THE Jag

The Jag...one of the reasons for the blog name. See Jag Update 11/30/08 audio editon on the right.

The good old days are hear at last!

Working in education as a teaching coach, I get a lot of exposure to new web tools and ingenious ideas for their use. I have bought into them and the concept of 21st Century teaching. I can think of dozens of ways to get classroom lessons involved with higher Bloom’s skill sets. But getting teachers to think that same way--they need a coach. Technology has never intimidated me. I have been involved with high end user technologies all my life from aviation to photography, from computer maintenance to technical consulting. Technology is great. However, I need to add that it is a great “tool”. Technologies alone do very little for me or for education for that matter. The science that brought them about is always interesting and very, very erudite anymore. It is above the huddled masses with whom I reside. So, the crux of my job is to daily come up with ways to bring the now technologies as learning tools into “classrooms from the past.” I do not exaggerate. When your kids walk into the average classroom of today’s schools, they traverse a time warp as they pass through the door frame. Back, back to teaching methodologies of the distant past. I know teachers who miss ditto machines. That is just plain creepifying!
Not to say that everything from the past has got to go--far from it. The basics are still the basics and there are basic things to learn at all levels of education. There are many didactic lessons out there of great importance. What I am saying is, we are expecting students to learn only how to function in a single, specific classroom. They walk out of a world where so much is provided, easy and even taken as given into classrooms that treat what they know and use everywhere else as tainted. These poor students are handicapped immediately. They nearly become nonfunctional. As nonfunctioning students they struggle to get the simplest of lessons. They are like a fish out of water. They are in a class where they have to dig matter from a book of what copyright? As compared to, for instance, browsing the web where they search with a tool for specific information and find up to the minute results in seconds? Which one is real to them? Remember now, kids want relevance. (That would be relevance to them.) The collective creativity of the web talks to learners where they are. The information can be and is often a combination of visual, aural, and kinesthetic origins. This is just what the educational experts say how people learn best. That fill-out worksheet is looking pretty drab at this point compared to interactive blogging over the finer points of a piece of literature, or math problem solution technique, or science experiment. They not only get to give their two cents worth, but can see what everyone else thinks, get to consider and comment other points of view and maybe do it with a person who lives in another country; and all this in real time. How about a Spanish class where the conversation is with students who natively speak Spanish? That is exciting. That is real, or, as we say in the vernacular, authentic. The good old days of teaching--they are here at last! Well, with a little coaching.

Boredom

I hear the term so often, but I have never felt what it means. Not a single time in my entire memory can I recall being bored? “I’m bored” is a phrase I hear all the time being a teacher in a typical rural US high school. How can youngsters with so much going on around them feel as though there is insufficient stimulus to generate interest in something? Totally baffling!
As long s I am observing teenagers, have you noticed how kids, maybe people in general are always looking for some stimulus from other than what is around them? Phones, iPods, videos, TVs, computers are the usual culprits, drugs, books yes, but much, much less often. My theory is, people are afraid to be alone. Don’t much like the company I suspect. When a person can’t interest himself in himself, I see the signs of an underachiever. This is just a plain worrisome observation. Not to mention a downright waste of brain power. Everyone has something to contribute, however large or small. That contribution will not so often be stimulated by redundant or derivative behaviors.
Obviously, not every waking moment can be an engagement in production, but they can be in prelude to achievement. Being plugged into an iPod “because I’m bored” has yet to demonstrate, to me any way, a culminating behavior that warrants endless hours of blank expression and off key, whiny, muted voices mouthing the lyrics of some song over and over again. A tree might be observed doing the same thing as its leaves rustle in the breezes day in and day out. Should I expect great things from tress as much as I do from bored students? Perhaps that is a misplaced expectation on my part! Trees are at least gathering photons to grow and produce tree parts and oxygen, slow as they may be in the process. What visible product comes of endless hours in mindless stimulation? Totally baffling!

How much do we need technology?

Now here is a conundrum. I am a Classroom for the Future Coach. That means I advocate learning in a variety of ways and often link those ways to realization by, organization with, or expression through the use of technological means. I admit that this learning mode is way cool, can be very efficient and eminently more interesting than some more traditional ways. And before you scoff, the work involved is intense and can more than often exceed levels of comparative learning with traditional methods. That said, I and most of the world for that matter can get along with a far less amount of technical wizardry than currently available. To wit, humanity has only been so “plugged in” for only a few decades. From all antiquity to the advent of “the new technologies” mankind got along just fine. And I dare say will fair OK after the societal collapse that the current political madness, of which no part of the globe seems to be immune, leads us into what will be a second dark age. In fact, those of us who cannot learn and excel in the traditional learning climate will be the lost crowd; and by lost I mean dead or worse, severely dependent. For all the understanding of learning available to us today, the lessons of the past are lost to so many of us. The reality of harmonious co-existence and prosperity through mutual respect, ownership, hard work, and a natural understanding that doing the “right thing” is accomplished by preserving a harmonious-co-existence. If it gets more complicated than that well, you see what the world is like today. Every culture eventually drowns in its plethora of rules. And what are rules? …the exceptions and caveats to behaving in harmonious co-existence.

