Education Failure - Linking Verbs

Be am is are was were been being seem feel look appear become grow taste smell sound continue remain....

Freshmen English... 1958. Every morning for 6 weeks we repeated this refrain until it was indelibly etched in our minds. We were not allowed to be "creative" with our language. We had to learn it. Learning the technical aspects of our language was as important as writing an essay of our own thoughts.

Three years of Latin; three years of German; Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer... learning the foundations of our language. No phonetics... no "hooked on phonics." Knowledge passed along rather than invented on the fly.

I found Thomas Sowell's article (and part 2) about the impact of passing along knowledge versus "facilitating" learning less than surprising. Oh, I know, Thomas Sowell is not exactly revered among the left-leaning and maybe too revered among the right-leaning. Okay, let's just say that my own experience says that I got more out of teachers who passed along the information and how it was relevant than those who simply handed out assignments and tested.

Teaching is not a process of "facilitating" learning and it is not a process of being "conveyors of knowledge who enlighten their students with what they know." It is a process of facilitating learning by conveying specific knowledge in ways that are relevant and interesting.

I once asked my son's geometry teacher if he ever attempted to relate that subject to everyday applications. He responded with a dull, blank expression and a simple, "No." That confirmed my son's opinion that this guy was putting in his time until retirement. I wanted to tell him how I built a two-level deck with a bay front on the back of my house using a level, chalkline and standard length lumber, plus what I had learned in geometry. No tape measure was needed.

The point is that teachers have to be more than "guides"; teachers must be surrogate parents. Before you get all huffy about teachers being surrogate parents, think about the reality of the situation. For the better part of the day, teachers must be the authority, the counselor, the guide, and the expert in our children's lives. Many teachers prefer just one or two of those roles, but the effective teachers establish a personal relationship based on strength of knowledge, strength of position and strength of character. They don't replace parents; they assume the temporary position of a parent who is educating many offspring.

My father taught me how to build and fix things. He showed me the right way, guided my hands-on efforts, and corrected me until I understood and was competent. He didn't hand me a power saw and just say "don't put your hand in front of the blade" while I "discovered" how to cut wood properly. He was a teaching parent. Good teachers understand that they are surrogate parents.

By the way, that English teacher who drilled those linking verbs into our collective consciousness was a reasonably good teacher. She had a difficult subject... grammar... and a difficult group of students... freshmen. But I never really understood until much later just why we were learning that list. Regardless (not irregardless), she did convey the knowledge needed to advance my understanding and proper use of English. Admittedly, I have become a little sloppy in my use of punctuation and, occasionally, grammar, but her efforts largely were successful.