Chapter 4 Adolescent Literacy

The main problem with classrooms now and days teachers only teach so the students can re-iterate information on a test then simply forget all or most of it and move on to something new.  This is the case even where there is no standardized tests involved.  We move and go through the material so fast that students can never truly appreciate the material and learn to understand it.  Science is by far the best example I can think of.  I can recall several times in middle school going over very basic principles regarding elements and the periodic table, but forgetting them and having to relearn everything in high school.  If we look at all of the material that is retaught throughout our lives we would be sick that we had to learn something so many times only to forget and not care about it when we are thirty.  Why should we care does it matter that we do not know calculus or chemistry?  Or proper citation for that matter, how many of us will after college write a book that requires citation while in our fields of study?  In order for our students to want to know things we must teach more than facts we need to teach principles with those facts principles that they want to know and understand.  For example in science we can teach principles that go with having proper lab safety that may go with automotives and cooking so that it incorporates more than the basic facts that even though I enjoyed these facts have already forgotten simply due to not needing them.  But, involving other aspects allows for relating concepts so that they will remember the facts because they will actually pertain to life and not simply some test they will take at the end of the chapter.