In Praise of Young Teachers

Mr. Spivey is in his third year of teaching. We just popped a bottle of wine at my place, after school, and spent three hours collaborating on improvements and details of the French Revolution Ant Farm wiki project–he’s joining, though he doesn’t know wikis–and on assigning a grade 9-wide (again) Bloglines semester research project.

He’s young, flexible, enthusiastic, and brilliant. Knows nothing of the tech side, but floated ideas for the wiki project that strengthened its learning value by orders of magnitude. Spoke, listened, agreed, disagreed, changed his mind sometimes, and other times changed mine. A born collaborator–instead of ego, imagination. The perfect–and perfectly rare–collaborative teacher.

Now all grade 9 students, not just mine, will be able to share in this wiki project–reading each others’ characters’ diaries, stealing and interacting with non-classmates’ characters in their later diary entries, marrying, falling in love with, or murdering them (1793 was not a pretty year) or their family members.

And they’ll all learn to drive and experience wiki-writing and collaboration.

Planning these things together after work was really more like getting together with guitars and jamming.

[Note to recruiters: don't underestimate the merits of young teachers. Less experience also means weaker addictions to "Gutenbergian" pedagogy.]

1. Learner Reflections after Month One of Wiki Work
2. Anonymous Student Feedback on Wiki "French Revolution Ant Farm Diaries" Project
3. Yet Another Student Voice on Wiki-Learning: "It helped a lot to improve my writing skills…."
4. Another Teacher for Non-Teachers to Read (and an Invitation to Teachers to Prep for Next Year)

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