What Students (Really) Need to Know

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"A good rule of thumb for many things in life holds that
things take longer to happen than you think they will,
and then happen faster than you thought they could."
- Lawrence Summers

by C.J. Westerberg

Do check out The New York Times' Education Life today, which has some provocative reads.

Here are glimpses of my top picks, although this particular special edition had far more articles of interest than the usual, so choosing wasn't a slam dunk.

Lawrence "Larry" Summers, former president of Harvard, Treasury Sec'y, and featured in the movie "Social Network," shares his six recommendations necessary for education in "What You (Really) Need to Know," based upon a speech he gave for TNYT Schools for Tomorrow Conference.

Summers endorses and riffs about the importance of being able to process and use information, not just "factual mastery"; the increased necessity of the ability to collaborate; a surprising perspective on foreign language learning; support of the flipped class (although he doesn't call it as such); the essential skill of understanding and analyzing data, and cosmopolitanism, along with references to Daniel Kahneman's tour de force book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow."

This makes it essential that the educational experience
breed cosmopolitanism -
that students have international experiences, and classes in the social sciences draw on examples from around the world.
-Lawrence Summers

So, too, are the comments - interesting in that many take his suggestions as an all-or-nothing, which is the way it seems to go in many education conversations these days: such as you are either for memorization and mastery, and therefore, against hands-on constructivist learning; you are either for the idea of the flipped class or against the idea of lectures as a form of teaching (or anti-homework of any kind); for using data to gain additional insight, or against data as part of the evil empire, and so on. You get the picture.

And for those of us who actually believe in being in an "always learning" mode, Patricia Cohen serves us, "A Sharper Mind, Middle Age and Beyond." Whether we have to go to college to do this is the question and critique of the following "finding", but it just makes sense that we continue to learn new things:

As it turns out, one essential element of mental fitness has already been identified. "Education seems to be an elixir that can bring us a healthy body and mind throughout adulthood and even a longer life," says Margie E. Lachman, a psychologist at Brandeis University who specializes in aging. For those in midlife and beyond, a college degree appears to slow the brain's aging process by up to a decade, adding a new twist to the cost-benefit analysis of higher education - for young students as well as those thinking about returning to school.

Two other good reads: the first has to do with writing, "Blogs vs. Term Papers," and the other has to do with the use or non-use of calculators when teaching learning math.

Let us know what you think -

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