I Forget

In last week's edition of The Conval Current, our high school newspaper, there's a terrific opinion piece by Tom Edick. It's about homework, and how much stress it puts on a student's life. What I like about it is that it doesn't just whine - it goes deeper into the question of why teachers assign homework.

"I have come to the conclusion that teachers need [homework] to either teach new skills that wouldn't fit into the class, or to give students a chance to practice new skills," he writes. "This sheds light on the true problem: an overloaded curriculum."He goes on to say, "You might say it is worth it since students today learn so much, but I disagree. I think students today forget so much."Amen, and thanks, Tom. You've captured in words the sinking feeling I have every time I begin a new class and correct the first quizzes or writing assignments. Is it possible, I ask myself every time, that students could get to ninth grade (or eleventh or twelfth grade!) without knowing the difference between a noun and a verb?The immediate impulse is to blame their elementary or middle-school teachers - just as, I am sure, college instructors blame their high school teachers, and employers blame their college instructors, or the whole educational system. But I know for certain that those elementary and middle-school teachers are teaching their students nouns and verbs. I know it because my wife teaches sixth grade, and we do our homework together, and we're very often trying to teach the same things.I also know it because I was recently handed a draft of a new Language Arts Curriculum for the ConVal schools. It says that by the end of grade four, students will be able to identify and define nouns and verbs, along with a lot of other things (like punctuation and capitalization) that they supposedly learned even earlier. So how come so many of my freshmen display no comprehension of nouns, verbs, punctuation and capitalization?They forgot it. They forgot it because they didn't have enough time to practice. They forgot it because they were also being force-fed addition, subtraction, fractions, and the capital of North Dakota. They forgot it because there wasn't enough room for it alongside the Pilgrims, the solar system, the computer keyboard, and the Food Pyramid. They forgot it because they were also trying to remember the rules of the road, AIDS awareness, and the Bill of Rights - not to mention the score of the Bruins game, the words to that song they heard on the radio last night, or how to work the microwave when they have to make their own dinner tonight.So I guess it's no wonder, after I assign my freshmen to read The House on Mango Street, that when I ask one of them what happened when Esperanza and her friends put on the high-heeled shoes, he lifts his hands in the universal gesture of helplessness, and says, "I forget."