The Future of Education

For those of you who don't know me, I am a STEM teacher who also has Asperger's Syndrome. I like to think that I teach things that will be helpful to kids in their lives after school. However, I don't fool myself that everything I teach will be useful to the kids, or that all the subject matter that I teach will be helpful to them in real life. Take pre-calculus, for example. Most kids, unless they become engineers or something similar, will never use things like that in their lives. I mean, who in their right minds has ever needed to know the standard formula for an ellipse when doing their grocery shopping? This attitude has helped me immensely when teaching. Students see me as a realist and, when they ask me a question like, "What will I use this for?" which is a common question in math classes, I give them an honest answer like, "Nothing, really, but the problem solving skills might just help you one day!"

The other part of my job is as a Learning Specialist. A part of this job, it is my responsibility to assist students with learning how to learn, or, to put it another way, to help students figure out how their brain works, and find out strategies that they can use to help them learn better and figure out the world around them. So, in this job, it is my responsibility to help students work their way through the school curriculum, and become successful academically as we'll as socially. I also see it as part of my job to help introduce new tools and techniques to my fellow teachers that can help them in helping the students to become lifelong learners. Ultimately, I believe that, for every teacher I can help with additional tools to help the struggling learners, the number of people who can be helped becomes exponential.

Which brings me to my topic for the day. As an educator, I need to constantly question myself, "Is what I'm teaching today going to help my students in real life? What is the purpose to teaching them...(Functions, ellipses, Shakespeare, whatever the topic may be)?" If the answer is, "Because I have to," or, "It's in the curriculum," then maybe you should rethink the topic. Everything I teach should be for a reason, one that benefits the students in their lives, not just because someone or something said it was important for them to know.

Today, I was working with a student on a math topic, trying to find a way to get him to really understand a concept. I was finally able to do that with him, and when I asked him about his other classes, I found out that he wasn't doing well reading a work of Shakespeare. In looking at the weekly reports, his English teacher stated that he wasn't retaining anything from the play. So, I talked to him about the play, asking him what he though his problem was. Now, some kids don't think at a high enough level to respond to a question like that, but I've been working with him all year, and I have helped him to see how he thinks and how he learns. He realized that the language was an issue for him and that, "...even with the other words on the next page..." he was spending so much time trying to understand the words (which he couldn't), that he wasn't getting anything else. So we looked online and found a website with a more modern, conversational English translation for him to try. By the end of our time, he said it was much better and that he was able to understand not only the words, but the story as well. WIN for him, right? I thought so, BUT...

I e-mailed to the faculty, thinking that this was too great a resource to pass up. "Maybe it can help other students who are failing (like my student is) retain more of the story and understand it better," I thought. Well, almost immediately after I hit SEND, I got a reply from his English teacher saying that WE English teachers frown on this site since the language is the important part of Shakespeare, and if they need to work through it, then so be it. And, to make matters worse, this teacher responded to the faculty e-mail list, which was like a slap to my face.

So, what IS the point to teaching Shakespeare? Is it the language? Is it the style (tragedy, comedy, etc.)? If it's the language, why not have classes in 9th grade in Shakespearean English? BECAUSE IT'S NOT THE LANGUAGE! In my view, the point to teaching Shakespeare is to learn to appreciate a different type of literature. I feel that we need to reevaluate our curriculum, and those of us who teach because it's part of the curriculum, need to rethink our careers. Our world is changing, and we are, as I once heard in a talk on Learning and the Brain, "We are using an antiquated model to teach our kids for an advanced world. The educational model is closed-book, yet the WORLD is OPEN-book!" Knowledge is no longer the mark of an educated person, it is the problem solvers, the information creators that will be viewed as the educated people of the future. We, as educators, need to help our students get there, and it will not be through the curriculum of our generation.