You can find me at A Puff of Absurdity if you’re interested in rants about philosophy, education, and the environment, or at Random Thoughts on Film if you’re more interested in film reviews and discussions. Keeping this blog up seems to be the only way I can comment on WordPress blogs!
The Test of Time
I’m searching for books to teach in this new course that integrates grade 10 academic level English, civics, and career studies. I’ve been having on-going discussions with our librarian about each book, and so far I’ve read about 20 different candidates.
The typical curriculum in our school teaches To Kill a Mockingbird and Romeo and Juliet and an independent novel. We used to read a play also, but I can’t remember which one. I’ve been encouraged to alter the curriculum towards whatever I personally think would be best for kids.
The last time I taught English was about ten years ago. I had a grade 11 general level class read Of Mice and Men, an independent Steinbeck novel to compare, the play A Raisin in the Sun, and finally Romeo and Juliet. I’m not sure why there isn’t a play offered in the standard grade 10 course. I love Tennessee Williams plays, but they’ll do Glass Menagerie later, so he can wait to be introduced. The only other plays I love are Theatre of the Absurd, which might be a bit much for them.
A colleague has two general concerns with most of the books I suggest: they’re too old or they’ve got too many naughty words.
She suggests I read something recent, but I find all the books she offers me dull or insubstantial. When I suggest something older, like Crime and Punishment, she cringes.
I’m back to the dilemma: do we teach books kids will like, a recent and popular selection many might have already read or might pick up on their own anyway, OR do we introduce kids to books they might not like as much, but they find challenging and will add to a dying cultural literacy, an older canonical book that’s stood up to the test of time.
I clearly lean towards the latter option.
School is the only place we have the opportunity to enlighten kids to famous novels and plays. We keep Shakespeare on the table each year in high school for that reason. I fear if we shift to current popular choices, we’re losing the chance to broaden their literary horizons. The recently published novels haven’t stood the test of time at all; I think most of the ones sent my way won’t be read even twenty years from now.
In lieu of a play, I plan to have the class read two novels, plus an independent, and, instead of Romeo and Juliet, I’m going for Twelfth Night – one of my favourites from high school. My most favourite was Merchant of Venice, but that’s banned in our school board. There are similar themes in Twelfth Night and Merchant of Venice, so I’m wondering if I can get away with showing the film version of MoV as a comparative. I’m wavering a bit on this one though because it will be a lot of work to create all the materials for the play, and there’s lots of R&J stuff to work with already. AND then I could show Water for Chocolate.
I was thinking about Breakfast of Champions and Fight Club for the novels.
Both have some bad words, and a few racy drawings that are childlike and pretty innocent for 15-year-olds, but I can include a warning about the language so parents can call to ask me to provide a different novel (which rarely actually happens). We offer books in classes currently that have a significant more swearing including the “c” word right out there in The Kite Runner. Fight Club has surprising little swearing. I wouldn’t show either movie adaptation, the former because it’s horrible, the latter because of the violence that is less objectionable to read about than to see in full colour.
My colleague thinks even BoC is still too old to offer to kids today, and the drawings are offensive, and FC has too many swears.
They have some common themes that would be intriguing to discuss: mental illness, environmental destruction, prejudice, capitalism, sexual obsessiveness in our culture….
But then I read an interview with Niall Ferguson, a Harvard prof, in the Globe and Mail. He suggests “education reform is urgently needed in the West.” So I checked his website for further thoughts. And here’s what he says:
…children who don’t read are cut off from the civilization of their ancestors.
So take a look at your bookshelves. Do you have all—better make that any—of the books on the Columbia University undergraduate core curriculum? It’s not perfect, but it’s as good a list of the canon of Western civilization as I know of. Let’s take the 11 books on the syllabus for the spring 2012 semester: (1) Virgil’s Aeneid; (2) Ovid’s Metamorphoses; (3) Saint Augustine’s Confessions; (4) Dante’s The Divine Comedy; (5) Montaigne’s Essays; (6) Shakespeare’s King Lear; (7) Cervantes’s Don Quixote; (8) Goethe’s Faust; (9) Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; (10) Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; (11) Woolf’s To the Lighthouse…..(And get War and Peace, Great Expectations, and Moby-Dick while you’re at it.)
