False Dichotomy, aka. Twitter Broadside
Education seems to be full of these things, but perhaps they're in every business and I'm only paying attention to education. You see them often, pithy statements that fit into 140 characters by eliminating all the gray area and reducing everything to black or white extremes of "The Right Way" vs "What You're Doing". Often well-meaning but ultimately harmful:
If your exam questions can be googled, then you're asking the wrong questions.
Google is useful for information, less so for understanding. Googling
the answer doesn't "show your work" and, given the nature of the
Internet, isn't particularly trustworthy.
If kids in your class are more engaged by a fidget spinner than they are
by your lesson, the spinner isn't the problem. Your lesson is.
Learning is hard. Kids fidget. Fads come, then go. Your lesson doesn't suck simply because two kids out of 25 are fiddling with this thing.
If your exam questions are multiple choice, then you aren't asking the right questions in the right way.
There's always a place for quick, multiple choice questions, even on summative assessments.
If your exam questions only use integers then they aren't Real World(tm) Questions.
If your exam questions require a calculator, then you're asking the wrong questions.
Integral answers allow students to show their work, are useful to the learning process because the arithmetic is secondary to the learning. Integral answers can also encourage students to search for different solution methods. Decimal answers that
require a calculator are great for Real-World data but Real-World data is often confusing and isn't usually appropriate during the learning process. Learn first, then use the learning. Calculators make guessing too easy and encourage kids to waste
time with it.
If you are asking questions at all, then your students aren't agents of their own education.
This is just silly. Teachers are there to teach. Sometimes the
students "lead" the class down the carefully prepared road through the
weeds ... but the teacher has laid the groundwork for that.
I am really tired of this nonsense. These blanket statements that reduce the complex world we teach in to just two colors (what you're doing and the right way) are unnecessarily reductive. It encourages simple-minded extremist fads that wither away after a couple of years of damage to children's education.
It's a false dichotomy and we're really going to need you to stop saying it.
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