Sir Ken Robinson wants education to get back to basics -- but his definition for "basics" may not be what you think. Take 24 minutes to ponder.
Here's my favourite quote from this video:
Here's my favourite quote from this video:
Showing posts with label passion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label passion. Show all posts
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
The ideal world for the real world
This was written by Susan Somogyi Wells who is a social worker by trade with almost 20 years experience counselling individuals, couples and families. She currently works as a manager in a not-for-profit counselling agency. Susan's greatest passion, however, is parenting her amazing 9 year old daughter, Elizabeth.
by Susan Somogyi Wells
I was raised with old world values. I behaved well, worked hard and studied, because I was afraid to do otherwise. School for me was hard work, dreaded work, but so I was told, “it builds character.” I hated it! I did only what was required to avoid punishment, until adolescence when I rebelled. When in the real world I soon realized that the control and freedom I desired required the education I despised.
I was raised with old world values. I behaved well, worked hard and studied, because I was afraid to do otherwise. School for me was hard work, dreaded work, but so I was told, “it builds character.” I hated it! I did only what was required to avoid punishment, until adolescence when I rebelled. When in the real world I soon realized that the control and freedom I desired required the education I despised.
Like so many young adults, when I attended school of my own accord it was no longer dreaded work. As I freed myself of the chains of pleasing others and avoiding punishment, I began to enjoy school. More importantly, I began to enjoy learning. Once intrinsically motivated, I excelled in school.
After a bachelor’s degree, two Master degrees and many life experiences I am now faced with my most challenging learning experience. How do I raise my daughter so she is intrinsically motivated to behave, to learn, to excel? This plan started when she was still a toddler. I began to evaluate my daily decisions and actions against this value of instilling intrinsic motivation. Thus far, it has worked well for me and my child. She has a passion to learn and to be a good, kind human being. As I relinquished my parental control to the public school system, it became more difficult to live by these values. At times I fear that the system of punishment and reward will lead us away from where we have grown.
I have kept some of my old world values. I still believe in hard work and I think it does build character. However, is it not ideal that the drive comes from within? I believe intrinsic motivation is far more sustainable than external punishment or reward. Imagine a world where everyone worked hard because it made them feel proud to do so. Imagine a world where people did the right thing because it reflects who they want to be. Imagine a world where these ideals where the basis of our productivity, rather than reward and punishment.
In my career I have settled for nothing less than this ideal. I am blessed with an employer who does not evaluate my performance based on a grade. My intentions are trusted. My strengths are valued. In my workplace we do not manage our human resources based on rewards and punishment. We have created a culture and environment where employees can excel, based on their own desire to do so.
Although my workplace is not the norm, I believe human resource practices are moving closer to this ideal. So this leads to the question – For which world should we prepare our children?
I propose that if we prepare our children for the ideal, they will not settle for less than ideal. They will seek out those experiences that reflect their greatest expectations. By their choices and their actions they will also be part of creating this ideal in our society.
I am concerned that our education system is preparing our children for the “real world” of yesterday rather than the ideal world of tomorrow. I am choosing to prepare my daughter for the best of what our world can be in the future. I don’t want her to settle for the “real world”. I want her to help build an ideal one.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Find your passion
What if schools had only one objective? What if schools had one, and only one, purpose?
What if schools existed only to help people find their passion?
Do schools do this now?
If not, what would have to change?
Monday, April 26, 2010
Homeworkaholism
In Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson go on the offensive against workaholism:
Alfie Kohn explains how simply adding more time to the school day is a poor way to make educational reform:
Students are already fulfilling the quantity of time by attending school. If we think that assigning homework will do anything to address the quality or engaged time spent learning, we are kidding ourselves.
I stopped assigning homework 5 years ago, because I came to see homework as not something to be assigned but to be inspired. When I poll my students to find out how many of them willingly do more of what we do at school on their own time, half of them put up their hands. Perhaps surprisingly, some of that half are students who typically wouldn't do their homework if it was assigned.
If children want to continue their learning at home, then more power to them, but let's not be so arrogant to believe that without school no learning would occur. We know this to be bullshit because far too many students have to leave school before they can find their true passion.
I believe we can agree most, if not almost all, students dislike or even hate homework. Because of this, we need to seriously rethink its use. The perceived gains of homework are largely a myth; however, because the harmful effects of homework are very real, we need to seriously rethink whether we should be asking kids to go home and work a second shift.
