Something Resonates Here!

September 04, 2006

Our Schools are Leaking!

In most schools, it has begun. We are forcing our children back into containers. For weeks, they have lived, played, learned, and worked without boxes -- through gadgets on their desks, on their laps, and in their pockets. Their schedule has been theirs -- often sleeping until 11:00, and playing and working until 3:00 and 4:00 the next morning. They have roamed a limitless realm of information with friends whose geography means absolutely nothing. Walls do not exist, because of the gadgets they carry.

And now, we are forcing them back into our containers -- container schedules, because they are back in learning containers (school and classroom), where they receive information from containers (textbooks and worksheets), tied to knowledge containers (standards) -- and we will seek to control their gadgets.

These gadgets are their links to information. They talk, text message, and google with their mobile phones, IM on their laptops, surf the world wide web, build and interact on MySpace, play Net-based video games and MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games). These gadgeted connections represent intellectual appendages to our children. They're like alien tentacles that grow from their bodies. We can't see them, but they are real. They are a part of how our children see and define themselves. These tentacles are the hands and feet that carry them where they want to go -- and as they enter our classrooms,

...we will cut those tentacles off.

The flow will continue. Their thoughts are still on the civilization they are building at home, the video they are producing with a friend from Norway, their new MySpace profile, or the song they're remixing for a boyfriend -- that is if they do not have their hands on a contraband mobile phone, text messaging another friend, with one thumb, under the surface of their desk.

Educators! Our classrooms are leaking!

Through their mobile phones, wireless handhelds, mobile game systems, their laptops, and a simple, yet pervasive sense of a broader world that ignores time and distance, our children’s attention is leaking out of our classrooms, our textbooks, and our state and national standards. The leaks have appeared and they will only expand and become more serious, the more we try to block, filter, and confiscate.

The question that confronts us today is...

Do we continue to container our children, amputating their intellectual appendages during “learning time?”

or

Do we try to integrate learning into the flow of their attention, taking advantage of the new porous nature of their lives, using these tentacles to connect children to the world that we are teaching them about?

This is a question that we can not put off another day, because our children are waiting. ..and it's answer is nothing less than the foundation of our future.