And I remembered loving Crime and Punishment as a teenager. It’s positively gruesome! I had thrown it out there to my colleague way at the start but was shot down because it’s too old and boring for today’s teens. But, are we going to let the diminishing attention spans of teenagers dictate what we have them study, or are we going to fight the dying of their sustained focus and get them on longer, more complex and distant texts? So I think I’ll replace FC with C&P.
I hate getting them in grade 12 philosophy and they can’t read the short essays by Plato and Rousseau and all those guys. They really can’t read at an academic level. They need help sentence by sentence, and they’re almost in university. If I can get them reading more slowly, looking up difficult words (actually coming across difficult words instead of making a list of vocabulary words that they already know), and understanding more subtle inference when they’re in grade 10, they’ll have a much easier time of it in grade 12 and beyond.
In some schools in the states it’s suggested at the gr 8-9 level, so the 10s could certainly do it. Or they should be able to at any rate.
And BoC and C&P can be compared through mental illness, moral agency, social alienation, nihilism….
If parents would have worried about fight clubs starting up in class, the kids can make much quicker work of things with an axe!
Wired In for Safety
“Ignorance may or may not be bliss, but one thing is certain: it is very profitable.”
Yet another article about the damaging effects of electropollution this time in the CCPA Monitor.
A few things I hadn’t heard before or need reminding of:
The U.S. Navy did over 2,000 studies on the health effects from microwave radiation back in the 1970s. Microwave technology was part of the military arsenal intended to inflict bodily harm.
The German Military University developed EMF protection standards for civilian building codes.
Collingwood is fighting WiFi in the schools. It’s slower than landline transmitted connections, and they site a 40% increase in cardiac arrest in children under 13 directly related to this type of radiation.
The EU’s report on EMFs called on all member states to take precautionary action. They’re now discussing outlawing the use of cell-phones for children under 18.
Canadian standards have a maximum safety level set at 100 times higher than some European countries (meaning, we are allowed to get 100 times the radiation that Europeans get).
In Canada, the 2007 Human Rights Commission report on Environmental Illness specifically included harm from EMF radiation as being real and requiring accommodation.
Nobody believes it, but if it’s true, we’re in a bit of a pickle here! Better safe than sorry. Just sayin’.
Religion and the Middle School
I’m fascinated with the Toronto school that’s allowing Muslim students to pray in their cafeteria on Friday afternoons. It’s a hugely complex issue: prayer in the public school, gender segregation in school, schools taking the role of in loco parentis a little too far…
Heather Mallick did a fairly solid job of slamming the practice outright in The Star on Tuesday, addressing the feminist, religious, and educational issues, and calling the move a decision made by “a lazy, frightened school.” But, of course, I have a bit more to add.
I love the multicultural nature of our country. I love that people can abide by different religious tenents. According to Muslim custom, congregational prayer is mandatory on Friday afternoons (for men at least). Instead of students being forced to leave the school, one school allowed them access to a room on site. That seems like a really nice idea. So what’s the problem?
First of all, the cafeteria was opened as an option not because the mosque was too far or difficult to get to, but because too many students with permission to leave school for religious reasons were hitting the mall instead. As Mallick details, the cafeteria option was a means to discipline students missing the service to socialize. This is where I think the school went too far in acting like parents. It’s not our job as educators to ensure that students participate in their own religious services. At all. As teachers, it’s our job to ensure students all have the freedom to participate, but not to ensure they actually do participate regardless what parents might desire.
