Count on John Merrow to find a totally fresh way of looking at the 2019 NAEP scores!
He asks: What would John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and Aristotle say?
The scores were disappointing but the responses were predictable:
The responses from the Administration, the center-right, and the left were not surprising. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos labelled it a ‘student achievement crisis’ and issued a call for ‘education freedom’ for parents so they could escape failing schools. See here for her response and here for analysis.
The center-right, basically the ‘School Reform’ advocates who have controlled the public education for 20 years, focused on the smattering of good news in the NAEP report:
Hispanic students had a higher average mathematics score in 2019 compared to 2017.
Fourth grade mathematics scores increased in nine states.
Mississippi showed an increase in grade 4 reading.
Grade 8 reading scores increased in the District of Columbia.
This could be presented another way, of course: Mississippi was the ONLY state where 4th grade reading scores increased, and DC was the ONLY place where 8th grade reading scores improved.
But John takes a longer view. What would the great thinkers say?
His answers might surprise you.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t know how you find time to do all the things you do, every day, but I am more than pleased that my blog came across your screen……
Always a pleasure to read John Merrow!
“And yet, reading instruction is woeful in many classrooms largely because those teachers were not taught how to teach the skill.”
From Merrow’s aside. See Nancy Bailey for several discussions to the contrary
“We need educators to look at each child and ask “How is this child intelligent?” instead of testing to find out ‘How intelligent is this kid?””
Most educators who see students on a daily basis do this. I have never in my 37 years of teaching ever talked to a teacher who bases instruction on an intelligence level. Some teachers, of necessity, base their evaluation of students on a performance ability. Students, for example, who find it difficult to perform operations with signed numbers will rarely find algebra approachable. No one, however, bases instruction on whether children are “smart.”
In fact, what Merrow is advocating here is in operation today across the board. Teachers are just trying to do what they can with the kids they have.
Teachers are just trying to do what they can with the kids they have. I agree. But here’s a big caveat: they are often working within systems that don’t try to work with the kids they have but, rather, try to fit differing kids into a Procrustean bed. We can see this clearly if we look at what happens to kids AFTER K-12. We end up with lots and lots and lots of high-school graduates who aren’t going to college and flounder around for years until they enter the subsistence wage service economy or finally find some program, catch as catch can, that can train them in a trade. And we end up with lots and lots and lots of other high-school graduates who aren’t particularly academically inclined but basically extend high-school by going to some lower-tier college and getting a degree in, say, Communications, and then coming back to live in their parents’ basement and play video games for a few years before following the same track as the kid who didn’t go to college.
All this is an enormous waste, takes an enormous toll on the economy, and takes an enormous emotional toll on those kids and their parents or guardians.
I often think of one student I had a few years ago because she’s such a clear example of the problem I’m raising. She had enormous social gifts. She was a star on the cheerleading team, which won the state competition a couple years. She had a bubbly personality and oceans of enthusiasm and a LOT of friends, and she was generous and kind to other kids, including those who weren’t as popular as she was. But for this kid, Algebra II might as well have been on the frontiers of advanced mathematics and the Declaration of Independence or The Scarlet Letter might as well have been the Voynich manuscript. She wasn’t good at the things that school wanted her to be good at, and she wasn’t going to be, however much prep she got for state tests. She clearly had many gifts, and she was fortunate to be able to excel as a cheerleader, but on the academic side, she was being told, daily, “Sorry, you are not what we are looking for.” And all this was codified when she failed her last chance to pass the high-stakes tests required for a high-school diploma.
One-size-fits-all reform-driven schooling failed this kid. And it fails millions each year.
Kids differ. Some will be cosmologists. Others will be cosmetologists. We need schools that recognize this, in the upper grades, that show kids ways to build on their gifts, that provide clear paths forward, that aren’t like Billy Pilgrim’s father “teaching” his kid to swim by throwing him into the deep end of the pool. In other words, we need strong voc ed programs in high-school with ties to communities and to jobs on the other end.
So they should have let her go after, say, 9th grade. I fact some districts did test an option of early graduation, after 10th grade. 12 years plus K = 13 years is too much time spent at school. Let them out earlier, and let them be a cosmetologist or a car mechanic. But the system is too rigid for that.
Or better yet, bring back, big time, vocational high schools. One “college and career ready” track is a crock. Idiotic.
