I've felt for some time that the incentives we're given in school are incorrectly formulated: performance on massive standardised tests gear your brain toward an ability for short-term rote memorisation.
How many classes did you take in high school or college and pass with flying colours, but if you had to recall anything but the name of a core concept you would fail? At Michigan we called it "academic bulimia" — binge on textbooks the night of the exam for the class, purge it all over the paper, take your grade and repeat whilst you spent the rest of your time doing something you felt was more important.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 17.3 ms ] threadI've felt for some time that the incentives we're given in school are incorrectly formulated: performance on massive standardised tests gear your brain toward an ability for short-term rote memorisation.
How many classes did you take in high school or college and pass with flying colours, but if you had to recall anything but the name of a core concept you would fail? At Michigan we called it "academic bulimia" — binge on textbooks the night of the exam for the class, purge it all over the paper, take your grade and repeat whilst you spent the rest of your time doing something you felt was more important.
I've always liked that one :-)
Seymour Papert's book "Mindstorms" is a must read if you are serious about changing education for the better.
http://www.papert.org/