Secondly, as someone surrounded by teenagers at work and home, finding a sneaky way to force teens to attend services is bound to backfire. For children, I’d fully support forced attendance for families so inclined in order to develop desired traditions, attitudes, and beliefs. But for teenagers, it’s a pivotal time of life wherein making good choices is a burgeoning skill. They can’t learn to make choices if all the choices are decided for them. And in order to see what works for them, they have to make a few mistakes along the way. Check out any coming-of-age film for an example. As a mom, if I found out my teen hit the mall instead of a religious service, I’d take away the privilege of missing Friday classes. Nobody can be made to worship or believe. They can be inculcated as children, but then they have to have the freedom to participate willingly or else any attendance will just be a performance.
Finally, Mallick is outraged that in this day and age the service has to be led by a man (or boy). The segregation of males and females, especially the menstruating bit, is hard to swallow. And the argument that boys will be too distracted by looking at girls is contentious, especially since they’re grade 7 and 8 boys who typically aren’t as distracted as the girls would like. But the suggestion that it’s shocking that a worship service can only be run be a man means Mallick is forgetting about Catholicism. It’s a huge part of the western world, and yes, even in Toronto in 2011, Catholic services must be run by men.
I does boggle the mind, but that’s a tradition that’s been followed for a few hundred years now. If we want to be fair to all religious groups, I think we have to allow them any tradition that doesn’t cause direct harm to the congregation or otherwise. If I’m going to fight traditional teachings, it’ll be the ones that ban condoms and gay marriage – or promote stonings, or, well, you get the idea.
But back to Friday afternoons. We used to have just Sundays off because most people were Christian and that’s their day of rest. Saturday wasn’t mainstream until the 1940s even though it was considered the Christian day to prepare for the Sabbath. It needed union backing for full implementation. It’s also the Jewish Shabbat. Since we’ve got a growing Muslim population in Canada, why not start the weekend at noon on Friday and solve the whole mess. Before people complain that teachers have too many holidays to begin with, I’d gladly take a shift in prep periods so that I teach the same amount in a week, then have prep time in one chunk on Fridays. (But can I work from home?)
Another Inconvenient Truth?
Some will roll their eyes at perceived paranoia, but several studies conducted show a strong correlation between wireless and health problems. They aren’t accepted as proof of harm by the Canadian or American governments, but there’s enough data to cause me to be concerned. I believe in using the precautionary principle, especially when it comes to kids and teenagers, which states that if we have a reasonable suspicion of harm, but scientific uncertainty about cause and effect, then we have a duty to prevent harm regardless of that uncertainty. The burden of proof should be on industry to prove a product is safe for use before we use it, not on poorly funded independent researchers to prove it’s not so we’ll stop. So, there’s no definitive proof it’s a concern. But there’s no definitive proof it’s safe either. The most positive studies say wireless is unlikely to carry a risk of damage, not that there is no risk.
We’re surrounded by wireless, so we can’t entirely avoid it, but we can reduce our exposure by keeping cell phones out of our pockets, keeping them an inch from our heads when we use them (or just text instead), and keeping our distance from the hubs/routers that emit the signals. If I have to have wireless in my classroom, I’m pleased to have the distinct privilege of suggesting the router be located in the classroom next door with a teacher who’s more trusting of corporations and governments to protect us, or in a hallway where people don’t usually spend extended periods of time.
The further we are from where signals are sent and received, the safer it is. I can choose not to use a cell phone, and I can tell my kids (who won’t abide by that first option) how to use their phones more safely. But wireless service in a school removes that personal choice for most people. Wired connections are faster and more secure than wireless, but then we have all those wires all over the place and the hassle and cost of adding tons of drops kids can plug into instead of just one router. Should we err on the side of caution or convenience?
Look at it from a Pascal’s Wager perspective: We have two choices, ignoring concerns and taking precautions.
If we ignore all concerns and promote wireless in the classroom and cellphones in pockets, and it’s all safe, no problem. But if it’s not safe, then we’re just increased the rate of cancers in our students and teachers.