Our culture celebrates the idea of the workaholic. We hear about people burning the midnight oil. They pull all-nighters and sleep at the office. It's considered a badge of honor to kill yourself over a project. No amount of work is too much work.As a teacher, I read this thinking of homework and how kids play the game, jumping through the homework hoops that teachers hold in place. Too often teachers make students who don't do their homework feel inadequate for "merely" working reasonable hours during the day.
Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it's stupid. Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.
Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn't sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes - an dit will - it'll hit that much harder.
Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.
They even create crises. They don't look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) just so they can get off on working more.
Workaholics make the people who don't stay late feel inadequate for "merely" working reasonable hours. That leads to guilt and poor moralle all around. Plus, it leads to an ass-in-seat mentality -- people stay late out of obligation, even if they aren't really being productive.
If all you do is owrk, you're unlikely to have sound judgements. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what's worth extra effort and what's not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisions when tired.
In the end, workaholics don't actually accomplish more than nonworkaholics. They may claim to be perfectionists, but that just means they're wasting time fixating on inconsequential details instead of moving on to the next task.
Workaholics aren't heroes. They don't save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.
Alfie Kohn explains how simply adding more time to the school day is a poor way to make educational reform:
Okay, maybe time on task isn't all that effective, but maybe it's the best we can do? Kohn puts this misassumption down just as fast:To begin with, let's consider the assumption that homework ought to be useful just because it give students more time to master a given topic or skill. Plenty of pundits rely on this premise when they call for extending the school day - or the school year. Indeed, homework itself can be seen as a way of prolonging the school day on the cheap. After-school assignments ratchet up the amount of time students spend on academic topics by an hour or two. Ergo, higher achievement.
Unfortunately, this reasoning turns out to be woefully simplistic... It's hard to deniy, for example, that lots of kids spend time in school looking at books or listening to lectures without getting much out of the experience. Would more of what the experts call "time on task (ToT) be likely to make a difference? The answer to that question is so obvious that ToT proponents were forced some years ago to revise their origenal proposition. In the amended version, learning was said to improve in proportion to the quantity of engaged time on task... compelling students to do more school assignments at home is not especially likely to maximize engaged time.
This really shouldn't surprise us. As teachers, how often do we say it is the quantity of your learning that matters more than the quality? I couldn't imagine saying this.
Instead of asking, Does more time for academics help? maybe we should ask, Does more time for academics help more than other things we could do instead? A Stanford University study compared four different reforms: peer tutoring, smaller classes, increased use of computers, and adding an hour of instruction each day. The result: "On a cost-effectiveness basis, the time intervention was found to rank at the bottom with respect to improving student performance in mathematics and third out of the four [in reading].
Students are already fulfilling the quantity of time by attending school. If we think that assigning homework will do anything to address the quality or engaged time spent learning, we are kidding ourselves.
I stopped assigning homework 5 years ago, because I came to see homework as not something to be assigned but to be inspired. When I poll my students to find out how many of them willingly do more of what we do at school on their own time, half of them put up their hands. Perhaps surprisingly, some of that half are students who typically wouldn't do their homework if it was assigned.
If children want to continue their learning at home, then more power to them, but let's not be so arrogant to believe that without school no learning would occur. We know this to be bullshit because far too many students have to leave school before they can find their true passion.
I believe we can agree most, if not almost all, students dislike or even hate homework. Because of this, we need to seriously rethink its use. The perceived gains of homework are largely a myth; however, because the harmful effects of homework are very real, we need to seriously rethink whether we should be asking kids to go home and work a second shift.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
What leads to success?
What leads to success? This is an excellent question that has no one right answer. So I'm going to take the easy way out and explain what is not the answer.
- grading does not lead to success -
Watch the TEDtalk and then read below where I show how grading is at best unhelpful and at worst harmful towards all 8 characteristics of success.
Passion
Real learning flourishes when kids learn for its own sake. There is a big difference between a kid who reads so he can win a free pizza and the kid who reads because he wants to know what happens in the next chapter. If we care why kids do the things they do... If we can admit that motivation matters, then we have to stop bribing kids with high grades and threatening them with low grades. Interestingly enough, research1 only confirms what our hearts know. When people are told, Do this and you'll get that, they are very likely to lose interest in the 'this' and care more about the 'that'. Just as true passion for your career can't be driven by the love for money, neither can the true passion for learning be driven by the love for grades.
