Beyond School

I couldn’t resist grabbing this screenshot of the Answers Firefox add-on defining the word “grok” in this context: beneath OED lexicographer and “Dictionary Evangelist” Erin McKean’s TED talk on 21st C. lexicography, and above Graham, who rightly asked in one of two funny comments what the hell I was trying to say in one of the many embarrassing sentences I bang out on these pages.

So sue me. I get exuberant.

But cereal, folks: look at that picture: it even sources this bit of slang back to Heinlein’s originating coinage. When I was a kid, I had to walk through the snows of the school hallways ten miles uphill backwards to get that kind of info in the library. Kids these days don’t know how easy they have it.

Do you grok it now, Graham?

Stephen Downes (top) trounced me (bottom) with a 98.98. He is King. (Nice new ‘do, Stephen!):

Diane Cordell (below: top) gave the testers a 180-degree ankle-wrench for misspelling “population” in their results:

And Doug Noon (bottom) “flipped the goat- sucker” with his question: “What is ’smart,’ anway?”:

I thought about Doug’s question myself after taking the quiz*. And I have this much to say for it: 1) it required some knowledge of the wider world; 2) it required the ability to pay attention to wording; 3) it required some lateral thinking; 4) since it didn’t go down on my permanent record, it was harmless fun; and 5) there was something motivational and instructive about learning where I stood relative to others who took the quiz.

One of the weird things about school - at least with teachers who conceal other students’ work by not making it public on a wiki or blog or whatever - is that we rarely get the chance to compare our own performance and skills-level with that of our peers. I didn’t know my writing was any different from others my age until, as a college junior, a professor in a graduate course I was taking told me that most of the graduate student writing in our class was less polished than mine.

(And if you think this is mere bragging, you miss the point, which is this: I may have taken myself more seriously as a writer far earlier in life, if only I had been allowed to learn, by having the opportunity to compare my own writing with that of my peers, that it was one of my relative strengths. How many of our students today don’t realize their strengths, in a similar way, and for similar reasons?)

*Sour Grapes Shout-Out from “The Cerebral Assassin”: I Demand a Rematch!

[Burell grabs microphone, shouts into camera]

This is to you, Downes! And anybody else out there with the yarbles to accept! I didn’t know the speed of the test was counted in the score. So I challenge you all to a rematch! Take the Genius Test and report back on Sunday, your time!

–

Apologies for the wonky formatting. It’s a Blogger column-width thing. I’m going to migrate to WordPress soon.

Photo credits:

top by Stuart R Brown
middle by Prof-B
bottom (”flipping the goat-sucker”) by upeslases
“Cerebral Assassin” by PetroleumJelliffe

And a wicked little widget. I’d make this a meme, but instead will just ask those who volunteer to take it to leave their results in comments - if they dare ;=)

Am-I-Dumb.com - Are you dumb?

A little more fun from the afterglow of the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference….

I took Wes Fryer’s workshop on how to compose music using GarageBand, and walked my Web 2.0 activity block students through it by creating a funk song in about ten minutes (okay, it’s a one-minute fragment, really, needing a bridge, chorus, and so forth - but it’s a start). They loved watching me play the fool and sing funk for the vocal track, and duplicating it to make a “deep soul” harmony track.

Fun and games? Yes. Learning? Yes yes yes! Why? No copyright violation if you create your own songs; more engagement; more “learning to learn” instead of memorizing ubiquitously accessible inert data (i.e., being a traditional student).

Anyway, I pulled the song from GarageBand to iMovie, then pulled photos tagged learn2cn on Flickr from iPhoto to iMovie as well, and threw a few of my photos from my own years in China as well.

The result? The funkiest Chinese travelogue ever created (and the worst mismatch of image and soundtrack known to humankind). Featuring funky guest stars Jeff Utecht, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Kim Cofino, Wes Fryer (talk about “speed of creativity” - Wes taught me the GarageBand skills to make this song in about 20 minutes!), and Will Richardson.

Dana Huff tagged me for this Teaching Meme.

1. I am a good teacher because… (sez who???) if this is true, it would be because I’m an “anti-teacher.” I pity students for being stuck in school, for too often being treated like inmates, and having to sit through what they have to sit through for 12 critical years. I try to mitigate this by a) re-naming myself “learner,” and them “learner” too; b) trying to make them conscious that they’re young adults who deserve to be treated as such, despite the infantilization they’re subjected to by school, family, society, custom; c) not shying away from controversial issues; d) emphasizing problem-solving and frustration-tolerance as key real-world virtues; e) giving them an anonymous feedback forum year-round to criticize anything they don’t like in our classroom, and responding to it; f) replacing homework with relevant projects. (I really should get my students to address this question.)
2. If I weren’t a teacher I would be a… I have no idea. A starving filmmaker? Writer? Singer-songwriter? Founder of an unschool? Full-time blogger?
3. My teaching style is… relaxed, non-authoritarian, relevant, high-energy, philosophical, wonder-aimed, and encourages principled non-comformity and laughter.
4. My classroom is… a complete mess, with most of my favorite books from home on classroom shelves for students to check out, desks in different arrangements every day and, if I had my way, no desks at all.
5. My lesson plans are… open, loose, often thrown out the window in favor of spontaneous ideas, constant revisions, and/or student input. I’ve never understood how people can follow lesson plans made more than a couple days in advance. “The map is not the territory.” And I tend to get creative in the midst of units in ways I can’t when they’re at abstract distances.
6. One of my teaching goals is… to create space for self-discovery and self-direction in my classroom, so my learners may become writers, and find both themselves and a self-selected expertise through long-term classroom blogging.
7. The toughest part of teaching is… resisting institutional pressures. And resisting an all-consuming love for the world of “teaching.” I’m totally unbalanced, but love it. So it’s not a problem for me.
8. The thing I love about teaching is… my job is to share my love of literature, history, writing, learning, questioning young minds, and self-discovery. And to be teaching in the most revolutionary moment in the history of literacy since Gutenberg 500 years ago.
9. A common misconception about teaching is… that it’s easy. Another, possibly, is that it’s effective. I more and more wonder what young people would learn over 12 years if they were free to choose their own pathways in life, instead of being coercively incarcerated in schools. Schools are not natural, so they may not be healthy.
10. The most important thing I’ve learning since I started teaching is… without projects and creativity, learning is probably temporary. And to trust my nose: if it smells boring or schooly, it probably is.

You’re it: Anthony, Cindy, Jo, Vivek, Doug, James, Christian. (And no hard feelings if you opt out. This one’s tough, the timing is tougher, and I wonder how much I’ll agree with what I wrote when I read it tomorrow