If we take precautions and keep routers in less-inhabited areas, and instruct students to keep cellphones out of their pockets and an inch from their heads, if it’s all safe, nothing’s lost. But if it’s not safe, we’ve just prevented an increase in cancer.
Seems a no-brainer to me.
Some studies:
Some studies from Devra Davis’ book Disconnect: The physics of microwave radiations suggests that it should be perfectly safe, but in controlled studies at the cellular level, it damages DNA, and they’ve found 10 times the rate of damage with 3G phones than 2G. Rats exposed as little as 2 hours/day to a cell phone receiving calls have a marked loss of ability to remember how to do simple tasks. Studies in countries where children use cell phones have, ten years later, 4-5 times the brain cancer rate of people in their 20s as countries where cell phones aren’t as popular. They’ve found a direct correlation between cell phones kept in pockets, a decrease in sperm counts, and an increase in testicular cancer.
Some groups (like the FDA) say research doesn’t count if it’s just done on cells and not the whole body, or on animals and not people. So for the past five years, scientists in Moscow have been following two groups of children between the ages of 5 and 12 – one group using mobile phones and the other not. Every year the children get a battery of tests. They’ve already found changes in the working of the brains of the cell phone users ranging from decreased capacity to work, increased fatigue, decrease in attention and semantic memory, and significant loss of the ability to tell the difference between different sounds. They also have functional problems – difficulties with learning and behaviour.
The safety level in Canada’s Safety Code 6 is some 6,000 times less stringent than the safety level advocated in the 2007 BioInitiative Report, which includes expert international research on electromagnetic radiation (EMR), electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and brain tumors, leukemia and other illnesses. Several countries (France, Finland, Israel) are actively working to reduce exposure to wireless signals while we’re working to increase them. Switzerland (where the internet started) avoids wireless and especially in “Places of Sensitive Use” including all classrooms and places of employment where any adult might be working for over 2.5 days/week.
Scientific American reported that recent studies indicate, “living tissue is vulnerable to electromagnetic fields within the frequency bands used by cell phones.” The insistence that it wasn’t possible to affect tissue with microwave radiation was previously the stopper to many conversations in the scientific community.
The FDA says on its website that no clear link exists between cell phone usage and cancer. But the FDA has questionable conflicts of interest with industry, often preferring industry sponsored studies over independent research regardless of the greater likelihood of bias. It took a long time for the FDA to be convinced of a link between smoking and cancer, and that’s still not considered to be proof smoking causes cancer, just that it’s associated with cancer.
Some Links:
The Independent – on brain cancer in children
My summary of Disconnect with page references
Switzerland vs Canada: A Tale of Two Countries
Design flaws in industry-funded research
Davis in The Huffington Post
Enviro Health articles
The Watershed Sentinel (an environmental mag)
Environmental Health Perspectives
The Rise of the Machines
I like to imagine what could come to be if we continue on the same on-line loving trajectory. I know people who only watch news on YouTube clips. They never read a newspaper. I think getting a daily paper as one of my epic fails as an environmentalist. I could easily read most of it on-line, but nostalgia keeps me forking over thirty-something dollars a month to be able to do a Sudoku, with pen on paper, before my tea’s ready in the morning.
But I digress – if more and more people start to get their news and general information on video, how important is reading? Is it possible we’re becoming more of an oral tradition with symbols replacing words, and videos replacing essays? I can watch Ginsberg read his own poem on-line, so I don’t have to read it. And it’s better that way. We have taped books already. Maybe we could have authors, or celebrities, read the books on a video – or get many people to read and act out the parts with props, and then we won’t need the books at all any more!
No, books won’t disappear. This is Not the End of the Book, with bibliophiles Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere, explains the many reasons why not, including that it’s difficult to read an iPad in the bath, and, I’d add, or on a long outback camping trip. The book is like the spoon or the wheel, they say; it cannot be improved. But it won’t stop people from trying. You can still read a 500-year-old book, but you likely can’t play a 30-year-old 8-track cassette. I read the book on a recent camping trip, and it got me thinking about many aspects of the Futures Forum course. Random thoughts follow and some of my views in one paragraph contradict views elsewhere (“I am large…”). Opposition is welcome in the comments.
