Teaching Isn’t Rocket Science, It’s Way More Complex: What’s Wrong With Education and How to Fix Some of It

Teaching is tricky business. If it were as easy as rocket science, which we seem to have figured out, all students would be learning as fast as their individual brains would allow. This implies that they would learn at their own individual pace, which would cause the gaps between the faster learners and the slower learners to gradually increase. In short, we know a lot more about how to make a rocket than we know about how the human brain works. Unfortunately, our current set of reforms driven by the corporate/political complex gives the same tests to students each year based on their born on date regardless of their ability. It also expects teachers to close the gaps between slow and fast learners. One way to do this is to slow down the fast learners, which some schools do rather well. They can also take advantage of the ceiling effect. This results from the fact that students already scoring at or near the top have nowhere to go but down, while low scorers have lots of room for improvement. In other words, it's easier to improve if your last scores suck. After summarizing over 140 books and reading dozens of articles every day for my blog DrDougGreen.Com since my wife Denise died in 2009, I think I'm in a position to write a book that lives up to my lofty title. The big problem with education is its one-size-fits-all nature that you still find more often than not in our schools. It is way easier to expect all students to learn the same thing at the same time at the same pace than it is to differentiate the learning so as to make it customized for each student. The current reform movement forces schools to narrow the curriculum in favor of the tested subjects, math, and ELA. It has pushed increased instruction of these subjects into kindergarten and preschool that has resulted in less time spent on anything else including recess. It judges teachers based on test scores that are invalid for a number of reasons. Reform leaders also seem to think that we have a large