A curve ball today

Something surprised me today and still leaves me somewhat unsettled.

Whereas I feel like the reading is going pretty well so far (see my previous post), the group project that I debuted today is not leaving me with quite as much confidence.

The group project was one of the required forms that I presented at the beginning of the unit (that and the compare/contrast paper that is a common assessment across all eight sections of the course I'm teaching, taught by a total of three different teachers). My requirements on the project were few--draw on the stories of your own life experiences to teach us something. Create something to share with us what there is to learn from your life experiences. Integrate into project and/or presentation some text you find that connects in a meaningful way to Into the Wild.

To help explain why I was leaving this all so open, I showed them two youtube videos that both I think make essentially the same argument: schools do not line up with who our students are today. They are not presented with relevant, meaningful classrooms that actually engage their interests and thinking. "A Vision of Students Today" was created by a cultural anthropology class at Kansas State University two years ago. "A Vision on K12 Students Today" is similar but focuses on K12 students. As a teacher, I look at both of these videos as a direct plea to me to make my classroom meaningful, to give them room to design classroom experiences that will have relevance to their lives. That was my initial intent with the group project described above--a few general parameters but then lots of space for them to design something meaningful and interesting to them.

What surprised me was this: my students came up with a few readings of these videos I did not anticipate. Once young man said that the videos showed how lazy students are. If they would only focus and pay attention in class instead of Facebooking, they would be more successful. This interpretation never even entered my brain. I saw the detail about the KSU students Facebooking through class as an indication that the class wasn't relevant and meaningful, not that the students were lazy. Another interpretation from another young man in my class was that education is being ruined by technology, that clearly all these students are distracted by technology and if it just wasn't there they would be doing fine in school. I saw all of the mentions of technology as a plea to teachers to pull that world into the classroom world, to make what we ask them to do in our classrooms better merge with what they do in their lives outside of school. I firmly believe that if we don't do this, school could become obsolete in the minds of our students.

I was not prepared for these responses from my students. Not at all.

And I'm not feeling so much confidence in this group project to achieve the aims that I had for it. I don't see the excitement that I hoped for. I'm not seeing the outside-of-the-box projects developing that I thought would surface when I stepped aside and said, "create something." I'm not sure if I actually ended up directing its focus too much and something that is intended to provide space for students to build relevance to their lives is actually one more teacher-centered endeavor. Or maybe I didn't give enough direction and my students are already flailing?

I just don't know.

But I'll write later to describe how it has gone.

And I have my first discussion planned for tomorrow over the first chunk of reading. I would like to do what F. Scott did by sitting down in the back of the room, taking attendance, and letting them figure out that they better get discussing, but I'm not sure that would work (I don't have here the same kind of super-motivated students that he has in the classes he wrote about). But I do want to think about maybe doing it that way.

Signing off. M. Shelley.