On Reading Recent Articles vs Traditional Texts
In the Futures Forum course we’re supposed to be teaching students for tomorrow. Some teachers are having students do most of the required reading on-line. Instead of the standard practice of a collection of short stories, a novel, an independent novel, and a little Shakespeare, some students are reading just one independently-chosen book and some articles of interest. It seems to suggest that the classics and traditional readings are less important to impart than allowing students to discover their own interests. This is an old debate: which matters most, the community or the individual. I tend to lean towards the side that suggests students will discover their own interests on their own time and read short on-line articles with little help from us, but if we don’t introduce some good literature along the way, they might never encounter it otherwise.
And will they learn to manage sustained reading, keeping track of many characters over a few hundred pages, if we don’t get them to practice that skill in our classrooms? They need to do it a few times and get the rewards of getting to the last page in order to want to do it on their own, and they might need to get to the end of a few books in school before one hits them as really worth the journey. There are few jobs where reading a novel, or Shakespeare, is ever necessary, but the skill of sustaining thought over time has myriad applications.
On Teaching for the Future
We don’t know what tomorrow will be like. We’re just guessing. Getting students perfecting computer skills could be the worst idea possible. We could run out of affordable energy to run computers in every workplace, and paper will make a resurgence. Or we could run out of trees and have to learn how to carve words in stone! Who knows? We can’t count on computers working like they do now or even existing twenty years from now. Students need to be able to search for information on-line for the immediate future, but they also need to be able to use an index in the back of the book and know how to find a book in a library – skills that have been used for hundreds of years. If we throw out old skills for new, the kids could be in a sorry state, and culturally we will have lost something. And, who knows, maybe the most important thing kids today need to learn is how to grow and preserve their own food. We can’t teach for tomorrow because we’re utterly clueless about what tomorrow might look like.
In Not the End, Carriere says “Aircraft manfacturers are currently working on planes that will be ready in twenty years, but they are built to run on aviation fuel that may no longer be available” (55). Are we doing something similar by “teaching” practical applications for Twitter and Facebook in the classroom? We’re still not really teaching for the future, but for today. Twitter could go the way of MySpace by the time these kids hit the workforce.
We come to that idea of preparing students for the world of the future with the best of intentions of course. When I was in school, I learned how to type and take shorthand and prepare reports for a boss, but there are few secretaries today. I can also thread a projection machine. Learning those skills didn’t detract from my education. It was valuable practice learning a skill. It taught me to learn how to learn at the very least. The things I need to know for my job this fall, all the technology I’m to teach the kids, didn’t exist ten years ago. They couldn’t have been taught in a high school to prepare a future teacher for the work world. It’s likely the specific technological skills a student will require as an employee isn’t possible to develop with our current technology.
At the last FFP meeting, someone said, “It’s a step backwards for them to use an index in the back of the book.” We’re making assumptions about what will be here in the future and what won’t: i.e. computers will take over and books will die off so it’s no longer important to know how to use an index. But maybe we’ve got that backwards. Are we falling into the trap of believing history runs in a straight line, always progressing, always getting better, when we know from history that it runs in cycles. Things improve, then they get worse over and over again. Things develop, then they sometimes disappear.
For centuries, what kids learned in high school was everything they needed to know for life. That’s no longer the case. People have to adapt to on-going change. Adapting isn’t something we need to teach; it’s something we naturally do whenever it becomes necessary. We’ve adapted to on-going on-the-job training. But there are some lasting skills and content kids need from high-schools.
We need to teach those few skills that will always be useful. My background’s in philosophy. After high school years spent reading as fast as I could, philosophy profs trained us to slow down. Read a sentence, look up words you don’t know to make sure you really understand it, then think about whether or not you agree. The last part is the most important. Critical thinking will always be a useful skill.
