Reflections on Some Current Situations

Abstract

Victory at Last After years of urging that American schooling practices catch up with Japanese education, critics and reformers can now celebrate. The nation is finally catching on to one Japanese practice: Saturday cramming sessions. Recent articles describe situations in several states indicating that children from Grades 1 through 12 are going to school on Saturdays to prepare, cram, and study for upcoming state or district tests. Waterbury, Connecticut, is one of the latest to announce a Saturday academy; the board of education voted unanimously to establish a Saturday Accelerated Academy, targeted for the estimated 600 youngsters behind in reading, writing, and mathematics, at a cost of $239,304 (Weekend Classes, 1999). No more Saturday morning cartoons or late sleep-ins for these kids. We wonder about the implications of these matters for teacher education. In an ironic mood, we ponder: Should forward-thinking teacher education leaders in SCDEs establish preservice and inservice modules entitled How to teach youngsters on Saturday who failed on Monday through Friday of the previous week? Ed remembers well, in his early economically desperate years of high school teaching, agreeing to and then teaching summer school classes for students who had failed English 10 the previous year. He remains uncertain who suffered more, he or the students. More time was not the answer. How do teachers teach reluctant, failure-prone youngsters in school on Saturdays, most likely against their will? How do teachers prepare students to do well on standardized tests? These development are clear examples of how societal expectations and demands may drive future teacher preparation. Wanted: More Work We were struck by reports of some recent polls of American secondary school students in which, it is claimed, students blame the teachers for not giving them enough homework, not challenging them enough. The lament seems to run this way: If only teachers would make us do more, then we'd do more. We do not propose to analyze this too deeply, but our combined 65 years of teaching have not been filled with students begging us for more work. Often, quite the contrary existed. We are not against matters that promote student learning and accomplishment. We merely wonder why, if students really want to work harder, they simply don't work harder. We are reminded of a player on a National Football League team who, after being eliminated from the playoffs, lamented that he wished the coach had worked them harder so they would have been in better shape. We wonder who is preventing students from working harder, taking on difficult assignments and achieving. Our discussions with teachers in four states suggest that they are pushing students as hard as they can. So, where does truth lie? Needed: Research These and other matters cry out for the need for quality research. Currently, America is a nation that lives on anecdote, spurious poll results, and quarter-truths, not even half-truths. In 1996, we wrote a chapter entitled Needed Research in Teacher Education (Ducharme & Ducharme, 1996), in which we described what we believed to be needed areas for research in teacher education. We believe other areas of importance have emerged since then that desperately need quality research. We urge readers to consider them and embark on a research program to help both teacher education and education in the nation make better decisions and achieve better results. These areas include * More Time in School. Certainly, it seems logical that more time in school, longer days, and longer years would promote higher quantity and quality of learning. …