Monday, December 9, 2013
Monday, December 2, 2013
Wherein I respond to a panel of great teachers
Last week's panel on integrating tech into the classroom with actual living 46-chromosome mammalian veteran teachers was outstanding. Regardless of content area or grade level, each of the teachers had a great deal that I found useful.
Perhaps most useful of all was Mike's comment about teaching students how to search for things digitally. This is a skill I've had to work out on my own, with like fear and trembling, over the thirteen years that I've been quite active on the internet. Things I don't even think about anymore, like putting "certain words" or "phrases in quotes" to narrow a broad search, are certainly not innate for fourteen year olds. With so much information available digitally, having a decent set of tools for perusing it is basically vital for any sort of higher-level research or creation work.
In the discussion of gaming the classroom, Jamie managed to allay some of my skepticism about how such a thing would work, noting that, just as in any classroom activity, you have to include something for everybody. Not everyone is going to love it, obviously, but his comments made me feel a little less uncomfortable about the competitive aspect being intimidating to some students. I still feel that competition in learning is most of the time beside the point, but I feel a little less cynicism about this now.
One thing that came up in the same discussion was Mike's use of badges in his classroom as a learning incentive. I feel two things about this.
First, what difference is there between an arbitrary badge and, say, a yellow banana sticker?
Second, I wonder whether incentivizing education like this isn't seriously detrimental to any concept that focuses on learning for learning's sake. I take pretty seriously the idea that reading Cather or learning calculus leads to a richer, fuller inner life. That the process itself is the carrot, not the stick. Introducing a rewards system runs counter to my understanding of the goal of education. And while it may prove expedient for students who might otherwise be unengaged by the material or the process, I would rather devote my time and energy to figuring out a way that the process or material could be made valuable for them, rather than figuring out how many yellow banana stickers one gets for reading Moby-Dick.
The answer to which is: all the yellow banana stickers.
Perhaps most useful of all was Mike's comment about teaching students how to search for things digitally. This is a skill I've had to work out on my own, with like fear and trembling, over the thirteen years that I've been quite active on the internet. Things I don't even think about anymore, like putting "certain words" or "phrases in quotes" to narrow a broad search, are certainly not innate for fourteen year olds. With so much information available digitally, having a decent set of tools for perusing it is basically vital for any sort of higher-level research or creation work.
In the discussion of gaming the classroom, Jamie managed to allay some of my skepticism about how such a thing would work, noting that, just as in any classroom activity, you have to include something for everybody. Not everyone is going to love it, obviously, but his comments made me feel a little less uncomfortable about the competitive aspect being intimidating to some students. I still feel that competition in learning is most of the time beside the point, but I feel a little less cynicism about this now.
One thing that came up in the same discussion was Mike's use of badges in his classroom as a learning incentive. I feel two things about this.
First, what difference is there between an arbitrary badge and, say, a yellow banana sticker?
Second, I wonder whether incentivizing education like this isn't seriously detrimental to any concept that focuses on learning for learning's sake. I take pretty seriously the idea that reading Cather or learning calculus leads to a richer, fuller inner life. That the process itself is the carrot, not the stick. Introducing a rewards system runs counter to my understanding of the goal of education. And while it may prove expedient for students who might otherwise be unengaged by the material or the process, I would rather devote my time and energy to figuring out a way that the process or material could be made valuable for them, rather than figuring out how many yellow banana stickers one gets for reading Moby-Dick.
The answer to which is: all the yellow banana stickers.
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