Cultural literacy will also always be useful: having a bank of common, traditional books in your memory so literary allusions make sense. Culture is created by what we collectively choose to keep or dismiss. If we keep it all and just use what’s on-line as our culture, then we know nothing – the details without the context. We don’t want to be burdened with a selection process, but without one, we’re a collection of individuals without a shared memory. Choosing books in schools that everyone had to read is a significant means of selection that affects us well beyond learning literary devices. Individual filtering means almost 7 billion separate encyclopedias of knowledge which prevents common understanding, and meaningful discussion between people can only take place on the bases of shared knowledge. (Although really it’s closer to 2 billion people on-line – the “haves.”)
An understanding of human nature and the global dynamics will always be useful. These are concepts often unwittingly taught in arts and humanities courses, and are necessary to develop regardless where the world takes us. Technology? Not so much.
On On-line vs Textural Sources
Teaching on-line research skills is vitally important in schools today for sure. Unlike a library, there isn’t an intelligent, dedicated teacher on-line amassing the collection. It’s rogue. Hence much of it is mistaken or out of context. There are no fact-checkers and the hierarchy used by search engines is based on self-imposed tags not accuracy nor excellence. Kids need to know how to tell what’s real and what’s crap. That’s a new skill needed not for the future, but for right this minute. Sometimes it’s difficult for teachers to determine what’s real on-line also. Many believed an American guy to be a lesbian woman in Syria.
In Not the End, Eco suggests having students find 10 different sources for one piece of information to compare, then they’ll see how Wikipedia is typically cut and pasted from another source. Have them look for any discrepancies and which articles are likely the most accurate, and the most primary sources. (67) I suspect students would hate such a tedious assignment, but it could be a worthwhile means to an end.
We’ve got some students reading reviews of analysis of writings instead of reading the primary documents themselves – or reading a tweet of a review of an analysis of a book. They’re getting information thrice removed, watered down, and potentially misinterpreted. And it makes them lazy. They could fail to develop the ability to interpret works if they don’t take the time to read and think about the original source on their own. Reading on-line make it far too easy to cheat. If a kid gets stuck at a boring bit, they can just google a summary and skip the rest of the book, yet feel like they’ve done the work. Back in the day, using Coles Notes held a pretty strong negative stigma. It would be embarrassing to get caught. Today, students source similar on-line help-sites on essays claiming it’s more efficient, and therefore wise, to avoid reading entire books. This is a wrong turn that needs correcting.
On Testing Their Memories
If we can access all information via google, do we need to remember anything anymore? Einstein didn’t know his phone number because it’s a waste of effort to remember something you could look up, and he was pretty smart, right? If everything can be easily found in a data bank we can keep in our pockets, then what IS really useful to remember except maybe some random trivia that might impress or entertain people?
But all learning is remembering. If I tell you the name of our Prime Minister, and you’ve forgotten ten minutes later, then you haven’t really learned it. So if we stop worrying how much kids remember (no tests or exams), aren’t we really saying we’re not going to concern ourselves with how much they’ve learned? How do we understand the rash of books on mnemonics now? People want to remember. They want to know things. The question for us is should they leave high school knowing the major players in current politics, or do we leave it up to them to decide if that’s worth the energy to learn?
On “This is All Brand New”
As far as I can understand it, the Futures Forum philosophy is that students should direct their own learning so they’re more likely to take ownership over it. They have as much freedom as possible to choose to do assignments, with suggestions of due dates, but nothing solid and no late deductions. We can follow the bare-bones of the curriculum, and there’s been frequent gleeful commenting on what’s NOT legislated (Shakespeare, the number of books read, etc.). Some insist the technology is merely a tool we’ll use to get them to buy-in to the process, but others seem completely taken with the computers as an end in themselves – that one’s still a bit fuzzy for me. I know which side I lean towards, but I’m not sure it’s the popular side. There aren’t any tests or exams. Students do projects of their choosing. They can make a film to show understanding of a concept rather than write an essay. Lessons aren’t taught to the entire class, but to individuals as needed and/or requested.
