So Eric wrote a post about bringing more realistic context, and therefore relevence, to the classroom. You should read the whole thing–it raises some very important questions that need to be addressed. I’ve got some thoughts on it, and I’d write them in a comment on his site, but I’m afraid that it’d be too long. Not sure of the protocol involved, but as there’s been a lot of chatter around these parts recently about the importance of not being a jerk on the internet, I figure I’ll play it safe.

Anyway.

Learning only happens for two reasons outside the artificial construct of school: 1) because the person has a natural inclination to and interest in the topic, or 2) because it’s necessary for achieving a desired goal. In both cases, personal satisfaction or survival is the motivation. Why do we expect things to be different in school?

You could make the argument that we need to teach students things that they aren’t necessarily interested in. For me, that would’ve been algebra. Beyond learning that the word is Arabic, I really had no interest in the subject. I didn’t care about x. I wasn’t interested in reducing variables or solving equations or anything like that. But I guess I needed to learn algebra, since it helped me do well enough on the SAT to get my no-homework-doing self into a good college. But then again, with this whole “School 2.0″ (gag me) thing, maybe people will finally realize that the SAT is a farce.

I digress. About a week has passed since I started this post–I couldn’t figure out what I really wanted to write about, but I knew Eric’s post was too monumentally important not to address. I’m still trying to figure it out, but I think here it is:

I’m not impressed/enamored with technology for technology’s sake, but I’m pretty sure that the technology can be used, in very powerful ways, to make school more relevant/effective for our students. Eric describes a dream situation: a student whose interests are focused into a learning program/quest, in which he plays the role of the Dungeon Master (those of you who weren’t deeply geeky in the 80s and early 90s won’t get this reference, but trust me on this). His student pursues opportunities outside the traditional classroom, and Eric facilitates. There is, of course, an online component, using very basic (yet powerful) Web 2.0 technology:

While all of this is happening, April’s writing on her personal blog, reading a selection of Gothic/Romantic novels for which she researches prominent fashions of the time, presenting her findings through presentations and videos, and developing her e-portfolio that demonstrates her growth in reading, writing, and communicating.

If school worked like this, I imagine we’d all be much happier–even/especially Dan and TMAO, because it’s my firm belief that interested students solving real-world problems in their disciplines will do better on any sort of realistic state exam/NCLB barrage. If school worked like this there’d be less grumbling by teachers about outdated curricula, less whining by students about why they have to learn this, and less suspicion by parents of what we do in the classrooms. It’d be transparent–you’re learning this so you can pursue your own interests effectively. Eric’s point about using the students’ interests as vehicles for skills-based learning is a great one–as a teacher, I could help my students read and write to their interests while showing them specific techniques to help them become better readers and writers.

As much as I hate to admit it–I’d love to be all rah-rah ed-tech School 2.0 guy– I’m still a skeptic. It’s a terrible feeling not to be wholly committed to something.

This started with two almost simultaneous conversations. First, Clay Burrell invited my students and I to participate in the 1001 Flat World Tales project. This seems like a very interesting activity, not to mention a great way to get kids from all over the world working together, but I’m having trouble getting as excited for it as I feel like I should. I’m concerned about forcing the technology thing too much, I guess.

Which brings me to the second conversation. One of my sophomores came to see me about her second quarter grade, which was pretty low. She couldn’t figure out why it was so low, so I explained to her that she was missing many blog entries, which I require as homework. Now, a couple of things happened right after I said that: She said that not only were there technical difficulties with learnerblogs, but that she and many of my other sophomores think that blogging is useless and “pretentious.” At the same time, I realized how counterproductive it was to force my students to blog on a schedule. I was grading them on their participation in something that I find valuable in my own learning (blogging) but in a way that doesn’t even work for me (posting by a deadline, rather than as I come up with things to write about). Long story short, I adjusted her grade but also made it clear that we’d continue to use the blogs for the rest of the year, albeit in a more productive/logical/useful way, TBD later.

So now I’m in a very awkward place (and believe me, I know from awkward). How do I integrate what I see as very cool connectivity tools (blogs, wikis, del.icio.us, etc) into my English classroom without being too pushy about it? If I force my students to use these things, then I run the risk of these tools becoming nothing more than fancy worksheets–routine, boring activities that we do when Mr. Wasserman can’t think of a better lesson plan. I’m trying to show my students how Web 2.0 technology can help them become better readers and writers, yes, but I’m also assuming that they all like the online thing (because, I guess, it’s like paper but shinier) as much as I do. Who knows–some might. Some definitely don’t. Many’s the time I’ve heard “I hate blogs” in those “how come my grade’s low?” conversations (and not just the one I wrote about above). I’ve stopped being offended and am now just paralyzed. I don’t know what to do next.

Maybe the blogs need to be less academically focused? Maybe the student blogs need to be pushed to become more like the blogs I find myself reading–the ones with voice, the ones that are focused on the blogger’s interests. Maybe it’s okay, even more than okay, to have students just write about what they think is important–I’d be a hypocrite if I got mad a student who wrote about her favorite album like I did a little while ago.

I wonder–and this is the invitation for my sophomores to respond–if I need to just bury the whole blog-as-reading-journal model once and for all. Enough with the “post before and after you read” nonsense. Enough with the “comment on someone else’s blog for credit” malarkey. Enough with making the blogs as fake as the five-paragraph essay and as seemingly pointless as a quadratic equation. In my enthusiasm for the new technology, I’m afraid I’ve run roughshod over one of my basic beliefs about education–it has to be authentic to be important.

The second semester of English 213 (sorry, 223) is going to focus on a couple of essential questions:

  • What is the purpose of having an English class? What should we, as learners, have and do in order to be better at reading, writing, and communicating?
  • How do texts challenge or confirm our individual beliefs about how the world works?

These questions are authentic, but I’ve been ignoring them. They will require me to both let go of my control-freak instinct and maintain a tighter focus on what my students and I are learning. No more, hopefully, doing something just for the sake of doing it. No more, hopefully, desperation lessons (you teachers out there know the feeling–class is about to start, you have nothing prepared, so you run your mouth, hoping that they don’t notice how scared you are, but you know they notice).

This is not a promise that everything will be bright and new and wonderful. It’s more of a pledge that I will continue to question what I do and what I bring to the classroom, and an invitation for my students to do the same thing–not just to question me, but to question themselves. As in, “What do I need to know in order to understand this text?” As in, “What are the issues and conflicts around this topic, and where do I stand on them?” As in, “Did this text change my stance on this topic?” As in, “What kinds of texts can I produce to make my mark on the world of thought?”

So yeah, we’ll keep blogging. We’ll use RSS and del.icio.us. We’ll read books and watch films and write on paper and on screens, and we’ll make films and have discussions and teach each other. But we’ll do each of these things with one purpose in mind–to examine different pieces of literature (or, if you’d like, the record of human thoughts) and try to figure out how they relate to us. We’ll question why we do things–and hopefully not why we “have to learn this.”

I really don’t know what this is going to look like. It probably won’t be a classroom studio in the way that some have envisioned it. In fact, it might be a horrible mess. I don’t know if my students have ever learned like this, through introspection and metacognition. I know I’ve never “taught” like this. I hope only that by the end I have a better idea of what I’m supposed to be doing in the classroom, and that my students have a better idea of what it is to read, write, and think in an authentic fashion. It sounds selfish, I know, but I really think that this is the first step toward making high school important to the people who really matter.