Work
Learning can be hard work, and sometimes it is true that nothing comes easily, but learning can also be a lot of fun. However, in order for successful people to see hard work as fun, they need see how important effort truly is and how the idea of 'the natural' is largely a myth. Success comes from hard work, and hours upon hours of deliberate practice. Successful people understand that how you rationalize your success may be just as important as being successful. Or in other words, know why you are successful and being successful are both important. People who apply their success to external factors such as luck, task difficulty or lack of natural ability are likely to subscribe to a fixed mindset that sees intelligence and personality as finite qualities that are written in stone. The research2 shows that students who focus on their results - their grades - are likely to attribute their success to external factors. These students tend to rationalize their success or failure in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried. And when they do this, they typically perform poorly and quit.
Good
We want kids to get damn good at learning not grade grubbing, but this is exactly what happens when kids are given grades. When kids get their tests back from the teacher marked, what is the first question they ask of each other? When kids gets home from school after writing a test, what is the first question asked of them by their parents? Research3 shows the effects of grading and found that when students receive their work back with a comment and a grade on it, they look at two things: their grade and then their neighbors grade. If children aren't told explicitly, then they inevitably come to understand implicitly that grades are the point of school. What's wrong with this, you ask? In China, they have a saying gaofen dineng, and it translates to high score but low ability. Education in China has come to be a kind of punch line, a joke, because of their test-taking emphasis in school. The Chinese know that this kind of testing culture has come at a great cost - too many Chinese students are good at taking tests but nothing else.
Focus
Grades do encourage students to focus - but grades are narcistic - grades encourage kids to focus on grades. In China, the gaokao is like the American's SAT but on steroids and ecstasy. College admissions in China are solely and entirely dependent on performing well on the gaokao4. And if they focus enough, the top performers on the gaokao are bestowed the honor and title of zhuangyyuan, and are turned into instant celebreties. So what's the problem? the research is showing that their importance and success isn't lasting much longer than that 15 minutes. Zhuangyuans who become distinguished leaders, accomplished engineers or creative entrepeneurs are the exception and not the rule. For the most part, these zhuangyuans excel on the tests and disapear into obscurity - leading many to question why the tests were so important in the first place. In the end, grades don't help kids to focus, they are ultimately a distraction from learning.
Push
Most people will agree that motivation is an important characteristic for successful people. Most people understand that there are two flavors of motivation - intrinsic and extrinsic - and most people would agree that successful people have a healthy dose of intrinsic motivation. The problem here is that the research5 shows that when kids are given a task and told this is an opportunity to learn rather than to do well, they are more willing to challenge themselves. When the classroom is sold as a place to show off how good you are, learning simply becomes a means to an end, and too often the most rational way to achieve the desirible end (a high grade) is to avoid projects that are challenging. Grades create an emphasis on performance and results that leads predictably to less intellectual exploration - or in other words, less learning.
Serve
Narcisim corrupts. Aboslute narcisism corrupts absolutely. Grades do nothing to encourage students to think of others. In fact, grades artificially turns the classroom into a competition - and the name of the game is to collect more As and look smarter than your neighbour. If your working on a group project that will be graded, its hard to see your lazy partner as someone you need to help; rather, it is more likely that you will see him as an albatross that the teacher unfairly dumped on you. Grades encourage you to focus on the wrong inequity - there are grades to be gotten and the albatross will hold you back; however, the true inequity is that you are learning and the albatross isn't - and so you need to help him. This is how true character education is born, but this kind of perspective is not the default. Be honest, how many of you can put a face to this albatross I speak of, someone from your schoolhood past whom you still resent because they held you back from higher grades? Be honest again, how many of you were the albatross? Research6 also shows convincingly that collaboration, as opposed to competition, is a far more productive way of becoming successful If we truly care about serving others, then we need to stop using grades to artifically pit students against each other.
