If you’ve got a few minutes, there’s some great nuggets in this TEXx talk by Gary Stager. One of the questions he poses is still buzzing in my skull.
"What if school was the best 7 hours of a kids day?"
Good question. And I like good questions.
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I got stuck on the “we need to make environments that are coercion free” bit. I also like the “you can do anything you want, as long as you’re doing something.”
I’m trying to do this with my grade 12 Computer Engineering class. We took in equipment, built a network from scratch, ran into all sorts of headaches, but then we got to the point where it could support networked games and time has been less effectively used. I’m a big fan of you can do anything as long as you’re doing something, I’m just not sure when the doing something falls into a hole and becomes doing the same thing over and over again on Counterstrike.
I guess the real question is: is there a difference between recreation and work? Between repetitive nonsense (facebook, any online flash game) and productive time? If they’re learning no matter what, I should relax, even if it isn’t as efficient or as focused as I want it, right?
Yes, I hear ya. It’s the curriculum question in a lot of ways? Do we teach what they need, or what we want them to know? Is there a way to do both? I don’t know the answer to that either. Open ended free-for-all doesn’t strike me as the answer, but neither does the complete control of learning for students by teachers. I guess, like many things, the answer is ever changing and somewhere in the middle.