PBL v. Rote Practice

I have a confession. When I was a kid, food fights, I kind of got the appeal, but as an adult, not so much. Yet. We seem to love food fights in education because we have them all the time and we pit things against each other that I don't think are actually diametrically opposed to each other. Here's a classic one. Have you ever heard an educator say no more drill and kill? It's not good for kids. And while what they might mean is they don't want someone doing just busy work for its own sake on something that they've already mastered, what they also often mean is that they don't think it's important for someone to work repeatedly at a foundational skill to really ingrain it in their long term memory. On the other side, you'll get the people who just say, no, project based learning. I don't want students doing projects, just direct instruction, none of this inquiry based learning or anything like that. And what I think they mean is that there has to be something substantive in what you're learning. It can't just be a whiz bang project masking as learning. They really also. Students really also need to learn the knowledge underlying something and automate some of those things. But what they're also saying is that why you're learning, it's relevant to. I'm not sure it matters that that's what they're saying. That putting these things into larger context, it's just not that important. And to think about how absurd these two polls are, all you got to do is think about music. Learning piano, for example. Like, do you think that it's not important to learn scales? I. Maybe it's not important to practice, say your octaves. You get the idea. Right? But what about practicing some different patterns for jazz or something like that? Is that not important? Yes, it's, it's meat and potato stuff, but it's critical to build foundations. And yeah, it's kind of kill and drill. But it turns out that it's pretty important to commit your times tables to long term memory so that you're able to do more advanced math and science and engineering. But now here's the thing. If you told most kids, hey, the only thing that you're going to learn this year is scales, because trust me, scales like they are really, really important. Most students, they're not going to go for that. They're going to want a project or a performance. They want the scales to be part of getting to a whole. And you know, I'm willing to do the work. But most kids, not all most, they're going to want it to be for a larger reason. They do want that relevance, and that's the performance. They want to see why it matters. They want to work on those patterns and scales and octaves so that they can play something like this. Or so that they can play something like this. You get the idea, right? And look, students don't want that performance or that project to be the dessert comes after the main meal. No, they want it to be the main course. It's the purpose, the repetitive practice, the drill and kill. That's so I can build the muscle memory and the muscles and automate my skill set so that I can then play those pieces and express myself. But it isn't one thing or the other. As with so much in education, rather than an or, we need to move to a both. And, and we need to see that at some points look like for a novice, one set of exercises to build a foundation that could be critical, like the performance. For a novice, it's. It's not going to be one of those pieces that I, I just played, but maybe something simpler like this. And look, maybe if I am an expert, maybe I'm not doing sort of simple exercises like this, But frankly, maybe even in the beginning, if I am an expert, just to warm up, I'm doing those things because the drill and kill and the projects are important. And let's be real. I mean, tell me that LeBron James is not spending time drilling on his free throws, drilling on his three pointers, working on his mechanics, but tell me he's also not scrimmaging and playing games, he's doing both.