BLOG 4 - YOU CAN ALWAYS LOOK IT UP - OR CAN YOU?

You can always look it up and yes, you can still look it up! The point of looking something up is to establish a baseline knowledge of the subject matter. We shouldn’t expect students to master subjects that they look up in books or on the internet. These are not realistic expectations for kindergarten students or college students. Research is used as a secondary source of knowledge and this is the student’s role to learn what they can through their own resources. The role of the teacher is to take the student’s research to the next level. The students build their block of clay to class and the teacher helps them shape it into a work of art. It helps if the students brings something to the table through baseline knowledge and that is definitely something the student can look up!
Rote learning has its place in teaching. I learn my basic math tables through memorization. I didn’t need to know why 4 + 4 = 8 when I was 6 years old . I just needed to know the answer. I wasn’t searching for a deeper meaning. I learned the basics by rote and then could add to that baseline knowledge as my through deeper levels of learning. We’re getting caught up in labels and the labels tell us that rote is bad and you need to go deeper. Don’t let labels dictate your schooling. Students dictate how they learn something. Rote learning worked for me so, it can’t be all bad.
According to the article, specialists in vocabulary estimate that in order to understand something that is read or heard or looked, the percentage of already-known words necessary for comprehension is around 95%. That percentage seems a little high for my tastes but, I do agree that it does take a fairly high percentage of already-known words for comprehension to take place. I have to admit that I know 100 percent of all the words in this article but, for the most part, I’ve had a hard time comprehending everything in this article. Honestly, this article reads like stereo instructions.
The author trots out a line-up of impressive academics that have been locked up in a classroom for the last thirty years researching theories, scholarly journals, and all matters of cognitive projects. The problem is that if you ever put these giant brains in front of a room full of students, they would look like a deer in headlights! Absolutely frozen for all the world to see. This is a case where looking it up has gone terribly wrong. I smell a another theory.