This is reminiscent of Montessori which came from a long line of thinkers, in particular Rousseau, Montaigne, and Erasmus. And don’t forget the Hall-Dennis Report with schools with no walls or Outcomes Based Education which never really got off the ground here.
This is where I buy into the idea. I can use the technology to augment the practice, but having individuals study what they most desire make a lot of sense to me – with my guidance that is. I’ll be reading Shakespeare with them, as a group, but allow them to go their own way with it once we’re done. The focus of the text is something they can choose, but not always the text itself. I’m going to endeavor to rescue a cultural literacy in decline.
BUT the problem with this philosophy of education is that we’re using an open model within an education system of some significant limitations with respect to marks, class size, and curriculum. Montessori methods work well if the end result is a pass/fail, or in a system in which students write entrance exams to get into university. In our classes, after a semester of open-ended work, we have to assign a specific number to the student – three numbers actually, one for English, Civics and Careers. Another serious limitation that disables the philosophy is the ratio of 30:1. In Emile, Rousseau advises a single tutor teach a boy whatever the boy is interested in learning about each day. The lessons are guided, of course, but always focused on the student’s current passions. Great idea! But with 30 kids, there will be times we all have to learn one thing at one time regardless of their passions. They can’t play Civics Mirror until we finish Act II. Finally, to do justice to a student-directed concept, the student should really be allowed to learn anything during the class time, not just the three subjects at our disposal. If a student’s current passion is biology, then they could be bored to tears in my class forced to do something within the limits of the curriculum. This could be seen as a balance between a rigid and an open system, but it could also been seen as a watering-down of the hoped-for educational ideal. When the leaders tell us to blow it wide open, it’s not really possible within current constraints.
A common problem with this philosophy, which came out as I discussed this project with neighbours, is that if students are allowed to follow a student-directed program, what’s to make them do their boring job when they get into the workforce. One neighbour lamented that these kids will come to work for her, and whine if they’re asked to do something that doesn’t interest them. And, let’s face it, much of the work day of most people is spent doing stuff we don’t really enjoy (not teachers of course).
I’d counter this argument that people are differently motivated at work than they are in school. I had a student once who was late every day and generally unmotivated during class. He seemed unlikely to keep a steady job. When I met up with him years later, he was doing very well at a company, never late and working hard all day because otherwise he’d be fired. Being sent to the office for a late slip is a punishment of little consequence (and effect) relative to being fired. If keeping a job means doing work of little interest, people will do it particularly if at least part of their job is enjoyable. People don’t have to enjoy work to do it. But we want to foster a love of learning in students in hopes that they’ll keep reading and developing once they leave us. It’s an entirely different model with different reinforcements and different goals.
A Final Concern
The world has dramatically changed while the education system is largely the same. We waver between open and closed, but we haven’t really addressed the crises in our world – some very real potentially growing trends that affect employability and our ability to thrive. The biggest change over the past few decades is the loss of jobs for people without a post-secondary education. In the 80s, people who struggled in school quit to work in a factory or on a farm. Now farms are factories, and factories are overseas. We might think we’ll stop the struggle if we offer a student-directed model, and it’s true we might catch a few kids that would have been lost otherwise, but a difficulty with learning, thinking, and memorizing affects the job search regardless how much they might enjoy this one grade ten class. As a kid in the 60s, mine was the only mother who worked. Now it’s the norm. Add to that the huge workforce gain when China and Russia joined the capitalist machine, and technology that ensures we can produce more with less labour.
