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Taking Notes: A different kind of factory


Posted Date: 11/18/2021

Taking Notes: A different kind of factory

 Your student, in Kansas, is one of 450,000 students, who every day arrives at school, and with his or her classmates goes through routines of opening books, listening to teachers, answering questions, moving to different classes, negotiating the playground or hallways, eating lunch, and after lunch, repeat. Sounds like a factory. 

But it isn’t. No one in a factory stops the assembly line to ask if you are having a bad day or need additional help or time to solve a problem. In a factory, if the raw materials are the wrong quality, they get sent back or thrown into the discard bin. That doesn’t happen in public schools. When I think back on my teachers, I remember them stopping by my desk and others to make sure we were getting it right, helping us along if we were struggling and trying to keep learning fun and interesting. That’s the opposite of a factory. 

Just to emphasize why schools exist, the State Board of Education has adopted a very unfactory-like Kansans Can vision. If that vision could be boiled down to one sentence, it would be something like, the school is there for each individual student — nothing else. 

What a revolutionary concept, right? Not really. Recently, the Manhattan Mercury did an interesting story that looked at how schools were operating nearly 100 years ago, according to the 1922 Kansas Rural Schools Bulletin. That publication states that the “model teacher realizes that the school exists for the child and not the child for the school.” Maybe our current State Board of Education time-traveled back to 1922 to lay the groundwork for its vision. 

The goal of public schools was always to build a better foundation (the factory) for society, but the plan (the vision) to get there was always to focus on each student so that he or she could become their very best. Another item in that publication from generations ago, has left me wondering a lot. It said teachers should “teach within the understanding of the child.” Just ponder that for a moment and think of all the children you have known, their different likes, dislikes, abilities, temperaments and personalities. Imagine facing a classroom of those students each day and trying to “teach within the understanding of the child.” For all those who say you don’t need the pedagogy to teach, good luck with that. Our teachers are amazing and their success with each individual student will determine our success as a society.