What Will Our Students Remember? (Point of View) (2002)

On a trip down the dirt roads of Idaho last summer, found myself one afternoon sharing a soak in a hot spring with a school bus driver from Boise. Upon learning that was an English teacher (my assignment is an English/social studies split), he told me that his hardest classes, and the ones in which he'd learned things he'd never used again, were English. nodded and smiled that smile that we've all perfected when we are told--on buses, at parties, at wedding receptions, and the like--that the discipline we teach has proven useless after all. And then looked off to the pine trees and the sky and the clouds. But the bus driver wanted to talk. I bet you know what this is, he said, breaking a silence of several minutes, and he proceeded to utter what at first sounded like pure gibberish: I am anna pestro keydac. looked at him, alarmed that he might be turning into a blithering idiot before my eyes. estimated his sprinting speed and compared it to mine. But then the syllables began to separate themselves into what was not nonsense at all, but a pat recitation of metric possibilities. Iamb, anapest, trochee, dactyl, spondee, he recited, dee, da da dee, dee da, dee da da, dee dee. My school bus driver from Boise knew his poetic meter better than did. So we talked about education--his. What he had and had not learned. What had stayed him in times of difficulty, what had not. Further conversation revealed that he had the presidents of the United States down pat, from Washington to Eisenhower, all in metered assurance. He was pretty good with anatomy, too, and recited a long list of bones to prove it. He was clearly proud of these abilities, and was-after a fashion--impressed. So often I've thought, If only knew, of all the things teach, what my students will remember. What will they know when they have forgotten everything else? What fact, what concept--trivial or profound--will catch and sink and settle and find a home in the recesses of their minds? What, of all the numbers and nouns, of all the names and dates, will they remember? What will they tell their children at the dinner table, or the gas station attendant as they wait for the tank to fill? What will they recite to strangers they meet on vacation? I'm reminded of a unit on India taught some years ago. had grown frustrated by a class that was higher than average in ability but was incorrigibly passive. The students would dutifully master anything if assured that it would be on the test, but seemed disinclined to show any initiative themselves. In response, presented one essay topic--What Know about India--as both a pretest and a posttest; in between, we studied all manner of things. We read articles and role played and made charts and maps and enacted myths. We studied interesting, significant, world-shaping, culturally relevant things--only one of which focused on traditional marriage and family patterns. The results? Some students did well on the posttest, and found that liked the way it forced them to order and synthesize information, to take a bit of responsibility for what and how they learned. Other students petered out after a few paragraphs and then began to grope desperately. Of those students, all of their essays--all of them--contained the phrase, Women give birth by squatting. Over and over as read those essays, came upon that little tidbit. Well, yes, it had been mentioned--in passing, thought--in the article we'd read about marriage and family. Had but known what a deep impression it would make. …