Remediation as Cheese, Remediation as Fishing

You may have noticed that the emphasis on completion, combined with a high priority on getting a job right away, has resulted in pressures on colleges to provide training and skills development … with less emphasis on the subtler goals of intellectual development, curiosity, and liberating arts.  In both developmental and gateway mathematics courses, we have become the epitome of the completion/job methodology; to the extent that this is true we have failed as educators and mathematicians.

My thinking on this got a boost from a short piece on “Habits of Mind” by Dan Berrett (see http://chronicle.com/article/Habits-of-Mind-Lessons-for/134868/).  Dan’s main point is that the current focus on measurable outcomes applied to a college ‘education’ results in using simplistic measures, where these measures miss the most powerful advantages of an education.

Earlier this year, I was in a conversation with a group discussing placement tests and diagnostic tests.  The predominant approach was summarized by a food metaphor:  Our goal is to fill in the ‘swiss cheese holes’ for our students, so that they do not have any gaps.  The ‘remediation as cheese’ metaphor is very much the common approach, whether a college uses modules or emporium or traditional classes; we measure success by counting holes (or lack thereof).  I’d like to think that education in general and mathematics in particular is more than the absence of holes.

Compare the cheese metaphor with this:  Remediation as fishing.  According to a quote, often cited as a Chinese proverb:

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.

“To fish” is the “remediation”; we are not about holes … we are about building capacity as well as building ability … we are about attitudes about learning as well as learning about attitudes … we are about enabling students to become more than they intended at the start of our course.  Remediation succeeds when students are fundamentally different when they leave our classrooms; the ‘lack of holes’ with arithmetic and algebra does not improve a student’s preparation for education or for employment as much as the habits of mind that can be developed.

Let’s help our students learn how to fish.  The broader goals of education are just as important as discrete skills and immediate performance measures.  We can, and should, contribute to our student’s capabilities within our developmental mathematics classes. 

Nobody makes a greater mistake then he who does nothing because he could only do a little.  [Edmund Burke]

 
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