To Drill or Not To Drill, That Is the Question

The traditional belief is that students must drill to learn facts they will need in the future over and over again is the only way to ensure understanding. This is especially true in areas like math where the past approach was to drill students in math facts so that they knew without thinking about it that 7 X 8 = 56.

Today teachers think that students view drill as demotivating and the opposite of fun. Of course, I have seen no school mission statements that put “having fun” ahead of learning. You see, learning is hard work. The knowledge and skill learned are the payoff. As with anything you get rewarded commensurately with the effort you put into it. It is interesting how much fun it is to look back on a difficult learning process that you successfully completed.

Daniel Willingham, cognitive scientist, in his book “Why Don’t Students Like School?” weighs in on this debate saying, “The bottleneck in our cognitive system is the extent to which we can juggle several ideas in our mind simultaneously. For example, it’s easy to multiply 19 X 6 in your head, but nearly impossible to multiply 184,930 x 34,004. The processes are the same but in the latter case you ‘run out of room’ in your head to keep track of the numbers. The mind has a few tricks for working around this problem. One of the most effective is practice, because it reduces the amount of “room” that mental work requires. The cognitive principle that guides this . . . is ‘It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice.’ “

He uses as an example that you can’t become a good soccer player if as you are dribbling, you still focus on how hard to hit the ball, which surface of your foot to use, etc. Low level processes need to become automatic so that you can focus on higher level concerns.

This relates to the often discussed brain model that sees it partitioned into long-term memory (facts and procedures) and working memory (awareness and thinking). If you wonder what I am driving at, it is just this, “the most popular (among educators) process for educating our kids is one that avoids practice (drill) because it isn’t fun. The problem is that the process results in kids who aren’t educated well and can’t compete as a group with their most competent foreign peers. Thus you have constructivist or discovery math curricula taking over the education marketplace in an effort to make it more fun for the teachers and the kids in the earlier years but resulting in the failure to lay the necessary foundational learning for the study of algebra which is now a requirement for all students virtually everywhere. One of the sad results of the lack of foundation is an emerging number of “algebra light” classes being offered to mask the failure to prepare kids for real algebra.

A friend of mine and I met recently with a group of educators to discuss the Everyday Math (constructivist) curriculum they were using in a large school district. The meeting of approximately an hour and a half was very interesting and very frustrating. I came prepared with charts showing the most recent performance on the state achievement tests among others. The district had a combined proficient and advanced percentage of 32 for 10th grade math. Thus, the other two-thirds were below proficient. As you would expect with a process that fails to lay the foundation for algebra and beyond, the results get worse by grade as the kids progress to higher grades.

The educators were interested in the graphs and I let them keep them but it really made no impact on them at all. They stated over and over that curricula didn’t matter; only the pedagogical process mattered. This is a good reminder that the education schools’ brainwashing technique for educators is alive and well. They cannot face the objective truth because they have been told over and over that it doesn’t count, only the processes they were taught in ed school count. If that were true everything would be great but it isn't true as E.D. Hirsch and others have so often pointed out.

This is a sad situation for our kids and the educator cadre who are chained to a set of beliefs that don’t and won’t work. I plan to discuss how we can work to overcome this mired in the mud situation in a future post.