Brad Pitt stars in a new film called Moneyball. It’s about a
Baseball team called the Oakland Athletics who at the start of the twenty-first
century under the auspices of a man called Billy Beane started to do something strange.
They did not follow the usual philosophy of pumping money
into high value players to buy results. Effectively the Chelsea FC way of buying
a title. Put in enough cash and you will win. There’s nothing wrong with it, it
seems to work. But not if you don’t have the cash. How do you compete time and
again with the big boys if all you have is a quarter, or even less of their
financial resources. The Oakland team started to look at what they really
valued in team players. Instead of the big plays and the sluggers who swung for
the fences they bought in lesser known players who had a knack of getting on
base. They built their team up by looking more closely at what provided value
in the long run, value to the team.
I sometimes think we forget the issue of value. The students
will scrape down the page and look at the mark they get, a single letter or the
number, is it and A? An A minus, what the F……? beside the essay will be
annotations, advice, notes and pointers to what they need to do next, a way to
check themselves against the lower mark. But attention is drawn like moth to
flame by that summative assessment, that judgement. Perhaps we need to get rid
of them altogether in the process of teaching? Perhaps we need to look a little
harder at what really gets results?
Funky lessons, extravagant software, I pads and trips off
site, but when it gets down to it what actually gets the student understanding
the work: hard bloody graft, careful explanation and practice. Students need to
take more notes, read more thoroughly and allow themselves the luxury of a
little time to slowly read through what they did well and what they need to do
better.
If we spend our time, like the overspending Baseball teams,
on the excitement (trips) and razzmatazz (I-pads) and the immediate
satisfaction of marks; we miss the opportunity to appreciate that a calm head and
the basics of education may win you the game in the long run.
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