Ontario Subject Associations

STAO, Science Teachers Association of Ontario

OAGEE, The Ontario Association for Geographic and Environmental Education

OAME, The Ontario Association for Mathematics Education

OHASTA, The Ontario History and Social Science Teachers’ Association

OPHEA, The Ontario Physical and Health Education Association

CODE, Council of Ontario Drama and Dance Educators

OSEA, The Ontario Society of Education through Art

OMLTA, The Ontario Modern Language Teachers’ Association

ORMTA, Ontario Registered Music Teachers’ Association

Why marks drop at university

Almost everyone has had occasion to look back upon his school days and wonder what has become of the knowledge he was suppose to have amassed during his years of schooling, and why it is that the technical skills he acquired have to be learned over again in changed form in order to stand him in good stead.

John Dewey, Experience and Education

This caught my attention as a teacher who has had to wonder why student marks drop in university, and why university professors don’t have an intelligent response beyond saying that high schools don’t do their job. The linked excerpt comes from Lapham’s Quarterly (Vol. I, Number 4, Fall 2008), and addresses schooling as “preparation” To extrapolate and apply, I think Dewey makes the point that when students learn how to write in high school English, they do so in response to particular teacher notions of what writing is for the material they are teaching. When those students go to university, they falter in the same task because they face another teacher with other notions of writing attached to the material they are teaching, which would seem to make it necessary that, in some degree, the teaching of writing needs to begin again as the university’s responsibility to its students.