Gone are quiet classrooms with desks all in a row and a teacher at the blackboard.
Instead, a peek into nearly any classroom across the Miss-Lou will reveal noise, movement and technology that sometimes does the teaching.
And though little about how children learn today seems normal to adults, educators insist that learning in a global society means parents, grandparents and guardians must do a little learning of their own.
Some good stuff in this article. However, being the husband of a teacher, son of a teacher and brother of a teacher, I can say from what I’ve heard that the “no child left behind” policy has had more of a (negative) impact than technology ever has or will on the pupil.
Some of the quotes in the article are incredible.
“Who is the teacher?” quote:
It is because students are so willing to take on technology that schools have had to incorporate it into everyday learning'”
The casual observer is not always wrong, quote:
“Games can be teaching tools, but despite what a casual observer may think, it’s educational,”.
The “blind leading the blind” quote:
“I can bang my head on the wall about something, but only until (someone their own age) repeats it, the child understands it (in some cases),â€
And my all-time favorite, “dense teachers produce dense students” quote:
“The curriculum is much more dense,â€
These are the students that will grow up to continue to be unable to connect their actions with the destruction that is around them.
God help us.
Don
By the time that these children are in 7th Grade will they be able to read the English language with comprehension, will they be able to write intelligible thoughts in the English language and will they be able to effortlessly perform straightforward computations using everyday arithmatic?
If not, then all of this ‘we’ve got a new method of teaching’ talk is nothing but talk. And the flashy gizmos being used in the classroom will prove that they have more ‘flash’ than results.
I had some mixed reactions to this article. My negative reactions had more to do with the educational buzzwords and catch phrases that were being thrown around. I have an instant gag reflex (thanks in part to my teaching minor and to my seminary experience) to anything resembling buzzwords because they are often used nowadays (in schools and in churches) in lieu of actual discussion or debate, and often as codewords for a particular political agenda.
Buzzwords aside, I was taken (in a positive way) with the picture in the article. When I was minoring in education and student teaching, I tended much more to gravitate to hands-on style learning pedagogy. There is a place for lectures and memorization and all that, but that only goes so far in my opinion. Having kids apply what they have learned I believe makes the lesson stick in their heads longer.
Regurgitating information for a test (which seems to be the American model for classroom tests), only to have the kid forget it the minute the test is over, is not really learning in my book. Its just a memory exercise (repeated over and over). But, on the flip side of that coin, the hands on stuff can’t be the only thing that’s “taught.” Without actual instruction, it’s just playtime with gadgets in lieu basketballs.