A while back, a video of Lauren Caitlin Upton's (Miss South Carolina Teen USA) poor response to a geography question went viral (19 million views as of today; the 30th most popular YouTube video of all time). Now there's a YouTube video showing Kellie Pickler's geographic ignorance ('Is France a country?') on Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?.
You just know that Lexington (SC) High School (where Upton had a 3.5 GPA) and North Stanly (NC) High School (Pickler) must be chagrined to have one of their graduates be the object of public ridicule due to their academic ignorance. Can you imagine the conversations that their former teachers are having right now?
Cross your fingers that one of your graduates isn't next (like we do whenever there's a national news story about some school administrator doing something dumb). Oh, and how many of you could have said that Budapest was the capital of Hungary?
I don’t think that her teachers missed presenting this. I think there is a very good chance that she knew this when she was in school.
I suppose it is normal to forget things under pressure or out of the context you learned them in.
I think the question for the teachers is how do you make the learning stay with the learner? Learning it for the test isn’t working.
Reminds me of your posts:
http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2007/03/are_you_smarter.html
http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2007/01/over_the_past_c.html
What factoids do we need to know, and what things are OK to know how to lookup in a real work environment?
I agree this is something she may have known in school. My question is, when was the last time this woman read a newspaper, online or dead-tree version? Or listened to the radio? France’s presidential election got so much coverage here I thought I was there. Maybe as educators we need to push the importance of keeping up with current events, even on a superficial level. And teach kids that current events are NOT the same as celebrity gossip.
I think Roger’s right. Isn’t one of the underlying questions relevance? Certainly teachers of both young ladies presented the information (more than once and in more than one grade level in all likelihood), but in what context?
The goal for our students has to be more than winning a vast sum of money on Jeopardy. Isolated bits of information often have little relevance to lives moving at light speed and focused on today, tonight, and tomorrow. In that world, if it doesn’t matter, why recall when you can retrieve?