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For my 11th grade Expository Writing class, I try to make the time to do detailed edits of each of my students’ papers. Then I make my students rewrite the paper – again and again until it is perfect.

I believe that students need the experience of writing something perfect at least once in their high school lives, even if they do it with help. They need the maturity that comes from thinking through corrections, questioning why something is worded one way and not another, and holding in their hands something of a high quality that they did.

Our public schools don’t currently support this kind of intensive grading and feedback.

One day, while editing argument papers, I came across the work of one student who chose to write about gay marriage. The student wrote:

“I believe that the government we live by is over taking people’s happiness. As human beings we grew up with human rights, by making our own decisions based on our interests and who we are. But in this case, marriage equality is one of many controversial issues that governments in many countries are debating about. Gay marriage is a marriage between two people of the same sex gender. Some countries like Columbia Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, Hew Hampshire, New York, Washington, Mane and Maryland had banned same sex in their country. Till today, marriage equality supports are still protesting. (sic)”

The next day, I called the student over to my desk. I asked, “Do you know what a country is?”

There was a headshake, no.

“Can you give me an example of a country?” I asked

“H���ɲ���’��?”

“How ‘bout a state?”

“The United States,” the student said.

“Go ahead and grab a chair… How ‘bout a continent? Can you give me an example of a continent?” I asked.

No.

I drew a map of the world and explained over the course of about 45 minutes what a continent, a country, and a state are. The student didn’t know that there were seven continents, couldn’t identify Africa, Europe, or Asia, and didn’t know the difference between a lake and an ocean.

That student grew up in our school system and has slipped through the cracks every single year for 12 years, learning neither basic facts about the world, nor how to write in formal, academic English.

This example is not rare, and the sample paragraph above reflects the median for my classroom in terms of sentence structure. That puts me in the middle of a horrible moral quandary every single grading period. Do I fail students who can’t do grade level work? Or do I pass them based on improvement and effort?

In this case, the student worked very hard to pass my class, learned a lot, and will graduate high school next year with abilities far below grade level.

Supposedly, standards-based grading is the answer to these problems, but as it stands, it may be making the problem worse. Grading is being distorted. The prescribed standards aren’t addressing the specific needs of our students. Teachers are taking standards too literally and they are neglecting to teach background knowledge and skills. And the fact that the standards are all skills-based has eliminated most canons of subject-matter knowledge.

Adding fuel to the fire, there is an explicit Google mentality currently expressed by teachers and leaders in education that facts aren’t important anymore.

And then we wonder why our education system is failing.

Our students need to know more facts than are currently expected of them. Memorization is not the most low-level, disposable skill, it is the most fundamental skill.

Memorization is to education what running is to playing sports. There aren’t a lot of mile-long runs in a football game, but every coach knows that running distance improves endurance, conditions muscles, and prepares players to learn other skills.

Nearly one-third of Hawaii public school graduates who continue on to college need remedial writing courses. Last year, on my diagnostic for incoming students, only 25 percent were able to identify the subject of a simple sentence, and even fewer were able to identify the verb. Only 35 percent were able to give an example of a pronoun. In one study that I read, students graduating from Hawaii schools were estimated to have a 10,000-word deficiency compared to their peers on the mainland.

We have overstepped our intention to shift the focus of education away from focusing only on facts, and we are not asking our students to know enough.

I’m not saying that education is all about memorization. I’m saying that increased focus on skills shouldn’t necessitate the total abandonment of memorizing some facts. We seem to think that by eliminating requirements to know facts, we are freeing up time and attention that we can now devote to even more advanced skills. But for the most part, what we have actually done is gutted information from the scope of learning.

Admittedly, I don’t remember the vast majority of what I learned in high school. But when I hear something that has a word that sounds familiar to me, I am more likely to be able to attach a meaning or make a connection to that idea. Memorizing all 44 presidents wasn’t fun, but it did enable me hear other forms of information, like the news, and put references into a context or timeline that informs my understanding of the world.

A lot of education is about exposing kids to a knowledge base that will enable them to clue in later and keep them from feeling alienated by information.

We need to embed some detailed and specific rote knowledge standards into our core standards. We need to align those expectations by grade level, and we need to test for that information. We cannot allow our students to slip through the cracks so far that they barely understand the world that they live in, but that is exactly what we are doing right now.

Michael Wooten is a former sergeant in the U.S. Army and University of California Berkeley graduate who came to Hawaii as a Teach For America teacher in 2008. He earned his masters degree in education from the University of Hawaii and currently teaches English and film at James Campbell High School in Ewa Beach.