Not all rules are so bad. What makes a rule not so good is a preponderance of them. After so many, each additional actually isolates a little bit of what heretofore was acceptable as unacceptable. Extend the number of rules to the absurd, the definition of government, and you eventually make natural behaviors unacceptable. Enforcing rules becomes an end unto itself. Creativity is stifled. Humans are creative by nature and as they have so often in the past, will invent the instrument to remove the rules, again. Draw your own conclusions. Can you learn from history?

Television

I hear complaints from every corner of the viewing spectrum aimed at nearly every aspect; content, time, commercialism, ratings, technology, cost, redundancy, talentless. You name it, someone is making the complaint. Actually, I don’t find it too…anything. There are times for just about anyone when its elements just plain fit a need. The complaints then are as ethereal as errant video signals trailing into the universe.
What amazes me about complaint is that any exists at all. TV is provided as an offering. It is for the most part in the “free” world a service. Service by its very nature is consumer driven. Don’t like it, turn it off. Providers will either respond to you or go out of business. If your group is too small to impact on the service profitability you don’t get service, but if you are not watching in the first place, who loses? It is economics 101.

So what do I watch? I like action, irreverence, and fiction. Well, TV should fill my days. You remove sports and the pickings get a bit slimmer. If characters that are nearer to believable than not have to be present, well TV becomes darn near unwatchable. I guess what first attracts me to any program is the face of the actors/characters. I note that sometimes characters are not at all human. Firefly has the ship, undoubtedly a character. Homer Simpson is an animation; having not watched it for more than thirty seconds tells you how much Homer attracted me. If I find the character intriguing, then I’ll hang in to see if I can appreciate any story. Being serial is real important to me. Isolated bits better have some hefty utility to attract my attention. So, you could say I am an active watcher. Having to think along the story line, analyze situations and predict behaviors and events are what hold my attention. Needless to say, I pay little attention to TV, especially the news casts, as a must do pastime. I find subtitled films most alluring since they require so much more of the viewer. The small screen makes them easys to access. Subtitles are usually abbreviations of the actual dialogue translations, so the acting and scenes must be parsed with the few words that make the screen. One must totally engage the film to absorb its content and that makes for a pleasurable viewing experience.

TV is what it is, and for the most part what we have allowed it to become. Don't complain about it to me. You see, complaining is not high on my interest indicator either.

eMBEDDED LEARNING

Bob Dylan and I never embraced similar politics, but I can’t argue the succinctness of his observation: “The times, they are a changin’.” Like it or not, in the near future public education will be conducted far less in wholly autonomous classrooms than it is now. Coping with NCLB compliance, the realities of job market trends and the state of technological sophistication of our clientele are making teaching the way I taught ten years ago, the way you may still be teaching, a way of the past. The consequences of being behind in the use of best practices are already evident in our students. Any guess as to who next will feel some consequences? You can embrace the needed adjustments to guide learners and fair well. Or, you may be run over from behind; left to eat the dust off the wheels of progress. An overly graphic analogy perhaps, but consider that the Department of Education is solidly supporting the economics of increased employability of highly trained high school graduates, the School Board Association is advocating all students need to be exposed to Web 2.0 tools, industry is stressing collaborative skills and continuous learning, and the average student of today will hold on average 15 different jobs, several of which may not yet exist. Relevant, to the point teaching practices that embrace how individuals learn best, and provide access to and practice of the higher learning skills that prepare students to be life-long learns are becoming the benchmarks of teacher competence right alongside content mastery. You then need to consider just how much ‘the times are a changin’’; just how many jobs will be in your resume.
These changes we as teachers must face comprise a great opportunity. The time is right to embrace what will be tomorrow’s standard of pedagogical behavior. In the process we have the occasion to refresh why we became teachers and to access new challenges. Take it from someone who is refreshing a commitment to teaching for a third time in his career; things that seem impossible become reasonable and interesting challenges. It’s like getting an unobstructed view from the top of a hill. Ready for a challenge?