Well stated! Young people need viable options that suit their talents and interests. A college education is not realistic for all, but no student should fail to get a high school diploma based on performance on a standardized test.
Amen to that!!!
Under what circumstances should a student fail to get a high school diploma?
One might well say that a high school diploma is not realistic for all.
If we had a variety of high schools, then it would indeed be realistic for all. I think that there should be both vocational and academic high schools everywhere.
That’s called a comprehensive high school, which has academic programs, vocational programs, etc. Gates pumped $2 billion into destroying such schools.
Bob,
In my part of the country, where the only high school in the county enrolls 400 or fewer students, this might be a bit difficult to achieve.
Putting that to the side, what about the first question I asked. Under what circumstances should a student not be given an academic high school diploma? Under what circumstances should a student not be given a vocational, say in cosmetology, high school diploma?
When they fail their classes or when they drop out of school. We made these decisions for a long, long time in the US, TE, before there were high-stakes standardized examinations.
As of right now, TE, only eleven states have graduation tests in place for the high school class of 2020. Arkansas, Arizona, California, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Minnesota, Nevada,Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Washington recently ending their graduation testing requirement.
Time to eliminate the rest of them.
How about a vocational high-school on the county line, shared by two counties? And this isn’t going to be a problem in most places.
Bob,
I agree that it would not be a problem for most students, but I do think it would be a problem in most places.
You are against denying a student a high school diploma base on a standardized test, but are you in favor of awarding a student a high school diploma based on a standardized test?
I think that a high school graduation test is an error.
If a student has attended classes, taken the required courses, received passing grades in those classes, that should be adequate for graduation.
What are you talking about, TE?
I am against the use of standardized tests for K-12 students, period.
And why would it be “a problem in most places, TE?” It has long been common in rural areas of the United States to have one large high-school for the country and bus service to that school. Such a school could easily be a comprehensive academic and vocational high school.
I really don’t understand your recalcitrance about this TE. Surely, as an economist, you can understand the enormous costs of having half our students graduate from high school unable to do anything that can earn them a decent living. And the economic costs are only a small part of this.
cx: unqualified to go to college and unable to do anything to earn a decent living
“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” — this is great, but how many out of 2.9 million American teachers are qualified to give their pupils something to do that demands thinking, and are able to do it constantly day by day, gently directing them to more complex problems? Countries where their ministries of education control the curricula, do serious pedagogical research and publish pedagogical tomes regarding developing creativity and problem-solving. These are standard-issue books for teachers in these countries and are used in their daily job complementing knowledge-based curricula. Because there is no Ministry of Education in this country, there are zillion of low-quality quasi-pedagogical books, pushed by edu-pub and edu-tech hacks. There is no sufficient control what teachers use in their daily practice, and teachers’ knowledge of effective pedagogy as well as of their subject is sub-par. Thus, no point to refer to Dewey. The very least we should demand from the teachers is to at least know their subject and be able to answer questions. Instead we can see that in some states teachers fail a high-school algebra test.
The last thing we need is more micromanagement of teachers by state and federal authorities.
Do you expect 2.9 million teachers to provide consistently engaging, creative learning environment on their own, compatible across schools sho kids moving from one state to another would not study the same stuff again and again? Many of the teachers don’t even know their own subject well enough. They teach kids inanities like density meaning “compactness of substance” and tautologies that “acceleration multiplies due to gravitational acceleration”. They use “rate of speed” when they mean rate of change of position, that is, speed. They say that the base SI units are liters, meters and grams, while in reality they are meter, kilogram and second. Anyone with a smartphone (which is nowadays literally anyone) can look this up in Wikipedia. When confronted, they say that this is an introductory course and all this will be straightened up when kids study “real physics” in high school. They try deflecting the blame, pointing that these are printouts taken from a dedicated website. When asked who directed them to this amateur website they avoid answering. Is this how you are imagining teachers free of micromanagement to do their job?
