A Plethora of Projects & Practical Pursuits

It occurred to me this week that some of the things we ask students to do in schools these days are the equivalent of someone insisting that we do all of our professionalwriting on a stone tablet with a chisel. From our perspective, that wouldn’t make any sense at all, but for someone who has “always done it that
way,” and isn’t familiar with (or comfortable with) the alternatives, it maybe difficult to imagine anything else. The analogy can easily be extended and extrapolated, but I’ll refrain! My point is that it is no wonder students are disengaged, disinterested, and sometimes even difficult to “manage!” Life and learning are, for the most part, what happen outside of school. Obviously, these comments are not true of every teacher, but I think they are true of education in general.

The typical textbook takes life and decontextualizes it, divides it into pieces that are so small they are
almost unrecognizable as ever having been alive, dehydrates them, and then wonders why students don’t find them appetizing. Why are we so tied to textbooks anyway? (That was a PURELY rhetorical question!)

One of the many things about new technologies that has been particularly powerful for me is the way it has pulled me outside of my own paradigm. The more I play with it, the more my perspective about EVERYTHING changes–and especially with regard to the ways I think about knowledge, learning, teaching, understanding, relationships, and living. It isn’t always comfortable, but it has been SO worth it.