Evidence of Understanding

I have searched the internet for videos lasting three minutes or less on understanding understandings.  I could not find one that was short enough.  What I did find was some video that seemed to explain why, after completing my doctoral studies and finding myself homeless in Washington State, I could not get a job that paid me enough to rent an apartment here.  At first I was desperate and afraid.  Eventually, I was just plain angry.  Here I was a highly educated woman just slightly over forty and without anyway to prove I had skills that were transferable.  In fact, that was not even a term being used at the time, in the late eighties.  And worse yet, I was homeless and sleeping in my car.

Not only did I have problems with sharing apartments with others; but often I was thrown out because of some reason the renter felt was a problem; like one alcoholic woman I lived with.  She just set my clothes out on the door step.  I came home at 2:00AM from working my shift on Fort Lewis to find my things outside her door in the middle of the night.  I didn’t even have a blanket to wrap around myself.  I ended up knocking on the barracks door of someone I knew from working security at the clubs on fort.  I had a blanket and pillow for the night.  It was late October.  That was the year I slept in my car on Fort Lewis in their primitive camp areas until late November.  This was in the early 1990s. 

So where is all this going?  Well, while we sit around and debate how to assess students and figure out if they have learned the course objectives…we are still not facing the fact that they might be unemployed with thousands of dollars worth of debt after graduating.  Those loan companies don’t give a rats @$#%$& whether the student learned the objectives or not.    Most employers don’t seem to care how much education you have and how many skills you may have acquired and/or whether they are transferable or not.  I spent many a cold night sleeping in my car, in this state, learning that simple fact.

I would rather assess how much the learner is learning that will help them in obtaining a job in this economy.  I would much rather have these learners actively participating in the learning and assessment phases of their college courses.  I want to know they will be able to do what I could not…find a job that paid them enough to pay for their student loans.  I want to know when they leave the college I am teaching in, they can afford to live in an apartment and pay for life’s necessities, for example health insurance.  I am much less concerned whether I am properly assessing what they have learned; I am more concerned as to whether they feel like they have learned the concepts and can apply their knowledge in a way that will get them hired at a decent wage.

I am one of those students who feel that my education was an economic waste to a point.  It did not help me secure a good job; it did not get me an apartment; it did not help me pay my thousands of dollars in student loans.  Nor did it help me fight the discrimination I faced daily.  However, it did give me the strength to carry on when things seemed hopeless.  It kept me from starving to death; and more importantly, no matter how many times people treated me like a loser, I held my head high and knew I was not.  I had graduated and did so with honors, which I might add, without having to cheat.

My assessment course is coming up.  I will be spending a whole quarter working on the concepts of understanding understandings.  There will be time enough to develop my rubics and put my thoughts to work for future learners in my class…which I will teach come hell or high water.  I have walked through those trials and valleys, it is time to reap the rewards and pass them to the next generation of learners.

In sum, it is time for educators to make college and higher learning relevant to their students.  It is not about us, it is about them.  We are the facilitators of their learning.  We must prepare them for the world they will find themselves in when they leave the protected walls of our colleges and universities.  Without jobs, whether or not they learned in college those things we thought were important for them to learn, they cannot succeed.  In the end our colleges and universities will have failed them and all they will be left with is the debt, overwhelming debt for years to come.

I hope you all have the time to watch this video.