Education: The Pursuit of Understanding, not just Knowledge


If you don't know, I am proud to be a high school English teacher. I feel it is my duty to help my students better know and understand the world around them through the study of communication and language. In our ever changing "Information Age," people have to be able to sort through tremendous amounts of information and come up with problems and solutions in a short amount of time. I see the teaching of English as a tool towards this goal. I believe the study of the language through reading, writing, and oral expression gives young people skills that they will be able to draw from as they enter institutions of higher learning, as well as the world of work.
I am not an advocate of the current political push for "higher standards" through the use of more standardized testing. In my humble opinion, standardized testing is just one evaluation tool in the quest of education. A student should have to perform in other ways that demonstrate understanding, not just knowledge, through community projects, papers, and presentations. Too many people are getting caught up in the standardized test "numbers game", comparing themselves and other countries to our numbers and wondering why we keep coming up short. Its a simple matter of comparing apples and oranges and scratching one's head when we end up with pears. The more we rely on fact based testing, the less education is really going on in my opinion. A more balanced approach makes more sense (which is probably why it hasn't happened as of yet). The reasoning behind standardized testing is to give the politicians, administrators, and parents concrete "numbers" that they can either praise or bitch about. In reality, standardized testing serve very little purpose when one considers that there are as many ways to learn and demonstrate knowledge as there are students, and testing is only one way of evaluating this knowledge. The acid test for most of this information can be summed up in two questions:
  • Show me what you can do with this knowledge.
  • Demonstrate what you understand as a result of this knowledge.

I have known students who scored "perfect" on the SAT but if you ask them to make any practical application of the knowledge contained on the SAT, the blank stare and the "Huh?" are enough to convince me that this person has the knolwedge, but no understanding of how to use it. Information is nothing more than a useless list of symbols until it is processed into meaningful knowledge by a human mind. Furthermore, knowledge must then be "plugged into" what the person already knows and utilized in some meaningful way to further their understanding of their world. This is known as Constructivism .

More Information on Standardized Testing




Constructivism: My Educational Philosophy

My educational philosophy centers around what is known as Constructivism. This is the belief that each person must build or construct a framework of knowledge based on what they already know prior to anything new being useful to them. Information is nothing more than useless symbols until it is processed and understood by a thinking mind. It also embraces the idea that how one thinks is more important than the mere accumulation and regurgitation of factual information. Thinking is a process which must be practiced through: hands-on demonstrations, scenarios, role-playing, simulations, team-learning, as well as more traditional methodology, until the mind becomes dynamic and flexible enough to handle any problem that might come along. It is more important to me to provide useful information and give students the skills they will be able to apply in real world situations instead of wasting our time on meaningless trivia which will be forgotten as soon as we finish a unit or take a test. I am also rather impressed with the work of Howard Gardner, although I am not so sure that he did not simply give us new words for old ideas in his Multiple-Intelligence theories. I've recently "trimmed the fat" and added new links to this page.

Constructivism Links



Critical Thinking


I hear the words critical thinking being tossed around a lot in the educational community and I just have one question: What is critical thinking? I'm not exactly sure, it seems to depend on who you ask and why. I have pondered this question for some time and discovered that I was critically thinking about critical thinking! (Kind of gets you all warm, fuzzy and metaphysical, doesn't it? see my philosophy page ). Anyway, I have come to the conclusion that critical thinking is a number of things all having something to do with logically approaching a problem and then discovering the various solutions available for that problem. This is because many problems in our world have multiple solutions that can be considered "right" and many that can be considered "wrong," and critical thinking attempts to address solutions to these kinds of problems. Of course I don't know that I'm any more right about this than you, so I'll just have to let you explore some links and find out for yourself! ;-)


Do you have a thought about critical thinking (or disagree with me about mine)? Please E-Mail me and we'll discuss it.

General Education and English Links


I have assembled here what I consider to be the best of the best in general education, lesson planning, and english sites. By no means have I even scratched the surface of sites out there, but I believe if you start here, you will find many others to choose from (that's what I love about the World Wide Web).

Posters in my classroom

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