Nowhere

Today I attended a screening of the documentary "Race to Nowhere," at my university. i thought it offered a number of interesting facts and observations worth thinking about.

the documentary focuses on the obsession with achievement in America: parents are focused on their children's acceptance into colleges practically from birth; children are then expected to engage in a multitude of extracurricular activities, while maintaining flawless grades; NCLB's emphasis on test scores, and its implications on curricula. but, the film asks, while all of these things may create higher grades or stronger resumes, are students really benefitting in the long run?

Perhaps one of the most radical ideas promoted in the film is that homework does not necessarily improve grades. one stat mentioned was that studies have shown that homework at the elementary level actually has no impact on student learning; at the middle school level, it helps somehwat - but after an hour, its benefits drop; at the high school level, that number rises to about 2 hours.

i think this is fascinating to think about. homework improves student grades only marginally, yet as teachers we still place so much value on its completion. One thing I frequently observed while student teaching was that students who did not complete homework were not at all unintelligent. many were very bright, and asked valuable and important questions that demonstrated they were trulying processing the content. but their failure to complete homework deminished their grades and often caused teachers to view them as less capable than they actually were.

One line i really liked in the film was somiething to the effect of "employers aren't looking for people who know how to use a semicolon." the point was that our workforce needs people who can think creatively and problem solve. if we continue emphasizing scores and testing achievement, how will we be able to tackle those problems that we've never before had to face? we need people who can apply thinking and knowledge to many different and unforseen situations, not just people who can sovle problems that we have already experienced before.

this bent of the film really resonated with me, particularly because the work i was doing in my "past life" was so very enmeshed with these ideals. the focus was "bleeding edge solutions," as we would say. the focus was on problem solving. the problems we faced with our clients were things that had never been experience before, largely due to the advent of various technologies. whatever the issues were, the core objectives were the same: come up with solutions that no one has ever thought of or implemented before, and do it efficiently and quickly. there were no "out of the box" soluctions, nothing to pull off of a shelf and sell. that was our holy grail - to create thos things - but at the time, we needed to do the boxing, to create the things to put on the shelves in the first place. none of it existed, and the problems were brand new.

i also think about my own experiences. although my family has always seen me as the "scholar," i've had my shares of failures, like when i failed calc or had to retake stats-heavy course in college. i hated myself for those courses. but looking back, i'm glad i failed them. i think it makes me a better teacher to understand what it's like to really hate a subject to its core, to have nightmares in which you envison your professor as a terrorist with a machine gun. i try to imagine what i could be like for a student who sees all of his teachers as assailants who terrorize him or her, day after day after day.

another good line from the film was "the world is run by C students." i like that. i don't think that's an entirely terrible thing. i find, among my peers and my students, that oftentimes the students with the highest grades are deathly afraid of taking risks. they are afraid of falling. if you have never failed at anything EVER, well, then failure is an incredibly powerful and daunting thing.

i'm not sure what my "real" homework policy will be. i am still thinking about this film, but i certainly recommend it, if for no other reason than to foster thought.

(sorry for the lack of capitalization. i wrote this up quickly and would rather post it than put off fixing it at the risk of never publishing. no, i'm not a bad English teacher for this!!!)