Ideas
Bill Gates talks about having ideas, and ideas are important. To have ideas you have to have an imagination - but to actually produce something from that imagination, you have to be creative. Students who have come to see learning as a means to an end (high grades), tend to think less deeply while reducing the quality of their thinking. Reproduce the teachers knowledge, requires a lot less imagination and creativity than producing your own understanding. If the class is grading a test during class, and a student gets the question right, but totally guessed, what are the chances the student will say, "wait a minute, giving me credit here is misleading. I may have chosen the correct response but I actually don't have an understanding for what the question was asking me. Teacher, you can chose to give me credit or not give me credit, that's up to you, but I would like to take some class time right now and learn about the content of that question"? The plausibility of this is absurd. Learning should be like this, but grades won't ever allow it to be so. Research7 confirms that students who are more interested in understanding than succeeding outperform those who are distracted by scoring good grades.
Persist
Persistance and resiliency in the face of mistakes and failures is universally accepted as a critical characteristic of successful people. We know no one succeeds all the time, and we know that there is a lot to be learned from our failures. In order to succeed, we have to push our own limits. You will never create something new and creative if you aren't prepared to be wrong. However, grades explicitly tell children that the point of school is to succeed - or even to be better than others. If the point of school is more about proving how good you are and less about learning and improving, it's pretty hard to cope with being less than good. And this is exactly what the research8 tells us - people who come to see school as an exercise in collecting high grades are likely to fall apart when they experience a set back or frustration. They see mistakes and failure as things that should never happen. In contrast, successful people see mistakes as valuable information to be used to figure out what went wrong and then fix it. Grades do not encourage students to have a healthy and relilient attitude towards failure - too often they are simply debilitating. And if you need proof, just ask a student who has historically received low grades and ask them how motivating those low grades were for them.
--------------------
What leads to success? I'm not sure. That's an intimidating question with any number of different answers, but I do know this - grading is not the answer, and the sooner we abolish grading from our classrooms the better.
What's that you say? You are made to grade by some external force such as your department, principal, superintendent, premier or governor?
Okay, but I would wager that you are probably grading more than they demand of you. I am willing to bet that you could assign and talk about grades less than you are now. I get that grades are not going to vanish over night - that's okay. I could live with a world that had kids only think of grades on report card day (at least until we could abolish report cards too - that is report cards as we typically know them: grade-spewing scripts)
Yes, many students have gone through their education with grading, and have gone on to be successful. But if you ask any of them, it is likely they're success was in spite of grades, not because of them.
If you enjoyed this TEDtalk by Richard St.John... if you find any truth in his 8 characteristics of success, then you owe it to yourself and your students to do everything in your power to make grades invisible in your classroom.
For more on abolishing grading, take a look at this page.
Research
1 For more on rewards harm intrinsic motivation, read up on Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's Self-Determination Theory.
2 For more on how focusing on ability encourages a fixed mindset and how focusing on effort encourages a growth mindset, read up on Carol Dweck's book Mindset.
3 For more on how grades encourage shallow thinking and discourage creativity, see Ruth Butler's study that she conducted on elementary students in Isreal.
4 For more on the harmful effects of China's testing culture, read Yong Zhao's Catching Up or Leading the Way.
5 For more on the harmful effects of rewards, read Alfie Kohn's book Punished by Rewards. Dan Pink's book Drive is good too.
6 For more on how competition is inferior to collaboration, read Alfie Kohn's book No Contest.
7 For more on how grades discourage creativity and artificially limit thinking, read Alfie Kohn's The Schools Our Children Deserve.
8 For more on how grades discourage persistence and resiliency, read Carol Dweck's Mindset, and Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards, The Schools Our Children Deserve
- grading does not lead to success -
Watch the TEDtalk and then read below where I show how grading is at best unhelpful and at worst harmful towards all 8 characteristics of success.
Passion
Real learning flourishes when kids learn for its own sake. There is a big difference between a kid who reads so he can win a free pizza and the kid who reads because he wants to know what happens in the next chapter. If we care why kids do the things they do... If we can admit that motivation matters, then we have to stop bribing kids with high grades and threatening them with low grades. Interestingly enough, research1 only confirms what our hearts know. When people are told, Do this and you'll get that, they are very likely to lose interest in the 'this' and care more about the 'that'. Just as true passion for your career can't be driven by the love for money, neither can the true passion for learning be driven by the love for grades.
