Beth McMurtry
speaker
34 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Beth McMurtry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
When you teach to the test, you're basically assigning short essays, you're assigning paragraphs, you're assigning excerpts from longer books. And then students are asked to say, discern the meaning in this paragraph or talk about the writing style or the use of metaphor. And as one professor described it to me, it turns reading into a scavenger hunt.
So students were taught to read in this way, and they come into college reading this way. And then professors who maybe didn't fully understand what was happening in the K-12 system are saying, what is going on here? My students don't have critical reading skills. If you think of reading like exercise, they weren't exercising. They weren't engaging in the act of reading.
I think if you look at certain tests, there has been learning loss. If you look at maybe SAT and ACT trend lines, right, they've been going down a little bit.
Forty percent of seniors meet none of the college readiness benchmarks the fifth consecutive year. Test scores have declined. Now the question, what is to blame, the pandemic or something else?
If you talk to or survey superintendents and teachers, they might say a significant portion of their students are doing more poorly on math and on English. So there has definitely been documented learning loss in K-12 that I think has been tied to the pandemic.
This generation is very self-critical. So telling students that they're dumb or dumber than previous generations, I think just feeds this spiral of anxiety. I don't think that's a way forward for anybody.
I think we have to remember that the students didn't create this environment. We, the adults, created the environment and the system that they lived in, right? Like this is the result of our handiwork. So we kind of have to ask ourselves, if we're unhappy with...
that the skills and abilities students are coming out of high school with and coming into college with, do we care enough to change that?
When it comes to reading, I think it helps to take the long view. I thought it was interesting when I was reporting the story that a couple of different people talked about the shift from the oral to the written culture like thousands of years ago. When writing was first introduced, people mourned the loss of the oral culture, the oral tradition.
And they just thought of writing as like a negative. Like nobody would say that today. But the point is that if we're shifting to an oral slash written culture again, if we're shifting to a multimedia culture, what does that mean? What are we gaining even as we lose some of the deep reading that we have been used to doing?
And the truth is we don't know yet because we're just at the beginning of the shift.
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