A class, as
my friend Roy says, is content-based or skill-based. Essentially the focus is
either on transmitting specific information related to a subject to students,
or in aiding students in the acquisition of a skill.
Some
classes inherently lean more one direction than another. Many of the sciences,
for instance, focus on the specialized information that students need to know
about the discipline.
However, I
believe that there are too many who focus on the content rather than the
skills. There is always some content instruction. There must be. However, the
skills are far more important, especially in an age of the internet.
As my
favorite professor (and the man whom I’ve patterned my teaching after) said,
“There will never be a time when you are without the text.” That was back in
the fledgling days of the internet, as well. Now, with access to all of the
information on mobile phones, his words are more true than ever.
While the English
Composition courses I teach are fundamentally skill-based (at least in my
world-view) the mythology class I teach could lend itself highly to
content-based knowledge. In fact, when I took the course, that’s how it was
taught: memorization and quickly surveying a new continent every other week. I
barely had a chance do more than spin around before the next scantron was in
front of my face.
And I felt
cheated.
I didn’t
really learn much. I learned as much about mythology from that course as I
would have looking at Wikipedia pages.
So when I started
teaching mythology, it was not an exercise in memorization. I’ve shifted the
class to skill acquisition. I teach students how to look at mythology. I want
them to be able to crack it open and pull out everything that’s inside of it
(and there is quite a bit). I want them to know what to do when they read a
myth, and how to recognize the value and the culture of the people who wrote
it. When students pass my mythology class, I’m confident that they will be able
to apply this skills to other myths.
It’s time
we stop treating education as the equivalent of looking something up in an
encyclopedia, and focus on the skills necessary to utilize the knowledge.