#72, "Why Don't Students Like School?"

"Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom"

Daniel Willingham

I was surprised by this book. The title suggested to me a work that talked primarily about student attitudes about school and learning, and possibly ways to solve related problems that arise. That is not the case, however. The answer to the question posed by the title is given in the first chapter, in the first few paragraphs. Students don't like school because school requires thinking. Thinking is hard, so students dislike school. Of course, the title and these answers are purposefully general--not every student dislikes school, after all--and they instead serve as seeds that lead to a deep, thoughtful, and thorough examination of topics including the mind, thoughts and thinking, learning, memory, and teaching. The author relies on a massive (and occasionally overwhelming) trove of studies and works to make his points, the combination of which lead inexorably to his foundational and sober conclusions, all of which are then directly and practically related to the modern classroom.

Willingham has fascinating ways of describing thinking and memory, most of which I had never heard or had not heard in this way. As I mentioned above, his primary argument is that the human brain does not like to think. Thinking takes time and energy, and the brain therefore does whatever it can to streamline, organize, minimize, and even cheat at receiving and processing information in order to conserve time and energy. This requires the use of two types of memory: background knowledge (the library of information available in your mind) and working memory (the instantaneous retrieval of information that pertains to your moment-by-moment needs). The interaction between these two types of memory, including the importance of factual knowledge as well as abstract thought, comprise the "intelligence" of a mind. He goes on from talking about the mind to a psychological perspective on "fixed" versus "malleable" intelligence, with the conclusion that students perform best who believe that intelligence can be increased with hard work, not just through genetic "smartness".

There's much, much more, and all of it has direct power in our everyday interactions with students in the classroom. The mind is a wonderful, terrible, incredible thing. Mine could barely keep up with this excellent book, but I think enough seeped in to make a difference.

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