Academic Indigestion
If you have ever experienced a rolling stomach after scarfing food too fast and running right into the next activity, then you know how unpleasant the taste of food becomes in those moments.
If you have ever experienced the late afternoon of a work conference, then you know how exhausting it feels to push an overloaded brain to listen to one more thing.
Our students know. They experience it on a daily basis. The rush from one class to another. The rush from one new concept to another. The academic indigestion.
No wonder many students struggle to retain anything they learn at school. No wonder they balk at yet another assignment. And to be honest, they probably experience physical indigestion too, as they hurry to eat their lunch in the allotted minutes and get to class on time.
There’s no time to savor, no time to digest. No time to organize their thoughts around a topic. No time to play with the new concepts, no time to let them roll gently around the brain and settle in. No time to let the new concepts transform into genuine curiosity and lifelong learning.
I’ve been in those long conferences. I’ve eaten food all day. It’s uncomfortable. It’s tiring. And I get to the end of a school day and I feel the same discomfort because I too have not processed or digested anything I’ve done. I have no time to reflect along the way. And if I’m feeling that way as the adult called to shepherd my students’ learning, then I can only imagine how frustrated and checked-out they must feel at the end of a day of being overfed.
While food is meant to nourish us physically, school is meant to nourish us intellectually. But when we overeat or eat too fast without taking time to digest those nutrients into our bloodstream, we feel nauseous and bloated, and we nullify the nourishing effect.
And when we learn too fast or shove too much information into our brains, we feel overstimulated and learning new information becomes equally unproductive.
At the highest levels of American education, we need to grapple with these questions. We need to decide what our objective is.
Do we want students who hear a bunch of facts all day, so we adults can check the box that we presented certain information? Do we want students who can take tests well? Do we want students who can parrot and repeat?
Or do we want students who truly understand the information, who can make connections between subjects, and formulate thoughtful questions in response?
Are we aiming for pure accuracy or genuine curiosity?
The answers to these questions will lead to vastly different approaches at the classroom level. Our current classroom method reminds me of supersized fast food and we’re checking those boxes just fine.
But are we open to cultivating a five-star restaurant with sit-down service, palate cleansers between courses and conversations with our servers and sommeliers? A place where students are nourished in body and mind with time to process and reflect as they learn?
