One size does not fit all
One size does not fit all. We have all heard it before. Everyone in a school needs to learn differently.
But, particularly in the mid years of high school where some students are trying to excel but there are still those who could not give two shits. We only have 1 size.
That size is a disorganised classroom, filled with a mix of students that can only be described as trying to not split people based on skill. The same formula or acronym written on the whiteboard and everyone doing the same work.
I do not believe that this is the correct way to teach this group of people. It may be one of the easier options from a standardisation perspective. But I am not standard.
The Grouping of Students into "Classes"
From my experience, it seems that schools are pretty good at making a classroom split roughly even with above, at and below standard students.
Standard here I use simply as a metric of comparison against what the system expects from these students.
Now, while the person that does not try at all is much rarer than simply the person that only does the minimum. That 1 person can waste so much of others' time that it is not uncommon for me or others around me to have finished the work before we have been instructed to start.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
The Problems with a "Standard"
Standardisation has been great in many situations. The standardisation of electricity across countries and continents. Or there being a definitive single power cable for all devices in the EU. Or safety standards in workplaces.
But I think it is unfair to treat students as just another product of the system. Teaching them until they are at standard in which it shoves them out at the other end with no context or what just happened or why they are here?
A major problem with the standard in education is that once you are there, there is no drive to go any further. The teachers don't push it and the system doesn't reward it with anything other than a letter on a piece of paper.
I personally struggle to justify spending any time learning ahead at the stuff I actually don't know when I could just sit and do nothing, I could be lazy.
For those who barely meet the standard. They don't have any need to learn above the standard and can just stick with it for the entire year and follow along with everyone else.
But also, I believe the standard is too low.
An example would be my English class. We are revising how to write an essay. The teacher has taught us things like not breaking the fourth wall, and avoiding contractions in academic work. However, in the at standard example we were given, she blatantly ignores those rules. This shows to me that we are not expected to apply everything we are taught. Which sounds absurd to me, however I have seen how little the average student remembers.
Possible solutions
Independent/Inquiry Based Learning
Inquiry means to learn by starting with a question and working your way to an answer.
I learn best when it is late at night, I should go to sleep but I don't want to because I am really interested in what this thing is, how it works and why it was built that way.
My own writing often stems from inquiry based exercises where I simply explain my thinking to get to a conclusion about something.
And this is great for gradual but comprehensive learning that can conform to what the student wants to know. If we learnt everything in an inquiry format. When we are deep in the rabbit hole, each student has the option to go explore other related things if that interests them.
Something that can release dopamine in the human brain is the feeling of discovering something. The reader of an article didn't click on it because it will serve the answer to their question to them on a silver platter. The reader wants to read to go on a journey to understand something. At the end of that journey is the epiphany they get from figuring out everything came full circle. If this idea can be put into learning. If the student can feel that they have figured out something on their own, and get the dopamine rush that comes with it. Then they will know what it feels like to discover something, to learn properly, to understand something enough to definitively answer it.
I have literally just found a random quote but it fits the bill perfectly
“People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.” - Blaise Pascal
Drawbacks of Inquiry and Independence
There is 1 major problem with this. That is that it puts responsibility onto the student. Now I personally love being responsible for my own time and myself. However I do not believe everyone will have that same opinion.
There are people that cannot manage time effectively when they are given dedicated time to do work. I fail to see how they could possibly manage their own time when doing something that naturally takes longer than copying stuff into books.
Which leads into the next problem. It takes a lot longer to go down a rabbit hole of random citations on Wikipedia and unfinished blog articles than it does to copy down curated sources and watch a slideshow your teacher copied off the internet.
This means that we would not be able to have the same density of classes that we do currently. For some time efficient students, they may even have the ability to do more than if they had to wait for the entire class to catch up before doing the next thing. However I do know students that would somehow manage to spend the entire day researching mushrooms simply due to not managing priorities correctly.
This could be one of the things I believe need to be taught with the current system. Not everything can be student led. "A genius knows what he does not know." But we are not geniuses, and it is rather difficult to learn something like time management if you don't know you need to learn time management.
A Mix of Structure and Independence
God knows a random blog post will not push any actual change system wide. At most it will show I understand the problems and am capable of sharing them.
Teach me how to manage time effectively. Teach me how to be organised. Teach me how to plan out a day of work. Teach me how to work around my bad predictions of how long something will take.
But do not teach it to me by making me copy an acronym I won't use onto a whiteboard at the start of each lesson.
Some of these things like organisation are simply expectations we get to figure out on our own during the early years of high school. However, as you can probably tell, I believe this should be the other way round.
I do not know how you can teach something so subjective. But I have heard teachers explain subjects like "We aren't learning about the industrial revolution because you need to know exactly what happened. We are learning about the industrial revolution so that you have experience learning about large topics, and working on breaking it down into manageable chunks." But they still hold our hands.
So they could give us experience managing our time and how we do our work.
A mix of independent and inquiry work on project based learning, particularly in the core subjects. Paired with giving us experience and guidance on how to do things independently. Would result in students learning things more thoughtfully and at a pace that suits them.
It is alright to have people that need some help from the teacher paired with people that plan out what they will do in each lesson. They just need to all have the wiggle room to go on a tangent about some random thing for 5 minutes.
OMG would you look at that you read it all.. Thanks