Chris Sloan, of Sloanspace said the other day:
Sloanspace: are they really different?:
I hear a lot about how today’s students are so much different than preceding generations. For instance, I heard David Warlick speak this morning at the UCET conference. Among other things he said that kids today are more competitive, risk-taking, sociable and self-confident than the preceding generation. I’ve heard he, Marc Prensky band others say similar things, but I’m not completely convinced.
(They say that) ..these kids are bored with school because teachers no longer know how to hold their attention, they say. But then I think about how bored I was through much of high school, and how I multitasked by listening to a transistor radio with one earpiece, how I daydreamed, wrote song lyrics in notebooks that my teachers never saw, how kids passed notes (a precursor of “chatting”), and I wonder – are today’s kids really that different than kids were back in the day? Have the students changed or are they just using different tools?
I agree with Chris, that perhaps our children, fundamentally, are not that different. I also do not buy in to this multitasking thing. I think that they are probably better at moving quickly from task to task — shift-tasking, and I think that this has more to do with their information experience. That’s what’s changed, and it’s undeniable. How our children spend their time and the intensity of their information experiences do, in many ways, define them.
I agree, also, about bordom as a somewhat universal condition of teenage years. I too was board nearly to tears with I was growing up. But, as a result, I suspect that regardless of my less than spectacular grades, my classrooms probably shown more light on my future than todays classrooms do on our children’s future. I suspect that the shift that’s happened is that our children’s outsidetheclassroom activities have become less boring (more energizing, exciting, challenging, social, etc.), and, in comparison, their classroom experiences (in many cases) have become less meaningful and less relevant.
Certainly the brain research points to children who are wired differently, and John Beck’s (Got Game) listing of children’s qualities is based on exhaustive research. But I believe that it is their information experience that we need to be paying attention to and coming to understand — and that we probably need to reshape our classrooms as a result.
Thanks so much for continuing the conversation, Chris.
Image Citation:
Powter, Adrian. “Bored.” http://flickr.com/photos/dandini/. 5 Nov 2006. 4 Mar 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/dandini/289717290/>.
“my classrooms probably shown more light on my future than todays classrooms do on our children’s future. ” I think without a doubt you are correct here. Today, more than ever, we don’t know what the future holds. Therefore, it’s impossible to prepare our students for a pre-ordained future. We can simply teach them how to think and develop the ability to solve problems that they encounter and create.
I”m not sure how this relates, but the other day I spoke with an assistant superintendent of a large PA school district. He asked me how I could guarantee him that my discussion starter newsletter would be high quality since I obviously write it each day. My answer was simple, he can’t be guaranteed. So here’s the question, are we entering a new world of educational publishing where we’ll have to develop new information on a consistent basis without consumers having the opportunity to preview it, to keep our students engaged in relevant learning?
Andrew Pass
http://www.pass-ed.com/Living-Textbook.html
Regarding multitasking, I too think it is not necessarily the case. Maybe today’s young people can shift from task to task more adeptly than previous generations, but what of it? Is it at the expense of a comprehensive, in-depth understanding of a topic, in favor of a ‘jack of all trades’ ability? I’m not sure, but didn’t some research regarding “Sesame Street’ (with it’s fast shifts of segments) point to this?
A very good question, Jeff. Can today’s children, assuming rapid attention shifting, learn what they need to learn at depth and rigor that it needs to be learned? I think that we have to carefully consider this in light of a time of rapid change. We shouldn’t be looking to see how deeply students can be taught something, and instead, look to see how deeply they can teach something to themselves. We must factor in to what and how we teach, the idea that the context and the very content is changing almost constantly.
We love talking about old whine in new bottles (the spelling is deliberate)…
Girls in my high school biology class plugged curling irons into the lab tables and styled their hair. I played cards under the table.
During my sophmore year in high school I was in bio class and my mind wandered to the computer program I was writing. (Remember when kids were capable of writing programs?) The solution to a bug in my program came to me during the biology lecture and it burned in my head until I could no longer sit still.
I raised my hand and asked to take the hall pass. I ran down the hall, fired up the teletype (which shook one wing of the building), sat down and debugged the program stored on the district’s mainframe.
To make a long story short… I got busted! The teacher was not only upset that I took the pass under false pretenses, but my peers thought taking the pass to debug, rather than smoke, was incredibly dorky.
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That’s a long way of getting to the big point I would like to make.
It is NOT my job as a teacher to HOLD a student’s attention. It does not belong to me and thinking so always results in one-size-fits-all pedagogical tricks that favor the needs of the adult over those of the kid.
Holding attention is authoritarian, top-down and based on the notion that the learning is external to the learner.
You might earn my attention, but you cannot hold it.
Frank McCourt, in his latest book Teacher Man, relates 30 years of experience working with terminally bored, uninterested, uninspired high school children in New York City. His answer? Teach them creative writing by pulling out all their faked “excuse notes”, reading them as examples of the best creative writing he’s seen them undertake, and then having the students make up new and better ones.
Holding students’ interest has *always* been a challenge for teachers. That’s the plight of the teacher of the young. Plato’s Republic:
“And, therefore, calculation and geometry and all the other elements of instruction, which are a preparation for dialectic, should be presented to the mind in childhood; not, however, under any notion of forcing our system of education.
Why not?
Because a freeman ought not to be a slave in the acquisition of knowledge of any kind. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”
So, what do students want? This is my question.
I think the difference today is that kids don’t know HOW to be bored. They don’t have the patience for it. In every other part of their life they have the ability to be constantly entertained. DVD players in cars have eliminated the long car trip blues. Handheld game players make any wait in line an opportunity to better your score.
When I was a kid I had to learn to deal with looking out the window for a few hours or, god forbid, talking to my parents during that long drive to grandma’s house. I had to wait patiently in the airport and bring a book to read on the plane. Today, the classsrom is the only place students have to daydream to pass the time. Perhaps we are providing them with a valuable opportunity to explore their own minds…
Excellent!
Now we can have norm-reference tests to measure the efficacy of our “daydreaming” curriculum.
I am constantly amazed by the fluency with which we can justify school practices.