30 years ago I was in middle and high school. For many of my classes I was often subjected to spending a lot of class time filling in ‘worksheets’. This action is usually done by doing simple word searches of the assigned textbook. This sort of ‘word search’ is the antithesis of what is needed to develop some practical reading comprehension ability. When enough of these worksheets and scrawled pencil written answers to questions at the end of a unit (answered with work search again!), we would get a multiple choice test. These tests usually consisted of questions from the textbook and (usually) four or five generated answers (the correct answer and 3 or 4 ‘wrong’ answers). You would simply check the correct answer. Sometimes the means to answer these questions correctly wouldn’t be based upon reasonable knowledge of the topic but rather they could be ‘trick’ question. Trick questions would expect students to find answers through some seemingly subtle logical inferences (this was never actually taught in class…)

Imagine my surprise as a new teacher to see that these less than stellar methods were still being used 30 years later! This is especially egregious as the world has fundamentally changed since those heady days of the 1970’s. Back then information was what you were given (and it generally wasn’t much, consequently it was often taken as is…) Nowadays (since the 90’s) there is almost infinite information available for literally anyone with computer access to the internet. There is a real need to teach and develop some discrimination skills with regard to testing the veracity of sources. Textbooks (still weighing in at over 10 lbs. in many cases) are still used in many schools as almost a crutch for teachers. Most come with prepackaged lesson plans, prepackaged lists of (their) resources, and capable of being used for only a few years in that they can (quite often) become obsolete very quickly. These prepackaged resources are where all of these multiple choice tests and worksheets come from…

There are so many useful tools out there in the online world (mostly for free) that this reliance on these older, obsolete methods seems more and more pathetic. To be honest, this wouldn’t seem to be that much of a problem, schools, as almost all bureaucracies like to maintain the status quo. It means that if it worked last year, it will be good enough for this year. There are some rather obvious shortcomings to this sort of thinking…and continuing to use the same methods to teach students about the world that were used by me as a student back in 1970 might be one.

So, this is a sort of gauntlet I have thrown down. My intentions are to create content that fulfills what I think works. I am interested in reading comprehension, computer literacy (as well as good old fashioned literacy), authentic assessment, (but not the use of jargon like this…), and evaluating some thoughts about learning in general. Well, it’s not a total of 95 theses, but then again I’m not Martin Luther either…

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