BA, we have had an entire generation, now, of top-down Education Deform micromanagement, and this has resulted in no improvement whatsoever by the deformers’ own measures, test scores. I agree that we need to improve the education of teachers. I have outlined, for example, what I think should be required of programs that prepare people to teach middle- and-high school English, here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/what-should-be-taught-in-an-english-teacher-preparation-program/
However, I speak from personal experience when I say that fine teachers are often shackled by pressures to hold data chats and put up data walls and teach from test prep materials and use test preppy textbooks and online materials. And one does not get continuous improvement by top-down micromanagement. One gets this by bottom-up means, as the quality movement in manufacturing made abundantly clear. And, if we want dramatic improvements in the knowledge and other qualifications of teachers, we are going to have to pay them a lot more. The year I left teaching to work in publishing, which is not a very high-pay industry itself, I almost TRIPLED my salary. I could not AFFORD to teach and raise a family. And I did not want, at any rate, as no professional does, to work under conditions of micromanagement in which people who knew a tiny, tiny fraction of what I know about my field had the audacity to tell me, all the time, exactly what I should be doing and how I should be doing it. You don’t attract and retain the best people that way. The best manager I ever had in publishing–Bill Grace–once told a group of us, “I’ve been extremely successful in this business. And I’m going to tell you the secret to my success. I hire people who know what they are doing and then get the hell out of their way.”
BTW, I recall reading in a bestselling middle-school biology book that blood returning to the heart is blue because it lacks oxygen and in a middle-school American history basal textbook that Sputnik was a nuclear device. The examples that you provide of misunderstandings of quite basic science are easily multiplied. Check out any person-in-the-street interview series. Stop Americans at random and as them why we have winter and summer, where the Andes are on a map, what causes a rolling ball to stop. Hell, the NEA did a study that found that 60 percent of American adults couldn’t calculate a 10 percent tip, even though all they had to do was move the decimal place. It is not surprising to find that a lot of elementary school teachers don’t know much science. A lot of people aren’t very bright, and most of these folks have had very few college-level science classes. This is a fact of life. If we want teachers to be the best and brightest, we have to pay them accordingly and give them the autonomy to choose their curricula and pedagogy and, importantly, to debate about these matters among themselves.
Consider, BA, the quality that one gets in an online encyclopedia like Wikipedia simply from crowd-sourcing corrections of errors. Recent studies have found it to have the same level of accuracy as the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the old days, when teachers ran their departments, they continually debated curricula and pedagogy. But surprisingly, there was remarkable similarity, across the country. You could count on the fact that 9th-grade English teachers would be doing Romeo and Juliet and that all of them would be doing sentence diagramming. That was because of social sanction–the habits of the tribe, of people falling back on the tried and true. But there was also the possibility of improvement because of that continual debating and because teachers and their department chair people had the ability to make changes. Do you really think that after all the micromanagement we’ve had of teachers and their classrooms in the past twenty years, our education system is BETTER than it was before this was the case, than it was when teachers for the most part made their own decisions? I don’t think our graduates are any brighter, more knowledgeable, more capable than they were in the 1950s-1970s, when we had building-level management and department chairpersons ran their departments.
We’ve had more than enough of Lord Coleman and his ilk being the deciders for the rest of us–by what authority? Divine fiat? Oh yes, by the authority of his appointment to this task by Bill Gates, that profound authority on how to teach English and mathematics, Mr. “All your base are belong to us.”
But who are we mere mortals to argue? After all, Gates and the masters at Achieve have appointed David Coleman and Susan Pimentel, by divine right, absolute monarchs of English language arts instruction in the United States, and surely, as Hobbes argued in the Leviathan, monarchy is best. Surely, in Hobbes’s words, we all need to live under “a common power to keep [us] all in awe,” for as Queen Elizabeth I wrote in 1601, “The Royal Prerogative [is] not to be canvassed, nor disputed, nor examined, and [does] not even admit of any limitation.”
My reaction to this top-down micromanagement (e.g., the puerile Common [sic] Core [sic] “standards” and the invalid testing and all the directives that go with these) is the same as that of “The Old Trouper” in the Don Marquis poem, the old theatre cat who says to his pal Mehitabel, a cat of ill repute and practitioner of the oldest profession:
mehitabel he says
both our professions
are being ruined
by amateurs
Anyone half decent in math, chem, physics, biology can get six figure salary almost instantly, so no reason for them to be a teacher. A position of a math or science teacher is either a dawn or a dusk of a career for anyone worth their salt, which is why more often than not it is a math or science teacher who is imported from abroad, from a country where they pay to teachers even less than in the U.S.
