Reflections
Click for an audio recording of this blog, Reflections.
The beginning of December, right before the new year, my daughter turned 19. Her dad asked her how it felt to be in the last year of her teen age years. She said it didn’t feel any different from being 18; and that didn’t feel any different from being 17. Well, she may not see any differences but I sure do! I look at this beautiful young woman and remember when she was a five year old girl who loved to dance with her daddy to music from Mermaid and Beauty.
I wonder if educators have the same blind tunnel vision as my daughter when we think about the education we are providing our students. Each year we look at our students and think that they are very much like each class before. Oh, we may have a year that the kids seem to catch on more easily or a class with better mathematicians or better writers. But they all have the same basic need, specifically, to pass the SOL test at the end of the year.
On Christmas Day, my daughter broke down into tears. She wanted to drive over to her boyfriend’s house. This time it was my husband who had the blind vision; he wanted her to stay at home. After all, it was Christmas and she should be with her family. As she lay sobbing on her bed, she told me that nothing had changed since she was eight. She still had the same responsibilities and priveledges as she did when she was younger. We talked for awhile and reached a compromise. She could go to her boyfriend’s house but returned home early in the evening so that we could spend the evening together as a family.
Teaching today’s students has evolved much like my parenting skills. My daughter is so very wrong. When she was younger, we would have just told her what to do and expected her to obey. Now that she is more mature, more compromises must be made. Yes, there are still some basic rules of curtosy that she owes to us as parents, but we, as her parents, have an obligation to change as well. There is still so much that she doesn’t know, so much that our experience has taught us. However, teaching an adult to be “grown-up” is a far cry from teaching a five year old.
Our students have matured over the years as well. We, as educators, need to compromise more. We need to listen to them. I remember my first teaching experience. I worked in a small, private school. My students were expected to sit quietly in a desk and complete the work I gave them once my “lesson” was finished. Today’s students are yelling, “Give us more responsibility. Give us more priviledges. Give us a voice!” Technology is the classroom that our students are demanding that we teach in. They are demanding more than just the answers to the SOL test. They want skills that will take them farther than the test; they want skills that will give them futures.
The question I get asked the most is, “Many of my students don’t even have a computer at home, so why should I spend time from teaching the state’s standards just to let my students play games on the computer?” I don’t mean to be unkind, but I find this statement ridiculous. There are some children that don’t have books at home to read. Would you abstain from teaching them to read because of the lack of text at home? Few students have home microscopes yet we still want them learn science. Not one child that I am aware of has one of those dusty, outdated, pull down maps yet we still expect them to know the continents. And why should we teach math if they don’t have base ten blocks at home to practice with.
Brain based learning philosophies say that new experiences can rewire and rework the manner in which one thinks. This is showing up now in the students we are teaching. It’s time to put away the dusty chalk and slates and move with our students into the digital world.