It’s clearly not the fault of education that kids can’t find jobs. This isn’t a problem we can solve in-house. If our goal is educating students so that they can all find gainful employment, then maybe, as civics teachers, we should ignore concerns with bias and teach them to be socialists who want to reduce the workweek to 30 hours. And we have to teach them to petition the government to raise minimum wage again or implement a guaranteed basic income so we can live on fewer hours of work. This has happened several times in the last couple centuries, and maybe it’s time it happens again. There’s little education can do for the masses if there aren’t enough places to fill in the sectors that cater to those with weaker academic abilities. And there will always be those with weaker abilities. Gardening and preserving food really might be the best thing to teach to ensure future success.
As long as we lose farm work to machines, and labour to other countries, we will have an increasing unemployment problem. Regardless how much we strive to get a computer in every kid’s hand, and develop within each of them a love of learning, it won’t ensure their employability. But it’s a nice try.
Still not getting the hype!
I think I know why I don’t like Twitter. As my students and close friends know, I love long arguments over philosophical, religious, or political issues. I hate chit-chat. A series of “tweets” is just a series of disjointed pieces of chit-chat. Sometimes there’s pieces of ideas that link to a blog, but I’d rather just have the blog in my reader than have to scroll down limitless tweets to find out someone wrote more than one sentence in a row. Likewise, if people want to follow my blogs, they can just subscribe. But mainly tweets are just telling me what people are doing in a way that makes me feel like a stalker and/or a gossip hound.
It will be interesting to see how I’m supposed to use this in my class. Unless the students just follow one another, any attempt at conversation will be interrupted by random thoughts from non-classmates. If we want to have conversations between kids in different schools, there are better ways: YahooGroups for one, or we could set up a message board where people can comment on different threads, or use a chat site. But maybe there’s a different application of this tool that makes it the best choice. That hasn’t been made entirely clear yet.
In our last workshop, teachers who have been running the program so far talked about the pros and cons of blogging with students, but that’s as far as we got, and frankly it was the only useful conversation we had. I want to know all the programs that worked and didn’t so teachers new to the program don’t waste time on the less useful bits of technology. I’d really like to hear the pros and cons of using Twitter in the classroom – but not on random disjointed tweets! I suppose it develops kids’ ability to skim for information – that’s something.
If it’s a case that we’re going to use it because that’s what students are already doing, well, two things. First of all, that’s a shaky premise for incorporating technology in the classroom. What students are doing, and what we want to guide them to do are typically different things. If they’re already doing it, then we specifically don’t have to do it because they’re on board. Secondly, from loose surveys at my school it seems Twitter isn’t a teenager thing to do. According to my students, twitter is for old people. Kids are on Facebook and chat sites. But maybe that’s just a biased sample.
If it’s a case that we’re going to use it because it will be necessary to use in future jobs, it’s a pretty easy skill to pick up in on-the-job training. It’s not something they need to learn in grade ten so they can perfect it before they graduate from high school. As I said in a workshop, it seems like a huge time-suck. I’m not pleased to have yet another place to have to check every day to find out if maybe there’s something important going on that’s really necessary to know about before I can start my day.
(Image source)
A Brief Introduction
I’m teaching a new course next year called Futures Forum. Students will all have access to computers, and will be expected to communicate on-line with one another and with similar classes in a dozen schools around the region. This is my attempt at learning the technology enough to be able to teach students how to set themselves up on wordpress, twitter, etc.
I love reading blogs, so I love that students will write blog-posts on their own blogs instead of journals on paper. All the blogs I’ve created in the past have been with blogger.com, so wordpress is new to me. I’ve known many bloggers who have, over time, switched from blogger to wordpress because, apparently, there are many additional features. Blogger can’t go the distance for the technical savants in the crowd. However, for the novice, I set up my first blogger blog in about ten minutes. This wordpress blog here took me over three cups of tea to sort out. It might be great for the additional features, but it was a slow process to get the template the way I wanted it, and it’s still not quite right.
My other public blog is mainly about the environment. This one, I think, will be mainly about education. But of course I’ll likely be all over the place on both. Hey, I added a link and an image!
Snyder's Symposium 