Differentiated Instruction

I recently watched a video of South Park look-alikes explaining differentiated instruction, totally beyond my comprehension.  During my early childhood years of learning in a one-room school (grades one through eight) I received a lot of unintended differentiated instruction.  My boredom with single-digit addition and recognition of sight-words was often distracted by some interesting discussion of early American history or the political geography of Western Europe.  In that limited space, it was difficult to fend off information that should not be learned until the eighth grade.  I was blessed to have had a first- and second-grade teacher who challenged me with optional homework beyond my designated grade level.

Knowledge is not only differentiated, but also anachronistically incremental.  I have enjoyed my adult 8 hours (post-degree, but not graduate) earned at Lipscomb University in fields in which I had no previous formal education.  Learning only for pleasure also takes away the stigma of a 3.00, for which I feel no inclination to apologize to my daughters who are quite tolerant.

The accepted sequence of education as a requisite for a career had no meaning for me.  Owning a business on Main Street in downtown Franklin seemed a sufficiently challenging goal. At no time did I think of education as preparation for employment, but understood the imperative of some economic security to pursue education as a lifetime goal.  Of course, I did not realize that until after 47 years, and by that time it was too late.

This paradox of thinking it is too late to learn something makes no more sense than thinking it is too soon to learn something.  The class I just finished at Lipscomb, I took with sixteen young people seeking an education major.  Having watched my three daughters attain education degrees and certification, I felt the pain of their portfolios and years of required courses, practice and evaluation.  I had the luxury of taking the exams and writing the papers purely for the pleasure of writing.  I don’t know how we convince five-year-olds and doctoral candidates that the value of learning transcends pragmatics and documentation.  Academia seems to have greater value in retrospect, than in the present or immediate future.

The myth that everything we need to know we learn in kindergarten has some element of folkloric truth, but is more often used to rationalize arrested intellectual development.   Those who avow that common sense is more to be desired than lesser-practical intellectual skills often do so in defense of skills in spoken and functional common sense.

Our educational determinism is shaped by necessity and expectation. Curiosity and imagination drive differentiated instruction in adulthood.  Continuing education, however, can impose impractical complexity. This puts at risk some decisions, judgments, opinions, and solutions developed from years of paradigmatic common sense and repetition.  It is possible to confuse the interaction of knowledge, faith and wonder. There is an exchange in the trial in Inherit the Wind which raises the question, “what do we think about the things we do not think about.”  I have found that knowledge does not diminish wonder, but only amplifies the vastness that we still do not understand.  Faith is either validated by knowledge, or retained and revered as unexplained wonder.  Or it may, in the absence of evidence, become a logical reason for doubt, pending further inquiry.