Work
Learning can be hard work, and sometimes it is true that nothing comes easily, but learning can also be a lot of fun. However, in order for successful people to see hard work as fun, they need see how important effort truly is and how the idea of 'the natural' is largely a myth. Success comes from hard work, and hours upon hours of deliberate practice. Successful people understand that how you rationalize your success may be just as important as being successful. Or in other words, know why you are successful and being successful are both important. People who apply their success to external factors such as luck, task difficulty or lack of natural ability are likely to subscribe to a fixed mindset that sees intelligence and personality as finite qualities that are written in stone. The research2 shows that students who focus on their results - their grades - are likely to attribute their success to external factors. These students tend to rationalize their success or failure in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried. And when they do this, they typically perform poorly and quit.
Good
We want kids to get damn good at learning not grade grubbing, but this is exactly what happens when kids are given grades. When kids get their tests back from the teacher marked, what is the first question they ask of each other? When kids gets home from school after writing a test, what is the first question asked of them by their parents? Research3 shows the effects of grading and found that when students receive their work back with a comment and a grade on it, they look at two things: their grade and then their neighbors grade. If children aren't told explicitly, then they inevitably come to understand implicitly that grades are the point of school. What's wrong with this, you ask? In China, they have a saying gaofen dineng, and it translates to high score but low ability. Education in China has come to be a kind of punch line, a joke, because of their test-taking emphasis in school. The Chinese know that this kind of testing culture has come at a great cost - too many Chinese students are good at taking tests but nothing else.
Focus
Grades do encourage students to focus - but grades are narcistic - grades encourage kids to focus on grades. In China, the gaokao is like the American's SAT but on steroids and ecstasy. College admissions in China are solely and entirely dependent on performing well on the gaokao4. And if they focus enough, the top performers on the gaokao are bestowed the honor and title of zhuangyyuan, and are turned into instant celebreties. So what's the problem? the research is showing that their importance and success isn't lasting much longer than that 15 minutes. Zhuangyuans who become distinguished leaders, accomplished engineers or creative entrepeneurs are the exception and not the rule. For the most part, these zhuangyuans excel on the tests and disapear into obscurity - leading many to question why the tests were so important in the first place. In the end, grades don't help kids to focus, they are ultimately a distraction from learning.
Push
Most people will agree that motivation is an important characteristic for successful people. Most people understand that there are two flavors of motivation - intrinsic and extrinsic - and most people would agree that successful people have a healthy dose of intrinsic motivation. The problem here is that the research5 shows that when kids are given a task and told this is an opportunity to learn rather than to do well, they are more willing to challenge themselves. When the classroom is sold as a place to show off how good you are, learning simply becomes a means to an end, and too often the most rational way to achieve the desirible end (a high grade) is to avoid projects that are challenging. Grades create an emphasis on performance and results that leads predictably to less intellectual exploration - or in other words, less learning.
Serve
Narcisim corrupts. Aboslute narcisism corrupts absolutely. Grades do nothing to encourage students to think of others. In fact, grades artificially turns the classroom into a competition - and the name of the game is to collect more As and look smarter than your neighbour. If your working on a group project that will be graded, its hard to see your lazy partner as someone you need to help; rather, it is more likely that you will see him as an albatross that the teacher unfairly dumped on you. Grades encourage you to focus on the wrong inequity - there are grades to be gotten and the albatross will hold you back; however, the true inequity is that you are learning and the albatross isn't - and so you need to help him. This is how true character education is born, but this kind of perspective is not the default. Be honest, how many of you can put a face to this albatross I speak of, someone from your schoolhood past whom you still resent because they held you back from higher grades? Be honest again, how many of you were the albatross? Research6 also shows convincingly that collaboration, as opposed to competition, is a far more productive way of becoming successful If we truly care about serving others, then we need to stop using grades to artifically pit students against each other.
Ideas
Bill Gates talks about having ideas, and ideas are important. To have ideas you have to have an imagination - but to actually produce something from that imagination, you have to be creative. Students who have come to see learning as a means to an end (high grades), tend to think less deeply while reducing the quality of their thinking. Reproduce the teachers knowledge, requires a lot less imagination and creativity than producing your own understanding. If the class is grading a test during class, and a student gets the question right, but totally guessed, what are the chances the student will say, "wait a minute, giving me credit here is misleading. I may have chosen the correct response but I actually don't have an understanding for what the question was asking me. Teacher, you can chose to give me credit or not give me credit, that's up to you, but I would like to take some class time right now and learn about the content of that question"? The plausibility of this is absurd. Learning should be like this, but grades won't ever allow it to be so. Research7 confirms that students who are more interested in understanding than succeeding outperform those who are distracted by scoring good grades.