So, those teachers who are not good enough and who have nowhere else to go, must be helped with pedagogy and subject info. Instead, they are left to their own devices to scour amateur websites for anything remotely resembling school curriculum, they have no personal life being busy creating their daily plans, they get kicked by a principal, they get jeered by ungrateful kids who don’t want to learn. They are dropped into water and told, “swim, beat the record, make us proud.”
And no, Common Core and NGSS do not represent what proper top down guidance look like.
BA, there you go again, bashing teachers. I daresay I have met thousands more teachers than you. I have been repeatedly impressed by how well educated they are, how deeply dedicated they are, how strongly they believe in their mission.
You like to bash teachers. It gives you some kind of scary thrill, a frisson.
I despise your condescension. Unless you stop this garbage, you are permanently blocked from this blog.
You misplaced the thrust of my message. Instead of providing the teachers, who don’t see a difference between “rate of speed” and “rate of change of position”, with quality teaching materials the powers that be pledge to shower them with money come the election season. As the history of mass schooling in this country shows, this will not improve the schooling, and continuing doing the same is sheer madness.
Students come to school with vast differences in their backgrounds. Some students come prepared to learn while others may not have the same level of readiness for a variety of reasons. As a teacher I have never viewed standardized testing as a useful tool. I have always found other informal ways that have provided information that helped me better meet the needs of students. I have always subscribed to the belief that we have to meet students where they are and move them towards where they need to go. Whatever teachers do, it should meet the needs of students and be engaging and meaningful.
As an ESL teacher who is also a certified reading teacher, I read Emily’s Hanford’s article on reading methods with great interest. While I agreed with most of what she said, I am someone that used a balanced literacy approach with students. I never found that the three cueing systems interfered with a student’s ability to read as Hanford claimed. I have always encouraged cueing systems as well as phonics to be tools in a reader’s toolkit.
There is more than one way that students can learn to read, and it varies according to what students bring to the experience. In her article she never once mentions what is a huge problem in education, and that issue is poverty. Poor students do not come to school as ready to learn as most middle class students. Teachers working with poor students should be well prepared to use a variety of ways to teach students to learn to read. I had great success teaching ELLs that were illiterate in L1 to read in English. Hanford does not mention that there are a few students that have a great deal of difficulty trying to learn through phonics. These students may have poor auditory memories or processing problems
“Ready to learn” is one of my least favorite phrases because it is both wrong and misleading. I think (or I hope) that the retired teacher means “ready for school,” which is completely different. Humans are a curious species, BORN ready to learn. Being “ready for school” means the child has been exposed to and learned certain behaviors that have prepared him/her for a school environment. Yes, it’s a real challenge when some children are ready for school and others aren’t, but all are “ready to learn.”
My years as a reporter also taught me not to trust educators who endorse “rigorous” curricula and the need for “rigor.” “Challenging,” yes! Just look up “rigorous” Harsh, unyielding, painful are three of the synonyms. Who wants that for children?
While I am ranting, there’s not much evidence that “balanced literacy” is effective. I think it’s basically “whole language lite.”
balanced literacy == whole language == look-say == snake oil
But you don’t need to worry about whole language anymore, because there is – ta-da! – sketchnoting: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/54655/why-teachers-are-so-excited-about-the-power-of-sketchnoting
Respectfully, John, while I agree with you about the necessity of teaching phonics, there is an issue, in reading, with “readiness to learn,” and this has to do with the innate language-learning mechanism in kids’ heads. Yes, written language is a graphical code that has to be learned. Some kids can learn this code based on sheer pattern recognition ability, but formal instruction in the code does work. However, and this is REALLY IMPORTANT, that code is layered on top of the codes of the spoken language, which are learned almost entirely automatically and unconsciously from the very young child’s ambient spoken linguistic environment. So, there are the spoken language codes of vocabulary, syntactic constructions, and world knowledge (that which the spoken codes reference). Kids from impoverished environments come into school with dramatically impoverished SPOKEN vocabulary, with little SPOKEN language syntactic fluency and with fluency in nonstandard (non-school) syntax, and with far less broad experience of the world and experience communicating about that broad experience with others. These deficiencies profoundly affect their ability to learn to read beyond a rudimentary level and ensure that kids will be on very different developmental schedules with regard to reading. And some, like the spoken language syntactic fluency issue have dramatic consequences but are almost never addressed in instruction. It’s a measure of the backwardness of our reading instruction that the federal government spent billions on its Reading First initiative and worked with the leading reading folks in the country to develop it and DIDN’T EVEN ADDRESS auotmatic syntactic fluency.
