What the Army Taught Me About Teaching

Every year, the Army recruits, at great expense, tens of thousands of young men and women. Given the costs of recruitment (and the dearth of eligible recruits), the Army cannot afford to lose many of these new soldiers. Army training is designed to take recruits who may know nothing about military life, discipline, or maneuvers, and mold them into warriors. Likewise, my task is to mold nascent scholars out of the under-performing, ill-prepared students who frequently show up in my community college classroom. I’ve found three Army practices most useful: making expectations explicit, the “crawl-walk-run” methodology, and formal evaluation of training. —Martha Kinney

The military has a fairly simple evaluation scale — “go” or “no go.”  In practice, that means means “success” or “do it again.”  When I teach writing for the internet, one sequence of assignments culminates in the students having to create a website (a series of interconnected web pages with appropriately credited images) according to my specifications, in the space of a single class period. I gave very general guidelines — “A client who loves the color green and who is obsessed with cheese.”  Obviously the point of that exercise is not polished prose, but rather a knowledge of the HTML-authoring tools, CSS, filepaths, and basic online courtesy (giving credit where credit is due).

A student in my basic composition class who misplaces a quotation mark can still get partial credit, since I can still read the rest of the paragraph despite the technical error. But a student who misplaces a quotation mark when creating a hyperlink might create a technical error that prevents users from getting to the rest of the site’s content.  So I recognize the need to walk students through the whole process carefully, even though I typically get at least a few students who are already accomplished web authors, who might find this process tedious. (I’ll have to let them start working ahead if they do well on the authoring exercise.)

I’m glad Kinney acknowledged that the army teaching model is not designed to foster creativity, but there are certain basic skills –not just HTML authorship but also peer-critiquing, close reading, and literary critical analysis — that have a technical component with very specific requirements. Students who haven’t mastered those technical requirements can be extremely frustrated when they notice their end result doesn’t meet the advanced requirements (where creativity is more important).

2 thoughts on “What the Army Taught Me About Teaching

  1. Josh, you’ve just perfectly summarized a conversation I had several times with several different students in my literary criticism seminar, except that in lit crit there’s no objective way to “prove” an answer — so I have to add the extra test of getting them to differentiate between what is possible support for a particular argument, what is plausible support, and what is necessary support. Often students who are just wading into the waters of literary interpretation get a little too carried away — again, wanting to jump right to the creative stuff, without thinking much about Occam’s razor.

  2. “…the army teaching model is not designed to foster creativity, but there are certain basic skills … that have a technical component with very specific requirements.”
    And this is the reason that my beginning level math classes (algebra, precalculus, and anything else before calc 1) require rigor and drill (sometimes referred to as “drill and kill”). I find that many students want to get right to the creative part, without any understanding of the underlying principles. They flail about, randomly trying any procedure that they recall from prior classes, and then they give up. They come to my office and cannot explain why they tried any of the things they tried. I point them in the right direction, and they immediately get the problem right. Then they ask me the one question I hate answering: “How did you know to do that?” The only answer I can give is to back through every keyword in the problem, and look at what they tell me to do – a task I learned a _long_ time ago… I was drilled in it for years. It’s second nature to me now – I react to a problem the same way every time.

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