“The greatest enemy of understanding is coverage — I can't repeat that often enough. If you're determined to cover a lot of things, you are guaranteeing that most kids will not understand, because they haven't had time enough to go into things in depth, to figure out what the requisite understanding is, and be able to perform that understanding in different situations”

YES !

Educators, like most people, shrink from making strategic choices, failing to admit that doing so represents the worst strategic choice of all – the decision to fail by deliberately mismatching goals with resources.

A 42 minute (or less) period is not adequate for serious student reflection or being guided through rewarding material of genuine depth. Adolescents do not have the same kind of brains as grad students and most of them will be stumped by trying to tackle difficult but eventually comprehensible concepts on their own. So, either most will get left behind or that kind of material never gets assigned in the first place.

On strategic choices, I wonder if there are really two choices, or more, which, if I haven’t miss-labeled, could be called comprehensive and cognitive studies. Comprehensive are the kind that take the more than 42 minutes that Mark talks about, while the other kind can be allotted as little or more time as available.

For some studies it is more important for the student to understand that there is a start and finish, while for other studies it is more important for the student to understand how that knowledge “flows” to the end.

As an example, take arithmetic as opposed to mathematics. In Arithmetic, Just understanding that there is a “start” that can lead to a “finish” gives the steps in-between comprehension. The student doesn’t really need to comprehend something like, say for instance, factorization, only that if he or she uses it at the appropriate time, an answer will be found. In that way, memorization would be an important tool for building a nation of doer’s. The resources can go to the quick and fast people able to memorize vast amounts of material in a very short time.

However, it might be, similar to what the leaders of the Native Americans found, that to build resiliency into a nation comprehensive study would become more important. Comprehensive study, I would imagine, tends to bring a nation out of its boarders, which are no longer there to begin with, to see the big picture. It would probably cause fewer problems as these walls disappear and give the globe-wide complex adaptive system form that it is lacking.

You are describing the difference between academic and procedural knowledge Bruning (whose also chair of the edpsych department) talked about [1].

Comprehending won't do much good, I think, if one is comprehending how to survive in a world that's gone…

Mark's comment is important, and I'm working on a series which addresses his concerns. We generally agree…

[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2006/09/09/social-teaching-strategies.html#more