Mastery Over Memorization: Foxcroft's
Portrait of a Graduate
By Steven McCarty, English Department Chair
T
he world has changed significantly in the time since teachers were on the other side of the educator-student relationship, so we need to be careful about teaching in the same manner that we were taught. I grew up in Generation X — the generation of “Star Wars” and Nintendo — so computers and the internet did not factor much into my high school education. I remember that my first experience with a computer — other than a Nintendo — was playing “Oregon Trail” in middle school. School seemed more spartan then — no phones to distract and no doom scrolling or shopping while the teacher was talking.
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The school of the 20th century centered on the transference of knowledge: Who was the eighth president? (Martin van Buren) What is the capital of Illinois? (Chicago! No, wait, Springfield!) A student had to know these facts unless they wanted to trudge into the library and flip the gilded pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica to look them up. Learning was simpler then. It was also slower. And to be honest, it was kind of a hassle, as any person who has searched through a newspaper on microfiche instead of Google will tell you.
Now enter today’s learners. I currently have students who were born after the first iPhone and have the capacity to research in minutes what used to take days to find. The set-up almost seems like a movie plot: What if you could obtain any information in the world with the swipe of a finger? What could a person do with such power? For today’s students, that question is not rhetorical. Today’s students are not neat little vats to be topped off with information, sealed, and shipped out the door. So what does a teacher do with such a student? Nothing. You make the student "do".
