Asking to come to the blackboard and giving a mark is an “aerie of stresses”
In the last period of its activity, approximately since 2000s, founder and chairman of the Apple company, Steve Jobs, was seriously interested in education matters. As we know, for this businessman, making money, creating an excellent product and bringing benefit to mankind are closely intertwined with each other. Jobs has noticed that the education at the schools and colleges in the United States, in contrast to developed countries in Europe, is still in the 20th century – paper textbooks and notebooks. He was planning to create digital textbooks, which, naturally, will be installed in the Apple product, his computers, ipads and iphones, with relevant curricula.
According to Jobs, we should reach the point that the high school students do their homework at home with the digital materials, and come to school or university to discuss and debate the assigned topic under the supervision of a teacher or instructor. Jobs spoke about this matter to his partner businesses, education and scientific officials and high-rank officials, including US President Barack Obama. Unfortunately, the death of the great revolutionist in the information sector (2011) did not allow carrying out this large-scale reform. Therefore, there are also objective reasons in America: the political trend is less socialistic than European, especially in Scandinavian countries. No businessman, even a billionaire is unable to reform the education, if the Government is reluctant.
The problem is not just money, the problem is the change of the mindset. More than half of the population living in today’s Armenia have received the education at the Soviet schools, and although many (sometimes rightly) speak of the advantages of this education, they, in my opinion, are degraded by the psychological trauma, which we were receiving in our school years. One of the stresses “occurs” when the schoolchildren are asked, “Come to the blackboard,” which is followed by an interrogation in Stalin’s “People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs” style. And depending on how much the “investigator” likes the answers of “the accused”, accordingly he is encourages or punishes the latter by giving various marks. The advanced technologies allow even in Armenia to avoid this daily “scaffolds.”
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The rating should help schoolchild or the student to understand his own strengths and weaknesses and to avoid punishment. In the same Scandinavian schools, for example, the following three-stage methodology is applied:
1/ teacher rating is followed by the student’s self-rating, the differences become a subject of debate, to the point, only objective and measurable features are discussed,
2/ self-rating has different components, the student must understand in what he was successful and in what he failed,
3/ first, the teacher and the class jointly decide “the value of the questions”, and thus, the rating for a few questions was presented in the form of a fraction, let’s say, 11/17, which means, 11 from 17.
There may also be many other ways, which will help to get rid of the practice of asking to come to the blackboard and being a “punishment” of giving a mark. Indeed, it is necessary to clarify the priorities simultaneously. For example, what is more important – to remember how many drunken elephants participated in this-or-that battle, or to be able to literately develop the application for employment, the resume, and to present your own ideas in a power point format, or to calculate how much, for what period and percentage to take the credit for implementation of this-or-that goal. And most importantly, which, in my opinion, should be given by the school, is the motivation, the internal stimulus, the motive to obtain knowledge. An incentive, which will remain in human for the whole of life.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
