Golden Bytes

I would love to be an author. (who wouldn’t want to be a late night, coffee drinking, wordophile?) I have often pondered writing science fiction books for boys aged 10-12, a very specific genre that is severely lacking in quality reading materials. The only books I know in the genre are the works of John Christopher, The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire.

I also would love to write about education, which surprises me. I dreaded starting a master’s program because I have always dreaded writing and research. Much to my surprise, I have found the writing for my master’s program to be the easiest part. Not to say that I am great at it, or even good, but I guess I have a lot to say and it seems to be easily coming out of me. I guess I’d like to think that after 10 years in the field of education I have a few things to say about it.

So if I were to write an educational book I would probably write about school climate or student and teacher interactions. I am a firm believer that the greatest impact on student learning is the relationship student’s have with their teacher. I’d love to research this and write about how teachers can impact students simply by how they interact with the kids. I think it is a simple thing we can do. It doesn’t involve standards, technology, money, resources. It’s simply how we talk to kids, how we react, what we say, how we say it.

No, that’s not what I am going to write about, it’s a blog called “Dangerously Irrelevant” written by Dr. Scott McLeod, a professor at Iowa State University.  I’ve just recently started reading his blog regularly.  He as been posting quotes from the book. The Game of School, by Robert Fried.   I haven’t read the book, I haven’t even read all of Dr. McLeod’s posts.  However, I find them very engaging for discussion.  Somewhat on the line of what Sir Ken Robinson had to say.  I think we really need to rethink how we have school and what our purpose is.  You can read his blog here.  Personally, I find his blog one of the best educational blogs to read.

Many of you who are part of the blogged^2 at RMS were wondering what the purpose of blogging was and why they might want to do it.  I was purposely vague because I believe blogging is about finding your own voice.  I could have given you a list of things to write about, but I didn’t want you to just tell me what you thought I wanted to hear, I wanted you to have a real experience with blogging.

As we move into the final week of Blogged^2 I may post a few more blogs that you might find interesting or inspiring.

I was asked to watch this TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson as part of my Master’s program last fall.  I keep coming back to it.    I think I keep coming back to it because it makes me question what I  do in my classroom.  It keeps forcing me to think about what the real purpose of what I do every day is. Is my job to prepare kids?  Or is my job to work with kids, to help them grow.  I think there is a subtle difference in the approach that can make a world of difference.

I often hear from teachers, and I agree with them, that teaching just isn’t fun anymore.   It’s no longer about kids, or about learning, or about people, but about meeting goals, making AYP, covering content, passing tests.

I also wonder if this is part of the discipline problems most schools are having today.  Are the students rebelling, in the only way they know how, to what they know in their hearts is wrong?  Are they calling out in the only way they know how asking for change?

So what is the answer?  I honestly don’t know.  I do think it starts with us as teachers.  I think we as teacher’s need to take a huge collective pause and reflect back on the road we have taken and how we got here.  Are we really in the place we need to be?  If not I think we as teacher’s need to take action.  Anne Bean touched on something similar to this in her blog post “Friday Frazzle” Schools are filled with some of the most educated people.  So why do we sit back and wait for administrators and politicians to make changes.  We are the ones with the expertise on learning.  We have the years of experience in classrooms working daily side by side with kids.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

www.ted.com

I continue to be impressed with my sutdents work in Google Sketchup.  My primary purpose in having the students learn Sketchup is for them to gain experience learning from the online tutorials, learning to share their expertise as they learn Sketchup, and to gain experience working in a three-dimensional world designing a model. (In the future I’d like to integrate this with a unit on architecture and scale models, asking the students to create a structure with a specific style of architecture and to create it to scale).

One of the challenges of Google Sketchup is that it is such a powerful program.  I have been using it for two years and still learn something new almost everyday.  Not being the expert in my class for every situation has sometimes been uncomfortable.  When the kids ask a question and I don’t immediatly know the answer they sometimes make a funny face, like “Your the teacher, your supposed to know!”   Being a perfectionist, this sometimes bothers me.  But if I waited until I knew everything about Google Sketchup I would never start and my students would be missing out on this experience.

To me, it’s a process over product debate.  As a class we are learning how to use Google Sketchup.  I am not the expert at Google Sketchup, but I am an expert learning Sketchup.  The students are learning from me what to do when you don’t know something and need to find out.  They are learning how to use their friends as resources, how to use the google help files, how to watch and learn from a youtube video (under my supervision).

Here are a couple examples of what students have done this semester.