Kaelie Curbxstomp

Kaelie Curbxstomp’s last blog post..Intimidation At Its Best

Nobody is saying “get rid of teachers” here. Move them from the front of the classroom, though - and possibly, just possibly, move students from a teacher-controlled or system-prescribed curriculum in order to allow students to learn when and in what directions they are ready to learn - that’s a thumbnail sketch of what I mean by “student-centered.”

To me, the argument is most interesting when it asks, “At what point does a student have the basic skills necessary to then move into more individualized pursuits?”

That’s why I asked about the value of high school years. For me, they didn’t justify the investment of time. I didn’t become interested in anything academic until I hit my 20s, my beloved Shakespeare, Homer, and Everything Else included. I suspect any development in literacy in my adolescence had very, very little to do with those four dubious years of classroom attendance. Worse, I suspect I would have read and written - and thus developed - more had I not been forced to spend so many hours and days and years in high school.

As for the side-trip into 21st century networking, creation, collaboration, and so forth - pioneer territory indeed, no denials.

But for the millionth time, networked learning is something I’m teaching only in an elective class. I can’t see ways to do that right now with academic stuff like my AP Literature classes.

And for the millionth and first, it’s really something to be understood by experiencing it. I’m sure you’ve met a good number of people in your academic life through more traditional means - the conferences, maybe emails, and the old list-servs of the 90s.

But the explosive shifts in thinking, dialoging, socializing, and collaborating via blogging, social bookmarking, social networking, and digital telecommunication (Skype), podcasting, on and on - those blow all previous realms of possibility out of the water.

Socially, intellectually, creatively, and professionally, it’s a world and a skillset the next generation will need to understand. It’s the new “book” for a post-Gutenberg age.

Gotta go now. Thanks for the push
Clay Burell’s last blog post..Podcast: With Dean Shareski on _Natural_ Global Collaboration and Networked Learning

But you seemed to be asking what people got out of school with a view to debunking the validity of formal schooling, and the devil’s advocate in me wants to ask: If this global networking model which you’re enthusiastic about helps lead to greater intelligence, happiness, creativity, self-reliance, independence, citizenship, and freedom (any more so, say, than any other cultural enrichment project run out of the schools), if it has some tangible benefits in other words, does this mean we need to throw out all our old models, even while it is clear if not from the feedback you’ve gotten then from a longer history of scholastics that the relationship between the docile pupil and judicious preceptor can in fact be a very positive one? The irony and I daresay hypocrisy in all this is that none of the proponents of student-centered pedagogy truly plan or even want to get rid of the teacher.

I have an emotional attachment to things artisanal and to a ‘renaissance’ conception of education, and if I became worried reading Penelope’s comments on the lack of use-value for cursive writing, it is because one could argue, along similar lines, indeed along lines recently pursued by the upper administration in my university, that Latin or Physics are no longer ‘viable’ because their practical implications aren’t self-evident in the modern, economically-driven era. Students would rather enroll in business, international relations, pre-med or law, thus these programs aren’t worth their weight in instructional staff and should be done away with.

It seems like I’m digressing, but I see a connection between this utilitarian line of thinking and the (rather more utopian than utilitarian) idea that children (ok, young adults) possess the judgment, savoir-faire, and wisdom to educate themselves (not sans guidance, I think you’re saying?). If the savvy manipulation of modern technology in the name of global citizenship is the ends we seek in an education, I might be willing to concede the point. But this “reach out and touch someone” learning is most emphatically not what I want to see at the center of curricula for my children. If it has become abundantly apparent (I’m speaking of my own family now) that we must to one degree or another home school our children to fill in the colossal gaps in the Stateside public educational system, by no means am I willing to forego the teacher on the one side and hand the reigns over to the World Wide Web on the other. Admiration, mimesis, humility: all these are good things, and they come out of the teacher-centered dynamic and move the student to great works.

Wouldn’t you say the Forbes author engages in the very rhetoric he claims to decry in the anti-American discourses and attitudes of some Europeans? Too shrill to be trustworthy.

Clay, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t intuitively understand all you’re experimenting with or exactly advocating for, but I trust your diligence and integrity will lead to interesting and I don’t doubt valuable results. Regards, Carmen

In any case, aren’t you skeptical about the types of tests that define what intelligence is, and define it in this research?

Here’s an interesting counterpoint from Forbes Online, that says, in essence, “It’s better to suck at standardized tests and excel at project-based (non-teacher-centered) learning” (full article here ):

Ignore what you were told by your college economics professor and consider the following puzzle. Whenever you hear a snotty European presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as “unintellectual,” “uneducated,” and “poor in math,” because, unlike European schooling, American education is not based on equation drills and memorization.

Yet the person making these statements will likely be addicted to his iPod, wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans, and using Microsoft Word to jot down his “cultural” statements on his Intel-based PC, with some Google searches on the Internet here and there interrupting his composition. If old enough, he might also be using Viagra.

America’s primary export, it appears, is trial-and-error, and the innovative knowledge attained in such a way. Trial-and-error has error in it; and most top-down traditional rational and academic environments do not like the fallibility of “error” and the embarrassment of not quite knowing where they’re going. The U.S. fosters entrepreneurs and creators, not exam-takers, bureaucrats or, worse, deluded economists. So the perceived weakness of the American pupil in conventional studies is where his or her very strength may lie. The American system of trial and error produces doers: Black Swan-hunting, dream-chasing entrepreneurs, with a tolerance for a certain class of risk-taking and for making plenty of small errors on the road to success or knowledge. This environment also attracts aggressive tinkering foreigners like this author.

Globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas–that is, the scalable part of production, in which more income can be generated from the same fixed assets through innovation. By exporting jobs, the U.S. has outsourced the less scalable and more linear components of production, assigning them to the citizens of more mathematical and culturally rigid states, who are happy to be paid by the hour to work on other people’s ideas.

And I concur with a previous comment that “typing” was one of the most best classes I took in high school, in terms of its far-reaching use value.

You wrote: “Maybe that’s why they copy paste so much?”
–I’m wagering this is as often related to sloth as it is to frustration over the sheer quantities of information out there that students have to wade through (plus a sense that they have nothing new to add)…

But I digressed from the original question, and have to come down in favor of preserving the traditional classroom with, yes, get ready for this shocking news: a TEACHER at its center!

The following relates to post-secondary learning, thought I’d send it along fyi. I like that the now de rigueur student-centered-classroom is mitigated by the research…

http://amps-tools.mit.edu/tomprofblog/archives/2008/02/845_the_paradox.html#more