Tag Archives: University of Pittsburgh

March Madness- in education and beyond

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I have an obsession, I won’t lie.  I LOVE this time of year.  This was an entirely unproductive weekend, and it is entirely the fault of the NCAA basketball tournament.  And for the record, I enjoyed the 4 network format that let me watch even more of the games as they fit my interests and needs.  My wife (good sport that she is, watched a lot of the games with me) even commented during the first half of a game Saturday night, “It’s not even enjoyable to watch the first half, I’ve gotten to see so many good endings”.  In four short days, we got to the point that we wanted the immediate feel-good moment, the last-second buzzer beater.  We didn’t want to watch the hard work that went into getting your team in a position to make that last second shot possible.  This thought led me to think of the similarities in education.
Basketball Shot by Bob Sanders

Basketball Shot by Bob Sanders

We’ve become a society of instant gratification.  Microwave meals, streaming video, voice search on our Iphones.  For those of you old enough to remember dial up, how insane would you go waiting for a page to load now like it did in the old days of AOL dial up?  My friend Sean and I were uncomfortable the other day waiting 3 or 4 seconds for the page to load because the wireless in that part of the building wasn’t as strong.  Unfortunately, society wants that same thing in education.  People want to see the instant results.  What’s the best way to immediately see results?  Often they use test scores, something quick and concrete that they can draw conclusions from.  This is the basis for NCLB and many other “reform” initiatives that continue to pop up in discussion and legislation.  They take a “last-second” snapshot of a student or teacher’s year and use that as the basis for success or failure.  That mindset misses a big  part of the overall picture.

The University of Pittsburgh men’s basketball team suffered a defeat to a lower-ranked Butler team this weekend.  Pitt had a 28-5 record this year and was the regular season champ of the Big East conference, a conference judged by many as the toughest conference in the nation.  And by many, their season will be judged a failure.  A failure because they did not win on a given day in March.  The outstanding season, the hard work that started in the fall, the hours of time in practice, all of that will fall by the wayside as they are judged by that popular hashtag “#fail”.  How similar is this to a teacher or student who spends hours of work, possibly having numerous successes throughout the year, but get judged as “not meeting standard” on the basis of a given day in March- or April, or May, depending on when the MAP, EOC or (insert your own acronym here) falls.

50 Books by Zeborah

50 Books by Zeborah

I know that lots of educators are scrambling to “catch up” and try to get information in because of lost days due to snow, etc.  Let’s hope that we can find a way to judge not just the final shot, but the overall body of work for them.  I’d hate to see them judged as a failure because we only want to see the results of the buzzer-beater and not watch the rest of the game.  THAT would be March Madness.