Anyone that understands balanced literacy realizes that it is not “whole language lite,” and it is often poorly implemented in this country. The balanced aspect includes both shared, guided and independent reading in addition to learning the sound system as well vocabulary, syntax and comprehension. It also includes writing which is a powerful tool in helping students apply what they are learning. Also, the kinesthetic act will help cement the sound symbol relationship. My district got positive results from balanced literacy since teachers were well trained in implementation. Most of all we wanted to foster an appreciation for good literature, and a love of reading and learning.
I am with you, retired teacher. Merrow demonstrates a superficial understanding of the range of research in support of a “holistic” approach. Phonics can actually be a key component of such a program (depending on the needs of the child), but you would be hard pressed to find a child or adult who loves reading because they can decode words fluently. I know how hard some children struggle to learn to read and the critical role intensive phonics instruction plays in helping severely dyslexic children to read. However, if reading remains just a decoding exercise, reading will never be a particularly useful tool for them. You can see in the errors more mature struggling readers make the urgency to make meaning. Those errors are more often than not clearly related to the attempt to create context/meaning.
Decoding is deadly on its own. It is barking at sounds without content. Any reading lesson should include the application of what is learned with meaningful content. Students learn the joy of reading from reading, and they cannot read well without understanding the sound-letter association. That is where the balance is, and it can be done well. My diverse school was awarded a Blue Ribbon from the DOE mostly because we had an effective balanced literary program.
Exactly!
“Decoding is deadly on its own. It is barking at sounds without content.” — reading IS decoding. It is playing back a song from a tape recorder. Whether you’ll be able to make sense of the sounds being played depends on your knowledge of the language of the lyrics as well as cultural markers. Reading has NOTHING to comprehension, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
I can prove it to you. Here, sing this aloud and then try to make sense of it, or sing it to someone else, no need to read:
There’s a lighthouse in the middle of Prussia
A white house in a red square
I’m living in films for the sake of Russia
A Kino Runner for the DDR
And the fifty-two daughters of the revolution
Turn the gold to chrome
Gift…nothing to lose
Stuck inside of Memphis with the mobile home
Yet, each line makes sense if you know the context. In fact, there are different ways you can understand it. But comprehending this stanza has no relation to reading per se.
Or something from this side of the pond:
Me, I’m out that Bed-Stuy, home of that boy Biggie
Now I live on Billboard and I brought my boys with me
Say whattup to Ty-Ty, still sippin’ Mai Tai’s
Sittin’ courtside, Knicks and Nets give me high five
You can hum it, you can sing it, you don’t have to close-read it, but if you out of the context you won’t get it.
Do you know how the term decoding is used in the context of reading instruction?
Decoding is the process of translating written word into speech. Why?
Yes and no. When a teacher who is teaching beginning reading talks about decoding they are referring to the process of learning the sound-symbol relationship or, in other words, phonics. It is connecting sounds to their letter equivalents and eventually blending them into words to which we attach meaning. Reading is not decoding, but being able to decode is required to read fluently. It would be extremely difficult to read without having some understanding of phonics, however unconscious.
I just got off the phone with Horace Mann. He said the one size fits all approach of high stakes testing is the contrary to the purpose of public schools that serve students of a variety of backgrounds. He said there is no particular right way to teach or measure of teaching. Mann also told me he thinks George and Jeb Bush are a couple of unruly delinquents, and Betsy DeVos is an idiot.
“He said there is no particular right way to teach or measure of teaching.”
Thank you! I am not a teacher, but as a parent that is so clear to me, especially in the early grades of teaching reading and math.
Some kids learn by decoding. Some kids learn with whole language. Some kids learn by having a patient and experienced teacher who tries many different approaches to teaching reading or math – even coming back to some that didn’t work the first time — until it clicks with that particular student. And some kids learn on their own and the teacher could use any one of a dozen methods in class and end up with a high performing student.
And some terrible teachers believe that if they just use whatever one method they are taught to use and told works for all kids, if a kid is not learning then that student should be punished, humiliated, punished some more, and humiliated some more, because he is clearly not trying hard enough. Those teachers thrive at high performing charters, especially if they are adept at getting parents to remove their now emotionally traumatized student from the school.
