Common sense must prevail

Matt Pearl

My students have probably grown tired this past week of a phrase I repeated to them over and over:

Every test is a logic test.

And I mean it.

The point I have tried to impress upon them is that life demands that, at certain critical times, we each must be able to reason out the best choice — even when the specific solution to a problem is not clear to us.

I want them to do well on tests. Since “teaching to the test” has never been my style, we spend a couple of weeks every school year learning how life’s examinations are designed to make us fail — but how we can still succeed if we use a little bit of logic.

A few times during the week, I thought about the lives that my students will live in the years following high school.

Some of them will go to colleges and trade schools, where traditional testing will continue. Others will join the work force, where the test often comes in the form of whether the boss is happy with their work.

It’s all the same, really.

If we apply reason to our growing base of knowledge, we can usually get by in this life. If we choose not to apply ourselves or elect to stop learning, our only expectation should be failure.

Yes, life is a series of tests, and all tests are logic tests. We are called upon to solve problems daily. A good friend of mine at King City R-I is technology coordinator Brad Jones. In typical ‘computer guy” fashion, his first suggested solution to most tech problems is simple: reboot the machine. It takes care of the problem over half the time. Why? Because computers, like their operators, collect fragments of unnecessary information and clutter after continued use, and sometimes need nothing more than a brief rest and a restart.

I envision a future for my students, an idealized picture where the kids who took my English class have the necessary foundation to solve problems and complete tasks related to language, speaking and writing.

I used to want them to have vast vocabularies, and to possess the ability to write like collegiate English scholars. Then I realized that they all have dictionaries (or Google), and that the writing skills of a published author are not necessarily a functional need for every high school graduate.

Which person is more likely to succeed: the one who knows the spelling and definition of countless words, or the kid with a dictionary that knows how to complete just about any task you set before him?

Testing gets a bad rap, and to be honest, sometimes the standardized exam culture deserves to be criticized. There is nothing rational or “real world” about testing kids (and, effectively, their teachers) as much as we do. But what I think doesn’t matter much; testing isn’t going anywhere.

What we must do is to reinforce to students the importance of being a knowledgeable human being. And when it comes time to put their skills to the test, we need to remind these young folks that the only competitor any of us really ever faces is our own self.

Logic allows us to use the strength of our minds to eliminate the bad choices and derive the right answer.

Each of us will be tested countless times in our lives; long after folks have forgotten all about Common Core, common sense will still hold importance.