Earlier this month I spoke at Wyoming’s WyTECC conference in Rock Springs. Even though I was only able to spend one day at the conference, the hospitality of the event’s organizers and intimacy of the venue made it feel like a longer stay and I left behind some new good friends. Lately I’ve had the honor of speaking at a number of 20th and 25th annual state ed tech conferences. Wyoming was holding their second and there was an enormous amount of energy in that, not to mention excitement and pride. I was proud to be helping them celebrate their 2nd annual conference.
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Evolution of a Blog Post
Have I become a lazy blogger? |
Unlike most first, second and third state edtech gatherings, there was a good deal of tweeting going on in Rock Springs, and I ran my Knitter Chat tool during my two pre conference sessions and the evening keynote. The backchannel was active and rich and Knitter captured both knits and tweets.
One phrase caught my attention as I was reviewing and inserting comments into the backchannel transcript – during my three legs back to Raleigh. Someone mentioned how so many of his students were lazy. It’s a term, lazy, that works quite well in conversations about classrooms, and a term I would have readily used as a teacher almost 30 years ago, “Lazy learners.”
Lazy learners were part of the landscape of the classroom back then and that was OK. Where I taught, lazy learners would become active workers packing peaches and harvesting pulp wood. Where I grew up they would have become lint heads in the textile mills, and not apologized for it.
Today, however, there are not quite so many places for lazy learners to go when they graduate or don’t. ..and fortunately, we no longer excuse laziness. But how do we fuel energetic learning?
I inserted into the wiki page that hosted WyTECC’s backchannel,
What trumps lazy?
Success trumps lazy!
I want to explore two words that have been on my mind for a long time. I want to make a distinction between these two words, though it is one that is not made in the dictionary. Some may say that I’m making up a distinction. But let’s plow ahead. It’s my blog after all.
The words are achievement and accomplishment. They are so close that each is often used in the other’s definition and even in descriptions of their etymologies. Yet I would not necessarily use them interchangeably. The contexts determine the word I would us — and in the education context, I most often see, read or hear achieve.
“This student has achieved proficiency.”
“We are narrowing the achievement gap.”
To achieve something is to accomplish attain some predefined goal.
As difficult as it was to avoid using accomplish in that last sentence, accomplishment is, in my way of thinking, a little different. When I accomplish a thing, I can turn around and see something that is the result of my efforts — and it is real. It is not symbolic. And it is not easy to measure. It is, more times than not, of my own design and purpose. I did it, at least in part, for my own reasons.
The more I think about it, the less certain I am of differences between achieve and accomplish. Yet the distinction is real. When our children complete a school task, have they merely learned something new, or have they become more capable. Can they, the next day,
- Do something that they couldn’t do before
- Build something they were unable to before
- Participate in a conversation that was foreign to them before
- Sway someone’s opinion or earn a collaborator
Do they, in anyway, feel larger than the day before or noticeably further done their road.
I would suggest that many lazy learners are just tired of standing still.
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