Response to "Week 2 Ch. 5: EVALUATE: Complete TLCs"

Week 2 Ch. 5: EVALUATE: Complete TLCs

Doing the TLC's reminds me of being in high school again. I can hear the voice of the teacher now, Answer the questions at the end of the chapter. The questions manufactured by a textbook company, a Pearson or a McGraw Hill. They weren't concerned with getting students excited but rather with drilling terms into their head. To connect it back to an earlier assignment, the plight of the student in the The Poor Scholar’s Soliloquy is one we're all familiar with.

I remember the endless stream of worksheets with blanks to be filled in and short readings to do, but which most people skimmed through for the answers. I would actually do those readings and if I ever told other classmates that I actually did it, they'd think I was crazy and judge me (But perhaps keep the mocking to a minimum because they knew who they were going to copy their answers off of). The path of least resistance was the way to go.

I remember some teachers would give out homework passes as rewards, as if their assignments were so interchangeable that they hardly even mattered in the first place.

So many assignments we were given for homework could be done the period before it was due; so many students would copy off of a friend, or hastily scribble in answers as the teacher proceeded to walk around the room to do a homework check. We all knew that they would never actually read what we wrote, just skim it enough to make sure it seemed like we had done what we were supposed to do. For those really negligent teachers, students would play the "muffin game". You would try to see how often you could randomly slip in the word "muffin" without the teacher noticing.

It is unfair to outright dismiss direct instruction approaches to learning, but it appears to me from everything I've encountered thus far in the course that constructivist approaches are superior to direct approaches. I've found collaborating with groups and considering other students' thoughts about readings far more informative than responding to the TLC's. I think the idea that we create meaning through social interaction is pretty accurate. Just reading a textbook can only get us so far when it comes to learning.