Dave Eggers has always been a difficult person for me to like. I remember him from my early days in publishing, and he was quite cocky and ego-centric. But Dave Eggers the Publisher is a different person altogether. I like this guy.

I can relate to your feelings of questionable enthusiasm. Not questionable in the sense of whether we should teach and talk to our students revealing our own love for what we’re doing, merely questionable in the effect it has on our students.

Please keep writing, I’ll keep reading.

Lee

Lee’s last blog post..Music and Life

I wonder how that would be managed and I also think of the fact that our present generation of high school students will probably experience 4 or maybe more careers before they are 40. Should they specialise at high schools given that they may alter their career focus not long after leaving school.

Our seniors, in the last two years of high school can focus on a particular specialization in that they may undertake more humanities subjects as opposed to science subjects for example. Mathematics is not compulsory. They focus on the subjects that suit them best.

When I went through high school far more students left school at age 16 to go to technical colleges and pick up a trade, get a job and acquire a skill. Fewer went on to the last two years of high school and then went on to university or a teachers’ college.

Now, students rarely leave high school at the end of four years. They undertake two more years of study designed for students aiming to go to university. So many students are not ready or for this intense period of study. They struggle and it can be quite debilitating for them.

Our government is now considering raising the minimum leaving age to 18. That means all students will have to complete all 6 years of high school, including that grueling two years of pre-matriculation courses. I do not think that is the right approach to take.

There are options that allow senior students to attend technical colleges part time. There are also opportunities for our senior students to complete university subjects part time before they finish school. They complete these programmes instead of completing a full suite of school based subjects.

I think these are good programmes and should be encouraged. It allows students to get a taste of life after school, at least in terms of adult education. It allows the students the freedom to leave the school at various times and experience education in a different environment with a different cohort. That breaks things up for the students a little at least. They get to get out of the school and participate in a subject that does interest them and does meet their needs.

Cheers, John

John Larkin’s last blog post..A teacher responds ~ who taught the experts in the first place?

John Franke’s last blog post..Fast Schools

Fascinating, excellent comment (and if the lack of a link to click on your name means you don’t blog, the quality of your writing suggests you should).

I say “fascinating” in part because your comment seems to reflect the same sort of ambivalence I have about curriculum. We don’t want historically ignorant, culturally illiterate, innumerate, and scientifically challenged youth inheriting the future from us - the argument for keeping much of the traditional curriculum. At the same time, first-had experience of my “advanced” high school seniors shows that 12 years of “elite” schooling in all those subjects have by and large failed to create cultured, numerate, literate, scientifically informed young people. They engage not with the ideas but with the testing of them, and then “garbage out.” So the traditional curriculum seems not to justify the time spent (again, they remember so little of what they learned in prior years that it seems they skipped school the whole time, when they didn’t).

But to throw it all out? Then what? Let them focus on some narrow interest and be ignoramuses otherwise? While it seems this is what’s happening anyway, I’m not comfortable with calling the mission of producing well-informed citizens quits.

If so many of the core subjects are irrelevant to them, despite our tireless efforts, then what?

This is unclear because I’m in a hurry, sorry for that. But you seem to be saying, on the one hand, it’s not working, and thus should be thrown out; and on the other hand, it shouldn’t be thrown out because they need the exposure.

Am I wrong? I certainly have no answers, other than again wondering if high school shouldn’t be an early specialization period.

When I think of my own understanding of history, politics, culture, science, and so forth, I have to say that it all took decades of adulthood to gel. And decades of self-directed, unschooled reading and thinking and talking.

But I think I’m weird that way. Most people my age were married with teenagers when I was finally figuring everything out. If I’d been one of them, saddled with work and family, I wonder if I’d have ever figured out anything.

So what does that say about the attempt to make teenagers understand the large canvas of human history?

Clay Burell’s last blog post..Let Tyranny Ring: Notes on Eggers, Part One

Good blog! I’m all for the abandonment of clock-watching, but I think it needs to come as part of a wider re-evaluation of what we do in schools, and at the heart of that is the curruculum. Our school has 120-minute lessons, expressly intended to introduce this relative freedom from time constraints; and what do we have to do? Deliver the same fact-laden crap for memorisation as before. Except now the kids have to wait 2 hours for a break rather than one! To combat the boredom that doing one thing for a long time inevitably engenders, we are encouraged to dream up ever-more inane methods of ‘making Shakespeare relevant’ and ‘engaging’. Y’know what? If we have to struggle THIS hard to make stuff ‘relevant’, maybe it’s time, as you seem to say, to accept that to many people, it just ISN’T relevant.

As for Marc Prensky, I agree with you that the ‘digital native / immigrant’ metaphor collapses immediately on encountering any of said ‘natives’ or ‘immigrants’ for any amount of time. However, I’d extend that to the essay you’ve linked to also. The more I read of Prensky’s stuff, the more I believe that much of what is said about the Web 2 ‘revolution’ and associated ideas is just mumbo-jumbo. Apparently, now, kids need to learn about the mathematics of space travel rather than basic maths? History is best delivered through ‘Civilisation’, to the point where any teacher who questions the facts as presented is crushing their spirit? Kids should report teachers for being ‘boring’? I’m sorry, but it’s too easy to confuse a radical agenda for improving education and a wholesale replacement of education with playtime. We need to rethink things, sure, but I don’t know that elevating edutainment as the new standard for ‘quality classroom experience’ is the way to do it.

It’s incredibly easy to turn people off considering more innovative uses of technology by being either too evangelistic or by being too unrealistic; I think that what Prensky habitually does (like many, many others in this debate) is to be so unrealistically, simplistically iconoclastic (’Change everything! That’ll work!’) that the half-decent (and commonsensical) ideas which he DOES have are lost.

Congratulations on the wedding, by the way.

Some high schools have switched to a trimester model with 90 minute classes and they make the effort to connect the curriculum. Imagine the joys of actually reading Thomas Paine while you are studying the founding of America. Might help make the study of some subjects much more meaningful.

Charlie A. Roy’s last blog post..A Jott in Line and Saving Time

What amazes me is that somehow blogging has made me a person who no longer wants to write, like all wannabees, but who needs to. I myself was smothering from too much time away from keyboard.

As for Twitter? I think the key is following a good hundred or 200 people, and having a browser-based client like my Twitbin for Mac. The volume of tweets cascading down my Firefox left sidebar from the 400 thoughtful people I follow is a waterfall of information and wonder. It’s easy to sip from as I do all other web-based work. If I only followed a handful of people, it wouldn’t work.

@Derek: more adults (not “schoolteachers”) mentoring the young and integrating them, habituating them, familiarizing them with authentic adult interaction - that’s such a natural remedy for the walls schools have put between the young and their societies. More money? Eggers’ approach doesn’t seem to require it, any more than my networked learning elective class - the Twitterverse as adult “teachers” - or, for that matter, Students 2.0, with its dozens of adult comments to each student’s post.

@Skip: Amen, amen. Was it Twain or Einstein who said “I never let my schooling interfere with my education”?

“The Philosopher’s Stone” is a song I could sing backwards and forwards under a posthumous morphine spell. I love that it emerged in your comment. Water seeks its own level Thanks for adding more poetry.

@Diane: You sum up the direction of my next installment on the Eggers talk so succinctly that I wouldn’t, if I had any sense, even write it now. As always, thank you for the care and thought of your comments.

It’s good to be back.