This is my week of working out of my normal audience realm. Yesterday, I keynoted and delivered two presentations at the MN ASCD conference. There were some teachers in the audience, but most of the attendees were principals and curriculum supervisors and directors. By all indications, my message about millennials and later sessions on video games and Web 2.0 connected with the audience, many of whom had laptops and were connected to the conference center’s ubiquitous WiFi. Of course I don’t know how many of them were doing e-mail.
Today I fly to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where I’ll be Telling the New Story for CAPE’s 2007 Conference. CAPE stands for Center for Advancing Partnerships in Education, and although technology is an explicit part of their description and mission, the organization seems most devoted to facilitating partnerships between education institutions and initiatives, and other community organizations, business and cultural. This will be one of those very rare events, where I’ll do a single talk and then jet away to some place else — so I’d better tell a REAL GOOD story. 😉
By jetting off, I mean to Kansas City, Missouri (second time in Missouri in as many weeks), for the annual Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. I wrote the other day about second (and forth and fifth) languages, and revealed my very definate lack of grounding in this area. I’ll be doing sessions on blogging and podcasting, and a half-day workshop on Web 2.0 applications on Saturday. These will be button pushing sessions, how-tos, with some discussion among the audiences about instructional applications. No worries!
But I’m also doing the keynote, and that worries me, because I am not a practitioner. The topic is flat word, flat information, and flat classrooms. I think that it will connect — but will they forgive me for being monolingual. Miss Profe assured me this morning that I am multilingual because of the programming languages that I know — but somehow, it doesn’t seem the same. You just can’t impress people at the coffee shop, with your fluency in PHP. 😉
All that said, yesterday, seemed to be a success. I felt an extraordinary sense of being in-sync with the audience, many of whom, as I said, had laptops. As usual, I asked (how many of you understand blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, and a majority of the hands rose, with the fewest understanding RSS. I’ve talked about this before, and people have, rightly, cautioned me that there are many educators who are still very much in the dark (ages) about the new web. But I was especially impressed with this group, who have less reason to be tech savvy than my usual audiences.
The millennials message seemed to resonate especially well. RoAnne Elliot, a curriculum coordinator for Mounds View Public Schools and president of the MN ASCD, introduced me for my keynote. In doing so, she talked about a meeting they’d had in her district with board members, folks from the community, and teachers and curriculum leaders. As part of these meetings, various subject area teachers are asked to bring students with them to add a learner/customer point of view to the discussions. In this most recent meeting, social studies teachers from the district brought in students. Just after describing the recent changes in their curriculum, efforts to make it more “rigorous,” the social studies students were asked to comment. Their consensus was that there was almost nothing about what they were learning in their social studies and how they were learning it that was especially rigorous. One student said, “I have to power down when I come to school!”
“Coincidentally,” Elliot said, “in reading through David Warlick’s web site, I saw that very quote (attributed to Marc Prensky), where a high school students says exactly the same thing, ‘I have to power down…'” I find this a bit peculiar as well, unless it’s a common phrase that students are using among themselves. It’s still important.
I looked up rigorous in the Merriam Webster, and, as a result have become entirely unsatisfied with the term, as it is commonly used in education contexts.
Rigorous: manifesting, exercising, or favoring rigor : very strict
Rigor: harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment (from Latin rigor, literally, stiffness, from rigēre to be stiff)
Is stiff rigidity what we really want in today’s classrooms when we are preparing our children for a future of rapid change? And how do we accomplish the richness that we imply in our claims toward rigorous curriculum when we limit teachers to paper textbooks, two-dimensional white boards, mind numbing lectures. Can it be done with anything less than blunt force mental trauma?
Again, I think that we have got to pay a lot of attention to our students outside-the-classroom information experiences, which are responsive, collaborative, information and media rich, dependable, and that present content as a raw material. Of course, this is a tall order — and it will get us no where as long as we are not willing to pay for the time and resources to retool our classrooms.