“Whole language” is the beast that will not die, at least not until the generation of teachers and teacher-trainers departs. No one learns to read well without grasping that letters have sounds associated with them. Of course merely teaching children this is not sufficient, but it is essential. Early in the reporting I became convinced that nearly every first grader could learn to read because they understood that reading was their passport to comprehending the world around them, and that was sufficient motivation. Why do children learn to walk? So they can achieve some control over their world. And that insight applies to reading as well Paolo Friere taught about language and liberation: teach people the words that will make them free. That’s true for children, of course.
When reporting I often asked to tako over a first grade class. I would ask children to cover their eyes and then write some nonsense on the blackboard: “The purple fish flew into the kitchen and ate a pancake.” Then I would ask the kids to uncover their eyes. If they snickered, I knew they were not merely decoding but COMPREHENDING. And in most instance, the vast majority of children snickered (most did not laugh out loud because they were inherently polite and didn’t want to upset the old white man with white hair.) When I asked them if anything was wrong with that sentence, the hands flew up: fish can’t fly, fish don’t eat pancakes, etc etc etc.
Reading is fun AND empowering. It shouldn’t be taught with drill, and nor does one size fit all.
“No one learns to read well without grasping that letters have sounds associated with them.”
I’m just a parent so I’m far from being an expert, but in my kid’s experience, “whole language” ALWAYS included learning that letters have sounds associated with them. It seems absurd that you believe that kids were just handed books or looked at site words and told “go read”.
It is what happens AFTER kids learn that letters have sounds associated with them that is the difference.
I also found that there were teachers who were absolutely positive they were teaching “whole language” or “balanced literacy” or whatever the most recent popular method was but they were not.
There are good parts and bad parts to all methods. I can remember the drudgery of sitting in a first grade classroom for what seemed like hours fighting to keep my eyes open as the teacher taught phonics and listening to other students slowly sound their way through reading a sentence out loud. Or getting my “reading book” and reading through the stories the first weekend at home, and spending the entire year going through those same stories slowly in class. When I saw my kid being able to choose “just right” books, and the difference, it seemed so much better.
And there were times when I was frustrated with some of the methods as well. And the same thing happened with math, where I saw the good and bad parts of “Everyday Math” and various other ways of teaching that went in and out of fashion. Some kids thrived and others struggled. Some parents hated it, but I saw my kid have an understanding of numbers and relationships of numbers that I never had despite being able to beat my kid to answer the question “what is 9 x 7?” because I had been drilled in multiplication tables over and over. Again, parts I did not like, but other parts made sense.
Some kids need to work through every single step. Others don’t. Sometimes the ones who don’t and never have to find that when it comes to doing much higher level math, doing all that in your head and keeping it there becomes near impossible. I just find education to be complicated and individual-dependent. And too many ed reformers (as you have rightly noted) insist it is just a simple matter of “good teachers” with the “right” curriculum who can easily teach 35 kids and turn them into high performing scholars. They are lying and what’s worse, the fact that they dump so many kids demonstrates they know it and don’t care.
Thanks for this conversation. Many ideas, no time to respond.
When Robin Lithgow was head of LAUSD’s arts branch she gave a lecture about her childhood experience in a “Dewey” school. She said that while she attended the school there was no concept of “failing students” and that every facet of the curriculum was taught using real world applications. I don’t believe they had any testing. Math was taught by creating a garden. The children had to work together and divide a plot of land into sections. She said that the students who went to this school went on to become wildly successful, but also noted that it was an affluent community. I envy her experience at this wonderful “Dewey” school.
My son teaches at an independent school, and last year he created an elective class in which students converted an old pickup truck with an internal combustion engine to all-electric. When he proposed the class and asked for about $10K to buy a truck, the head of school asked him if he knew how to do that. He said, “No, that’s the point of the class.” Five or six students spent much of the year on the job, which included designing and building the battery system and programming it so all batteries would use their stored energy equally and at the same rate. On or about the last day of school, they test-drove the truck. And it worked! That’s learning those students will retain for the rest of their lives, along with the confidence that comes from failing, getting up and trying again, and succeeding.
I wonder whether your son’s school has proper physics and chemistry classes as well as vocational classes.