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But it worked for me!


Teachers and parents alike are often struggling to understand why students today aren't and shouldn't be taught in the same way they were taught 20 years ago. From complaints about Common Core math, to policies on limiting homework, adults question why these changes are necessary.
 We often fall into the "but it worked for me" mentality: "But when I was young we did...[insert educational practice here]... and I turned out fine." This is a logical fallacy, since there was no control to the experiment of you -- there wasn't another you that was taught without that educational practice, so it's impossible to know if your education may have been more effective using a different pedagogical practice.  Also, the theories and understanding in education has grown and evolved just like our understanding of science or development of technology. That rotary phone worked just fine for our parents, does that mean you want to give up your iPhone and only use a landline?  

Think about it like this, education research is not that different from medical research. What we know today is more advanced that what we knew 20, or even 10 years ago. If you go to the doctor with an illness, do you want the most current evidence-backed medicine, or the treatment from when you were a kid, 20 yrs ago? It’s the same with education; we have researched the practices that were used 20 years ago and while some of them have been shown to be effective, some of them have not, and should no longer be used. Teaching with these outdate practices, that have been shown to be ineffective, would be like treating a patent with a drug that was used 20 yrs ago but isn’t as effective as the current medication...in medicine this is called malpractice.

Just like with medicine or technology, our understand of learning, how the human brain develops and processes memories, has improved dramatically in the last 10-15 years. We have new tools (computers, video cameras....) to empirically test teaching and learning practices. 
We have only really been collecting data on education for a relatively short period of time, a little over 50 years, compared to how long we’ve been teaching people, and as our data sets grow in number of children, types of children and duration of time, we are able to see trends we just didn’t see before.

So before you condemn the new common core math as an unnecessary evil because it's not the way YOU were taught math, or protest your child's elementary school eliminating homework because YOU had homework and turned out great, remember that education is an evolving field of research, and want you should really be supporting is the latest evidence-based teaching practices so that your students are getting the best possible education today.


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