In Defence of Hard Work

Just over a year ago I had the opportunity to undertake my M.Ed. in Britain.  As would befit me, I found upon my arrival that I was being instructed by a Dean who was closely aligned with Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector of Schools who gained notoriety by publicly noting that some 15,000 UK teachers were incompetent.  The Dean of Education, Peter Ireland, keeps me on my toes and recently wrote that:

“Remembering is not an inferior alternative to understanding; it is an essential component of it.”

I have long railroaded against an education system that fills are students with useless and irrelevant facts.  Thus, I largely speak against textbook-based practice, worksheets, and all of the other tedium that fill so many classrooms.  However, Peter’s note gives me enough pause to have to clarify that:

Learning must include hard work. 

Recently, in my Innovations class, my students have been working to create educational games.  James Paul Gee has inspired much of our work and the idea that games can educate has naturally inspired my students.  However, they’ve now run into the ‘roadblock’ that comes in any good learning activity – that place where inspiration has to turn into hard work, and perhaps, even for a moment, a bit of tedium.  Research must occur, the lessons that the game will teach prepared, and the background knowledge remembered and learned.  And, as per Peter’s argument, it is this wrestling with large amounts of information, thereby placing it in long term memory (where recall is more or less effortless), that will allow it to be pieced together in their working memory into a coherent and exciting game.

So – no matter how student centered, inquiry-driven, and authentic the task is there will still come that point where hard work is necessary.