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No More Nostalgia

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Old-School…School

Questions I’ve been considering:

Could students (or teachers) do the same types of schoolwork Americans did one hundred years ago? Should they be able to? Does one better prepare and motivate kids for college than the other?

Look at the above test and see how many you answer. For me, none of them are very easy.

Like Tony Soprano said, “Reminiscing is the lowest form of conversation.” There’s no place for nostalgia in the classroom. Students don’t need a one-week unit on citation when they have easybib.com. With the time that saves you and your students, attack the databases available to you with webquests and research contests.

Instead of reminiscing, rigor needs to be a staple the classroom. That rigor can be technology-based. I’ve had students absent for half our classes, students who sleep beside the curtain separating their kitchen from the bathroom surprisingly ace high level analysis of college texts because they had to. It was new to them. It challenged them to plan, write, and videotape a interview about a social problem and post it to their blog. Under that new umbrella of expectations, spelling the town you live in wrong becomes absurd for the student.

On the other hand, sometimes I find myself avoiding technology. I say the internet is slow, the articles on the Smartboard are too small to see, I don’t have the administrator’s password to thingamajig, the media center is often inexplicably closed to students, the netbooks are all checked out, or the computer lab got reserved.

#firstworldproblems, I know, I know. But fifty daily first-world problems mean you’re no longer in the first world.

In a way, it’s easier to avoid technology. One-quarter of my students do not have internet at home and know little of basic things like typing and what is internet explorer. To my surprise, it’s a real trial having my students make research blogs instead of research papers.

Sometimes, the rigor has to simply come from students motivating each other.

As teachers in underserved communities, we don’t just work there, we have to create a safe and well-served community in our classrooms.

I’ve realized classroom discussions substitute potentially missing dinner-table discussions, the nonexistent analysis of PBS NewsHour with one’s older siblings, and they in fact may lead to more household debates for the students to lead at home. All our students already know about Martin Luther King, Jr.

Let’s follow Paul Tough’s advice from his book How Children Succeed and create some curiosity. Do our students know about Malala Yousafzai, Nelson Mandela, or Ai-jen Poo?

http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,1567605638001_2112245,00.html



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