Reflection

From the time I began kindergarten in 1972 until high school graduation in 1985, there was no discernable difference in pedagogical practices, at least not from my vantage point. In the current decade, to say that education has changed is to make an understatement bordering on the inane. The light speed with which technology has outpaced a notoriously resistant to change educational system such as our own has left far too many students behind, bored and…angry.
If you’re anything like me that last word might stop you dead in your tracks. Recently I came across an article by Marc Prensky titled, Engage Me or Enrage Me (2005). I bristled at the title but read it anyhow. In this program it has been difficult to avoid Prensky, so I assume most of my colleagues would be familiar enough with the gist of this article. The formula is something along the lines of; kids today are very different, teachers are not, kids are savvy, teachers are not, kids don’t learn the way we used to and teachers still teach the way teachers used to. (At least that’s how I heard him initially.)
All these differences I have been aware of for some time and embarrassingly I’ll admit that in the past I have remarked how, “Kids these days, they don’t want to work for anything. They expect you to juggle for them, as if they should be entertained every minute of the day.” Then I read something that was pretty simple, only I hadn’t thought about it before. A commentator on NPR mentioned that the educational model that we still employ is an obsolete one based on a scarcity of information. Fifty, sixty, seventy years ago it simply was not a given that you would have access to books, teachers, libraries and the like. The most efficient format for education was to put several dozen or several hundred people in a room with an ‘expert’ at the front. Our children, even the very young, have unprecedented access to more information than we can truly comprehend. Now I get it…they are angry and I finally know why!
One of our resources from a previous class reported a study in which 25% of today’s students think school interesting or meaningful to them. In addition, fewer than half believe that what they have learned in our educational system will help them to be successful in life. What is disconcerting to me is that from what I have seen (including but not limited to my classroom), they are probably right.
We (I’m looking in the mirror here) must get off our collective laurels and educate these kids in how to handle, evaluate, search, categorize etc., the enormous quantity of information they are inundated with each day. What does all this ‘soapboxing’ have to do with a GAME plan anyway? I have a far greater motivation now to alter my role as an educator. I have always cared about kids, I have always wanted to find ways to reach them and help them learn. However, it has taken a true paradigm shift to recognize that it is NOT the kids who need to wise up and change. My new, sincere GAME plan is as follows;
Goal: Learn to facilitate learning, rather than direct it. Not a small task.
Action: Locate resources (articles, blogs, interviews) and submerse myself in the idea, language and perspective.
Monitor: Recruit a colleague (Pam, she doesn’t know it yet but she’ll do it) to join me and we can keep each other company through the trial and errors.
Evaluate: I honestly believe this will be the easiest part, I just have to look at my students and see how many are engaged or enraged.