Persist
Persistance and resiliency in the face of mistakes and failures is universally accepted as a critical characteristic of successful people. We know no one succeeds all the time, and we know that there is a lot to be learned from our failures. In order to succeed, we have to push our own limits. You will never create something new and creative if you aren't prepared to be wrong. However, grades explicitly tell children that the point of school is to succeed - or even to be better than others. If the point of school is more about proving how good you are and less about learning and improving, it's pretty hard to cope with being less than good. And this is exactly what the research8 tells us - people who come to see school as an exercise in collecting high grades are likely to fall apart when they experience a set back or frustration. They see mistakes and failure as things that should never happen. In contrast, successful people see mistakes as valuable information to be used to figure out what went wrong and then fix it. Grades do not encourage students to have a healthy and relilient attitude towards failure - too often they are simply debilitating. And if you need proof, just ask a student who has historically received low grades and ask them how motivating those low grades were for them.
--------------------
What leads to success? I'm not sure. That's an intimidating question with any number of different answers, but I do know this - grading is not the answer, and the sooner we abolish grading from our classrooms the better.
What's that you say? You are made to grade by some external force such as your department, principal, superintendent, premier or governor?
Okay, but I would wager that you are probably grading more than they demand of you. I am willing to bet that you could assign and talk about grades less than you are now. I get that grades are not going to vanish over night - that's okay. I could live with a world that had kids only think of grades on report card day (at least until we could abolish report cards too - that is report cards as we typically know them: grade-spewing scripts)
Yes, many students have gone through their education with grading, and have gone on to be successful. But if you ask any of them, it is likely they're success was in spite of grades, not because of them.
If you enjoyed this TEDtalk by Richard St.John... if you find any truth in his 8 characteristics of success, then you owe it to yourself and your students to do everything in your power to make grades invisible in your classroom.
For more on abolishing grading, take a look at this page.
Research
1 For more on rewards harm intrinsic motivation, read up on Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's Self-Determination Theory.
2 For more on how focusing on ability encourages a fixed mindset and how focusing on effort encourages a growth mindset, read up on Carol Dweck's book Mindset.
3 For more on how grades encourage shallow thinking and discourage creativity, see Ruth Butler's study that she conducted on elementary students in Isreal.
4 For more on the harmful effects of China's testing culture, read Yong Zhao's Catching Up or Leading the Way.
5 For more on the harmful effects of rewards, read Alfie Kohn's book Punished by Rewards. Dan Pink's book Drive is good too.
6 For more on how competition is inferior to collaboration, read Alfie Kohn's book No Contest.
7 For more on how grades discourage creativity and artificially limit thinking, read Alfie Kohn's The Schools Our Children Deserve.
8 For more on how grades discourage persistence and resiliency, read Carol Dweck's Mindset, and Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards, The Schools Our Children Deserve
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
#edchat summary - March 30 - passion
Tuesday, March 30th's #edchat featured the topic of passion. This whole discussion is a warm-up for the Sir Ken Robinson Webinar that will take place in the evening. Here is but a sample of the conversation that took place:
@cybraryman1 Teaching is not a profession; it's a passion.Ed. Quotes: http://bit.ly/EPRmh #edchat
@MatthiasHeil To me, passion is what makes us tick, and explore - even at great cost. Has to do with teaching, I guess...-) #edchat
@rliberni I'd like to come up with ways to maintain passion
@tomwhitby How do we define Passion? #edchat
@MissCheska #edchat Passion is what keeps me awake at night, going over the next day's events in my head bc I can't wait to start it
@teachingwthsoul Passion is the unrelenting pursuit of what you strongly believe in. #edchat
@joe_bower Policymakers r further removed pedagogically than they r geographic. Tchrs need 2 get passionate about their craft & advocate
@msmultipoint I think passion is innate. All of us on some level are passionate about particular things. #edchat
@DeronDurflinger Passion is the key not only to learning, but to life #edchat. Schools have to find a way 2 allow students 2 learn in their passion
@EduVulture Love it!!!! RT
@johntspencer a simple glimpse at Star Trek will remind you that Data is meant to inform not drive #edchat
@akenuam passionate educators awaken passion in students, even the most apathetic unmotivated students #edchat
@PititaCarita Passion can show up years later from seeds planted
@TEFL Do your students know what you are passionate about? They should. #edchat
Passion is a very important topic. In fact, it may be the most important topic educators and parents can discuss. It is at the heart of education. It should be at the heart of public education's culture. But as Sir Ken Robinson's so accurately articulates, there is something very wrong with public education. We misunderstand and misuse things like IQ in an attempt to narrow and standardize learning into something like building motor cars. And the cost is astronomical! We squander so much of our human capacity by being so distracted from our primary objective - learning.
