The Rube Goldberg-izing of Education

Public Education: Making the Simple Complex since 1852

Earlier this school year, my fourth grade gifted cluster classes were studying simple machines. As a culminating project, they created Rube Goldberg-esque machines, using levers, pulleys, etc. to make a simple task (such as bouncing a ball or unwrapping a piece of candy) more complex.

Recently I got to thinking about how our public education system routinely "Rube Goldberg-izes" curriculum, procedures, accountability measures, and just about anything they can get their hands on. Think back to the last excrutiating faculty meeting you attended, where nearly 20 minutes was spent determining the best solution for the lunch box pick up problem or the seating arrangement in the auditorium. Even more frustrating (and terrifying)- take a close look at one of your teaching manuals and read an entire page from top to bottom, left to right. Amazing how trivialized one skill can become!

Imagine the instructional time that could be saved by streamlining and de-Goldberizing our schools! Collaboration time could be spent analyzing student work, providing constructive feedback to colleagues, or (gasp!) differntiating instruction based on data. Nevermind that the putty we are using to hold up our posters keeps peeling or a colleague's birthday is coming and we have to come up with a clever gift. Forget that we ran out of post-its earlier than expected and there are typos in the curriculum guide written by a notoriously incompetent (yet frequently promoted) specialist. Who cares that our second graders keep tattling and the fifth graders can't seem to keep quiet in the restrooms?

The work of teaching is more important than all of these silly things. It should not take 13 steps to wipe our face with a napkin, or, the educational equivalent: get our students to write the proper heading on their page. Our time would be better spent making the complex more simple. Helping students understand place value is hard! There are multiple steps that can be taken to get to the final product of kids being about to compute with large numbers.

With the tight budgets we are working with today, our resources need to be used as efficiently as possible. Personally, I'd rather my tax dollars pay for a Place-Value machine rather than a Heading Writer.