Beyond School

I love how Technorati helps me find fellow-travelers linking to my posts so I can read their reflections on theirs. Bing Miller of The 21st Century Schoolhouse is a case in point. Reading his reflections on my “save blogs from homework” jag of late (see most of the last 10 or so posts) gave me more food for thought.

Bing observes that student responses to literature questions on his blog were more engaged than their traditional counterparts, and this is true. Linzel, likewise, voices reservations about web-log assessment being only the preserve of English teachers (he teaches science), and only to be assessed as writing, and not content knowledge and accuracy.

And they both have a point, leading to this further thought: student responses to directed questions on course content–I think Bing’s right about the value of having students respond to lesson questions of whatever sort on blogs. But–I think that whole class blogs are the place for that, while individual student blogs should contain freely written posts reflecting the individual student. Again, if blogs are about authentic audiences, then to me that means the writer’s own interests choose that audience, and tries to attract its loyalty and continued readership by honing his/her sense of what topics, and what style, will appeal to that audience. And the writer is only going to bother if the writer is writing about what drives him/her to write. So I want to hold firm to the point that blogging is for writer-development. There’s a big difference between a “writer” and a “student.”

As for Linzel–hey Linzel (can I use your first name?), what was that “learning fair” project they did in the middle school where students selected their project, independently carried it out, but under the mentorship of a cohort of teachers? And the academic credit was separate from any compartmentalized discipline? That sort of idea is what I’m groping toward for our own approach at my school.

If a student likes math, let him/her reflectively write, on a much higher order of thinking than getting the facts right, about math. And keep writing. For months, a year, years. As that writing progresses, those mentors–composed of a writing specialist and a subject-matter specialist (e.g., English and math teacher)–would periodically conference with the student about his/her exploratory, reflective journal-journey down the math path.

Ten-to-one, that student will eventually write his/her way down all sorts of side-paths into math history (cohort pulls a history teacher in for a conference), biography (”Why did Descartes invent calculus in the first place?” the blogger will one day wonder), science (”How does calculus work in the practical world?”–and cohort maybe sets up a Skype conference with an engineer from the real world to chat about that), etc. On and on.

That student’s self-directed blog, after he/she got into the groove–and this might take months to happen, since this sort of intensive thought is discouraged in our coverage-driven, garbage-in/garbage-out school system–that would be a blog worth reading.

Other student math lovers, locally and globally, might discover this individual, might like the way this individual is finding cooler and cooler questions to explore about something he/she loves, and the factuals and hypotheticals our young writer offers as he/she goes–and those readers will, because they are the writer’s authentic audience, come back for more.

And seeing that growth in readership–and in return readership–will give our young writer the experience school has never given students: that of being a writer, instead of being a student.

But what reader will ever return to a blog that’s full of homework posts? If Stephen Colbert were here, he’d say such a blog smelled of this: “Schooliness.”

So again: homework posts? For the class blog, in the comments. That’s where students can all read each other’s course-related stuff anyway, and get that peer-learning: in the “comments” section of the whole class blog.

But otherwise, only direct the student in his/her own blog to this degree: “You will write. For years. And you will write according to standards of high quality for content and style. But beyond that, you’re beyond school-writing. You’re writing to find your own connections, your own interests, your own ideas, voice, and style. You’re writing to become, to the best of your potential, an actual writer. And we’re here to guide.”

Otherwise, left unprotected, students will never have the opportunity to experience being an authentic writer in schools. They’ll be too busy being students doing homework. They won’t have time be real writers.

Though they will, chillingly, probably be dishing all that homework up on five or six different homework blogs.

(Photo credit: Hoyo by jubilo haiku, on Flickr.)

If you like this post, please spread it:

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