School makes me mad. Real mad sometimes.
I get upset at the way student issues are dealt with. The food choices in the cafeteria upset me. It's frustrating to not be able to go out to recess because the temperature is too high or too low. The paperwork and documentation that I am required to do is enough to make a grown man cry. The expanding obsession with graphable data, plot points, and all things spreadsheet drives me crazy. Parental conflicts, report cards, grading, textbook adoptions... And don't get me started on the testing and all the baggage that comes with it.
School makes me mad. So what?
I have to slow down and ask myself that. So what? What does all that anger and frustration mean?
Number one, I guess the anger means that I care. You don't get upset over things you don't care about. The paperwork hasn't turned into a TPS report to be carelessly filled out and then used for discarded fish entrails. Yet.
The day I stop getting angry about some of this stuff is the day I need to seriously consider my profession as a teacher. I just have to watch that the anger doesn't consume me, but motivates me.
I know that there are things I probably could /should be doing. I'm sure there are meetings, protests, ballots, petitions, strongly worded e-mails, meetings, leading a charge, activism, legislation, voting. Something. I'm sure there is something more I could do. I just don't know what to do exactly. So, I'll start where I am- in my classroom and on this blog.
School makes me mad. Now what?
Showing posts with label school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label school. Show all posts
An Insidious Step Ladder
We teach kids for the now.
Sure, we must prepare them for what will be coming up in their lives. I know that knowledge builds upon knowledge and all that. But, I'm talking about the idea that students must learn for themselves in the now. Like right now.
John Spencer wrote a short, sobering post a few days ago that riled up an itch in me that I haven't been able to scratch yet. <buttkissing>If you're not familiar with John's writing, please go check him out. He's great. Really.</buttkissing>
His post made me think about how often we throw around the idea of the "real world" in learning. We want to write real world examples into our lesson plans and have our students solve real world problems. We want to prepare our students for the real world. The funny thing is, the classroom is the real world. We are in it right now, and so are our students.
We can't only teach them things to use in the real world future tense. We must teach them things to use in the real world present tense. We are the real world. This is the real world.
Like I said in my comment on his post, I hate when teachers say "We're doing this because you'll need it next year." If they need it next year, then shouldn't they learn it next year? I hope that learning can be for learning's sake here in the moment.
What do our students need to know now? Right now. What has their interest? What has hooks in them? Let's start with that.
School is not some insidious step ladder that kids climb one rung at a time, hoping to get to the top as quickly as possible for some vast landscape of knowledge and skills that they can finally use. The real world is not the top of the ladder. The real world is the ladder. Our classrooms get to be in every inch of every rung.
School is the real world. And school is now.
Photo: Dave Dugdale
Seth Godin on Education
via youtube.com
Wow. Just wow.
I actually found this on two different sites today- http://weblogg-ed.com and http://www.monkblogs.blogspot.com So many great thoughts about schools. It is challenging for sure, but that's the point.
I think Linchpin just moved up to the #1spot on my To Read list.
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