Secretary's Column
By Dr. Rick Melmer
Department of Education

Wax on – wax off

After viewing the title of the article, you can probably name that movie in less than five seconds. If you guessed “The Karate Kid,” you are correct! You might wonder what this movie has to do with education. Continue to read, and I’ll try to connect the dots.

In “The Karate Kid,” Daniel LaRusso moves from New Jersey to California. He quickly discovers that new kids do not always fit in, and he gets involved in some fights to help initiate him into his new town. Daniel becomes motivated to learn how to defend himself and quickly becomes impressed with a karate teacher – Mr. Miyagi – who has a history of helping young people learn the art and skill of karate.

To Daniel’s surprise, some of the activities that Mr. Miyagi teaches him appear to have nothing to do with karate. He asks Daniel to wax his car using a particular type of motion (wax on – wax off). He also assigns Daniel the task of painting the fence – again using a particular motion while he paints. While Daniel is waxing the car and painting the fence, he is angry and convinced that the exercises have nothing to do with learning karate. Soon, however, he realizes that the skills he learned from Mr. Miyagi did have a direct impact on his ability to be successful in karate competitions.

Each year, we graduate thousands of high school students in South Dakota. We expect that what they have learned in school will prepare them for life after high school. Employers and postsecondary faculty seem to be clear on what they expect from our graduates. My question is: Do the subjects and activities that we stress in high school prepare our students for their future lives? Here are some expectations that people have of our high school students and some activities that we can endorse to address these expectations.

• Basic Skills – Our students need to have a basic handle on academic skills such as reading and math. How do you acquire those skills? Rigorous coursework and solid assessment systems. End-of-course exams will become much more common as schools across our country attempt to assure the general public that our students have the basic skills to succeed.

• Literacy – Students must be able to read and comprehend at an adult level. Yet students may read less in high school than at any time in their school careers. More reading requirements at the high school level would assist in preparing students in the area of literacy. Each high school teacher should have a book that students could read to gain a greater understanding of the content area and sharpen their reading skills at the same time.

• Communication – If they have learned it, can they communicate it to others? Our current system of learning in high school is still quite passive – students listen as the teacher presents material. Activities such as Senior Projects provide students with a chance to package their learning from high school and communicate this learning to others. Senior Projects cause a student to reflect on his or her learning in high school.

• Problem-solving – Information is growing so rapidly that we can no longer expect to memorize all there is to learn. Students need to apply their learning to problem-solving situations. Our curriculum and activities need to be project-based so that students work with others to solve problems. We need to ensure that teachers are incorporating problem-solving activities into their curriculum.

Our students may be like Daniel LaRusso. They don’t understand how their high school curriculum will help them later in their lives. Let’s be more like Mr. Miyagi and ensure that the activities we create for our students will help them be prepared for the future.