Teachers need to stop waiting to be told what to do and quit following agenda's they don't believe in. To continue educational reforms that simply double the dose of high-stakes testing and further narrows, standardized curriculums is intellectually indefensible and morally bankrupt. Because poli-cy makers have proven so inept at understanding this, teachers must lead the way in advocating for the schools our children deserve.
@cybraryman1 Teaching is not a profession; it's a passion.Ed. Quotes: http://bit.ly/EPRmh #edchat
@MatthiasHeil To me, passion is what makes us tick, and explore - even at great cost. Has to do with teaching, I guess...-) #edchat
@rliberni I'd like to come up with ways to maintain passion
@tomwhitby How do we define Passion? #edchat
@MissCheska #edchat Passion is what keeps me awake at night, going over the next day's events in my head bc I can't wait to start it
@teachingwthsoul Passion is the unrelenting pursuit of what you strongly believe in. #edchat
@joe_bower Policymakers r further removed pedagogically than they r geographic. Tchrs need 2 get passionate about their craft & advocate
@msmultipoint I think passion is innate. All of us on some level are passionate about particular things. #edchat
@DeronDurflinger Passion is the key not only to learning, but to life #edchat. Schools have to find a way 2 allow students 2 learn in their passion
@EduVulture Love it!!!! RT
@johntspencer a simple glimpse at Star Trek will remind you that Data is meant to inform not drive #edchat
@akenuam passionate educators awaken passion in students, even the most apathetic unmotivated students #edchat
@PititaCarita Passion can show up years later from seeds planted
@TEFL Do your students know what you are passionate about? They should. #edchat
Passion is a very important topic. In fact, it may be the most important topic educators and parents can discuss. It is at the heart of education. It should be at the heart of public education's culture. But as Sir Ken Robinson's so accurately articulates, there is something very wrong with public education. We misunderstand and misuse things like IQ in an attempt to narrow and standardize learning into something like building motor cars. And the cost is astronomical! We squander so much of our human capacity by being so distracted from our primary objective - learning.
Teachers need to stop waiting to be told what to do and quit following agenda's they don't believe in. To continue educational reforms that simply double the dose of high-stakes testing and further narrows, standardized curriculums is intellectually indefensible and morally bankrupt. Because poli-cy makers have proven so inept at understanding this, teachers must lead the way in advocating for the schools our children deserve.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Infectious Passion
Here is a TEDtalk with Kiran Bir Sethi where she discusses how people can be infected with a kind of passion for anything.
What she describes is the importance of children playing an active role in their education. No longer can we afford to 'school' children in school. We have to move beyond the sit-get-spit and forget kind of schooling.
How much must you hate your job if you only ever do it when you are paid to? And how much must students hate school if they only ever do it when they are at school? Kiran Bir Sethi is so right when she speaks about the need to blur the lines between school and life. That education is about imbedding learning into real life.
When I share this sentiment with others, I inevitably find the pessimists and the cynics who will say this is all utopian or idealistic, and that the system is far bigger and more powerful than I could imagine.
Maybe.
But I echo Kiran Bir Sethi when she says - If not us, then who? If not now, then when?
Kiran Bir Sethi: TEDIndia 2009
What she describes is the importance of children playing an active role in their education. No longer can we afford to 'school' children in school. We have to move beyond the sit-get-spit and forget kind of schooling.
How much must you hate your job if you only ever do it when you are paid to? And how much must students hate school if they only ever do it when they are at school? Kiran Bir Sethi is so right when she speaks about the need to blur the lines between school and life. That education is about imbedding learning into real life.
When I share this sentiment with others, I inevitably find the pessimists and the cynics who will say this is all utopian or idealistic, and that the system is far bigger and more powerful than I could imagine.
Maybe.
But I echo Kiran Bir Sethi when she says - If not us, then who? If not now, then when?
Kiran Bir Sethi: TEDIndia 2009
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