A school child was greeted with a question as he came home. His mother asked, “Who’s president of the United States?” The boy answered, “Barrack Obama.”
“Wrrrronnng!” his mother replied. “It’s Donald Trump.” Apparently the mom expected her boy’s answer not only to be correct, but also timely.
And when Dad got home and was apprised of the boy’s having missed the answer, he said, as ALL fathers seem to say, “Well, when I was your age, I knew the names of all the presidents of the U.S., in order of their elections.”
And what did the kid reply? “Well, when you were my age, there weren’t as many presidents as there are now.” Notice that it’s hard not to appear like a smarty-pants whenever we begin any sentence with “Well, when I was your age.”
Yes, learning becomes a cumulative task. Some teachers may STILL require rote memorization of the order of presidents. When people my age were in school, merely having heard of a Roosevelt was about all that was expected of us for that presidential roll call.
But yet, even in later years (at least before the invention of cell phones), we needed to carry a lot of information in our heads: lists of table, state capitals, and especially the chemical elements. My first revelation is that I never chose to become a chemist. Chemistry, I believed then, and still do, is about things that smell awful, and every chemistry teacher wears a lab coat and carries a beaker or two.
I discussed the notion of what students ought to be permitted to take to an exam, with my friend Lupita Gonzales, whose high school teaching experience is much more recent than mine. Her opinion seems to be that work a student can do without electronic aids, the better.
As freshmen at Highlands University, we needed to sign up for a series of REQUIRED classes, including chemistry, biology, math and physics. In the olden days — by that I mean the 1950s — students didn’t have the luxury of treating course catalogs like menus, as if college were a cafeteria.
Some courses we could not avoid.
I learned that to survive a chemistry survey course with a certain visiting summer professor, we needed to memorize the ENTIRE periodic table of elements. And to really impress the teacher, we were expected to add things like valences, atomic numbers and much other stuff we’ve all forgotten.
I heard, from a slew of disgruntled fellow freshmen that most of them had planned to avoid that instructor.
By the time I took (and passed, the first time) chemistry, it was the final quarter of my senior year. I suspect many others avoided chemistry until their senior year when, presumably, they were more mature.
I’ve been out of the classroom since 1999, except for a stint when our former editor and publisher of the Optic, Tom McDonald, and I co-taught a couple of journalism courses in an effort to revive the student newspaper, La Mecha. I liked Tom’s approach in that he wanted the students to be out in the field, writing articles and taking photos, not sitting in a dorm room attempting to write fiction.
During these sessions, we discovered that in some classes, the use of any electronic device, such as a calculator or cell phone, was forbidden. “It gives an unfair advantage to those who don’t have these devices” was the explanation.
Tom and I discovered, some 10 years ago, when we taught these courses, that many professors clung to that no-devices policy.
Essentially, tools we needed were a pencil and a notebook. Glancing at an actual final exam, administered to prospective high school freshmen in a Kansas town, I pitied the students and the amount of preparation it must have required.
Now let’s go back a mere 122 years to the time when Kansas was undergoing growing pains. A friend, Rosalie Lopez, a long-time teacher for the West Schools, showed me an actual final exam for eighth-graders in Salina, Kans., in 1895. Apparently, the claim that someone had an eighth-grade education meant something. I find it grueling and don’t intend to take the five-hour exam that covers grammar, arithmetic, U. S. History, orthography and geography. And Rosalie Lopez was a wee bit too young to have proctored such an exam.
Here’s a tiny sampling of what teachers expected of eighth-graders:
For grammar:
- Give the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
- Define case. Illustrate each case.
- What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
For arithmetic:
- A wagon box is 2 feet deep, 10 feet long and 3 feet wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
- Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. of coal at $6.00 a ton.
For U.S. History
- Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
- Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
For orthography:
- What are elementary sounds? How are they classified?
- What are the following and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthongs, cognate letters, linguals.
- Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, tion.
For geography:
- Describe the mountains of North America.
- Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
Those seem like hefty requirements for teens whose day probably included a number of farm or home chores.
I prefer the speed and accuracy that things like cell phones provide. And my attitude toward those with only an eighth grade education certainly has improved.
I believe that in many ways our ancestors were more prepared for life than are many of us.
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As for those Biblical questions that I include in this column: I believe they’ve been too simple. Katie Palmer, Ed Littleton, Dorothy Maestas and Jeanette Yara breezed through the question as to why men ought to make the coffee during Sunday School: Hebrews/ he brews.
Items in the future will soon be at the post doctoral level, so study hard.
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Weight last week: 227
Weight today: 227