There’s a plague mottling our whiteboards and corrupting our classrooms. It’s not necessarily a plague, but a demand: know, understand, do. Is that a threat? What will happen if I don’t? Know, understand, do is a new way of organizing class time and lessons; teachers are required to explain to students exactly what we need to know, understand and, you guessed it, do.  However, when this structure of teaching is executed, it swallows class time and limits our ability to synthesize the information we are taught in class on our own.

Hearing the content of a class in the first five minutes or seeing my teacher anxiously scrawl his or her lesson plan on the forgotten corner of the whiteboard is like reading the spoiler alerts of a movie before going to see it. Why do we need the Rotten Tomatoes synopsis if we are going to sit through an hour or more of class time and, hopefully, know and understand the content taught to us?

During these five minutes that some teachers devote to deconstructing the material in a Sparknotes-esque summation, I find myself questioning the difference between knowing and understanding. Each time I am told to “know” and “understand,” I feel like an earthy-crunchy philosophy major who wears a gemstone amulet around my bearded neck and pensively asks “what does it truly mean to know, maaan” to an equally earthy-crunchy and introspective wannabe–Aristotle. I still do not really understand the difference between knowing and understanding, but I guess that is the one thing left for me to do.

I do respect the effort to make learning accessible to every student by outlining the content of each class. It definitely is beneficial for some students to visualize exactly what they need to garner from each lesson. However, I also feel that this structure is limiting. In classes where discussion leads the direction of the class, outlining the exact material covered is almost impossible and impractical to predict. Also, some classes will naturally change direction if questions are asked that necessitate more thorough explanations. Some of my most effective teachers have allowed the students to direct the class and solve problems or come to conclusions themselves, without the aid of a didactic and oftentimes redundant whiteboard. Summarizing and outlining the contents of each class cheapens the quality of the lesson and questions students’ abilities to think critically.

In a school where the phrase “college and career ready” is tossed at students and teachers with more force than any rogue spitball could ever be shot, I was surprised that this method of structuring class is required. I have a hard time imagining any professor or boss taking time out of their busy, important lives to explain every lesson, task, and assignment to their students or employees. I do feel that the education I have had the opportunity to receive at BHS has made me “college and career ready,” but this is thanks to the teachers who have allowed me to develop my own critical thinking skills. These teachers held me accountable for gathering the information I need to know, understand, and do by the end of class.

In certain classes, summarizing the contents of a class can be beneficial. For example, in a math or science class, knowing the formulas or content we need to know for an upcoming test is undeniably helpful. But if a teacher believes his or her class would benefit from a more natural learning environment, then he or she should have the freedom to omit “kud” from the lesson plan. The acronym itself only brings to mind an image of a lazy cow gnawing on some dead grass. If the administration and teachers do not want to produce lazy students, then they should trust in their students’ ability to think critically and allow them to take accountability for their own actions.