Category: Philosophy

This year, it’s all digital, all the time. Email, GDrive, Dropbox and the like make it so easy to push files back an forth that printing things out is more of a pain than it’s worth. I’ve not installed any printer drivers on this computer, either. Just in case my resolve weakens.

While for most day-to-day things ditching printing is pretty easy, there are a few things I’m keeping in mind:

1. There’s a certain… richness… to paper. A tangibility. A tactile response to it’s heft and physicality. To that end, I’m trying to emulate that digitally as much as I can. That means graphics, layout work, and pushing a specific aesthetic on everything attached to my classes. A cohesiveness. This cannot be overlooked.

2. Just because it’s all digital doesn’t mean it’s all the same. I need to keep in mind the myriad digital formats that exist, and endeavor to use the most appropriate format for the task I’m trying to accomplish. Vital. And when you combine this with #1, you realize that the aesthetic you’re using has to translate across multiple digital formats. A bit tricky.

3. Think like a startup. Make a choice quickly based on the best information you have access to, and then be ready to pivot to another choice if things need to be changed. Make these changes definitively, and don’t look back. Done is done.

I moved classrooms for this year, and in doing so I saw the opportunity to purge much of my physical stuff from my life. It was liberating, and while terrifying for a moment, I don’t regret it at all. I did, however, move two file cabinets to the new room. These are an archive of my last 6 (or so) years of teaching. I’ve never reached into them for anything, really. It’s a record. But I’m not sure it needs to exist. What’s it for? Why keep it? What purpose does it serve?

None, I think. It’s a function of me being sentimental.

I guess the next step is clear.

There’s a lot of new terms people are trying to define kicking around the twittersphere about “Flipped” rooms and “Hybrid” classes. “Blended” Whatever.

Here’s where I am with all that right now.

It’s all the same thing, really- a series of methods to extend the learning beyond the classroom. Like homework.

And that’s the catch, really. All the academic work indicates that homework at the elementary level has a negative effect on students. That at the middle school level homework is, at best, a break-even activity. It’s not until high school that we’re looking at real benefit.

While it might be nice to think about assigning a video to watch in the evening is a better thing for a young student, once we consider that the video is really just homework, it’s hard to get as excited. Even at the high school level, it’s just another thing to assign. Maybe better. Maybe worse. Is watching a video for homework inherently more interesting than reading an article? Hardly.

Excuse the “This isn’t that big a deal” tone here for a minute: I’m building.

What I do see as a genuine improvement here is for talented educators to make videos so good that students choose to watch them out of pure curiosity and engagement. What if educators built content so good- so engaging and compelling that students were eager to watch the next episode? What about production value? Graphics? What about having the content that teachers distribute not look like second-rate rehashed, re-photocopied, dubbed from VHS, straight-out-of-1996, monospaced-font junk?

What if we approached the making of our content like serious producers- and did just worry about the content itself, but also the quality of the package we hand to students?

The title to this is a teeny bit misleading, I know. I always worry. It’s part of who I am.

Given that, the title should be “I’m starting to worry about all this collaboration-focused education doing disservice to the introverts in schools” but that wouldn’t fit. I just posted a new Tangential last night, and it deals with Introverts and Extroverts and Lord of the Flies. But that got me thinking (again) about how we accomodate those two personality types in the classroom.

We’ve been putting a tremendous amount of faith in the power of collaboration in the classroom- and I’m not saying that’s entirely a bad thing. There’s a lot of good that comes out of collaboration, and there’s a lot of collaboration that goes on in the working world. It’s an important skill, and it suits the extroverts in the room well.

But our rooms aren’t full of extroverts- they’re full of a mix of extroverts and introverts, and with all the focus being put on the extroverts in the room, I worry about the smaller group of introverts being ignored. Susan Cain makes a good point surrounding this in her TED talk on the subject- and while when that came out there was a bit of nodding and agreeing on the subject, I haven’t seen anything actually done about it. I wonder about the spread of introvert vs extrovert among classroom teachers- are we overwhelmingly extroverts? Is the performance aspect of what we do attracting significantly more extrovert and therefore skewing our ideas about teaching the general population?

Maybe I’m sensitive to this sort of thing- maybe years of being put on the spot in classrooms has made me overly shy about doing the same thing to a student. Maybe the current view is that students that are introverts need to be trained how to be more extroverted in the classroom. Maybe extroverts need to likewise be trained to be more introverted in classrooms.

I don’t know why. I’m not sure why each group can’t be taught to use what they have as a gift and work with it. I’m not sure why we have to be compelled to try to change the fundamental nature of how student function.

I think the better plan is to teach students how to exploit the way they work- teach the introverts to embrace the introversion and the extroverts to use theirs. It seems obvious- as they’ll want to function that way in life anyway. The ambiverts in the room can practice moving between the two.

…on the end of the year, and like every year, the wheels are starting to come off.

I’m not sure what it is that leads to the fatigue that we all feel towards the end of the year, but it’s here again. I’ve been trying to fight it off- but I’m having some trouble. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve chosen a sleepy summertime novel (To Kill a Mockingbird, btw) to end the year, and it’s lulling me in, or if I’m somehow not as creative right now with cool new projects.

I’d like to blame the very warm early, early spring we had- I’d love to say that because they were exposed to summer to early, they’ve already shifted to that mindset.

But I’m not sure that’s true.

What I fear, and what I’m starting to think might be the actual reason for the fall-off, is this: We don’t have enough variety in what we do. If we were a restaurant that you were eating at for 185 days, we’d have a menu that is too short and we’d be sick of everything on it. Almost every activity that we do is based in the same sort of physical space- sitting at desks and whatnot. Almost every activity involves writing things down in what looks an awful lot like analytical writing. It doesn’t seem to matter much what subject we’re talking about, it all sort of looks the same.

I’m wondering if now is the time of year to bust out the left field jams. The wacky stuff. If we’re a dinner serving hamburgers and fries, now’s the time to announce that we’re dabbling in molecular gastronomy. We’re adding tuna tartar with an avocado foam and sesame crisp.

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