Bud the Teacher

Clay Burell’s challenged me (or tagged me, or whatever) to engage a meme that he’s passing along.  I might.  I’m bad about memes.  I don’t mean to be.  (And I am thinking about a good passion quilt image and will post one.  Eventually.  Thanks to all who tagged me.) But I did want to encourage you to read his post.  Mostly because of this idea about teaching Lolita:

I think I can say they all love it. I also think I can say they can handle it - and if they can’t, they should learn to, now more than ever.

As a high school language arts teacher, I encouraged my students to pick many of their own books in consultation with me and other trusted adults.  I would encourage you to do the same.  But that’s another post.

But when you do decide to read a book together, I’d ask that you never insult the intelligence of your students, emotionally or intellectually, by hiding the world from them through picking “safe” books.  Safe choices are pretty much always about you (or your administrator, or your school board) and not about your students.  They live in the worlds being represented in literature.  Many educators live in these worlds, too.  Let’s not pretend otherwise.  Instead, let’s challenge students to engage ideas and concepts that are weighty, essential and enthralling.

Let’s ask them to dream and to dare and to risk by talking about difficult ideas in safe places.  Let’s ask them not to agree with the stance of a particular author or book or teacher or administrator or board policy, but instead to struggle through finding their own way.  With help, of course.

Most good teaching is all about finding balance.  Safe and scary.  Old and new.  Today and tomorrow.  Child and adult.  Easy and hard.  Choice and “have to.” Too often in schools, we lean way hard on one side of the teeter totter and completely avoid the other side.

What fun is that?  And what good is it for anyone?

One hundred percent of my family is technologically literate. No, really.  I’ve got the numbers to back that up.

Here’s how I would report that to the Department of Education:

Number of members of my family: 4

Number who are technologicaly literate: 4.

If you know me or my family at all, I suspect that you would challenge my numbers.  Why?  Because two of the four members of my immediate family are children.  Young children.  One’s three.  The other’s a ten-month-old.  How in the world are they technologically literate?

See, what I did back there, and what most folks who collect statistics do all the time, is that I got to define my terms.  For the purposes of this data reporting, I have defined technologically literacy as the ability to turn the TV in our living room off with the remote control.  Everyone in my family has accomplished this action - although not all of them deliberately so.

I was reminded today, as I sat through a conversation about data reporting now and data reporting to come, that reporting a number in a column or a data field seems like such a simple thing.  How many computers do you have?  (Easy to answer - you can count.)   How many 8th graders do you have?  (Easy to answer.)  How many of them are technologically literate?  (Um.  Well.  That one’s harder.)

That last one all depends on how you’re defining technological literacy.  And how to assess it.  And we’re not all in agreement about the best way(s) to do that.  The devil continues to be in the details.  (Oh, and while we’re kind of on the subject, here’s an analysis of many of the different definitions of 21st Century Skills, which Nancy White happened to tweet along while I was in the other conversation. We’ve got lots of definitions, and now definitions of the definitions, but we still don’t know how to teach the blasted things.  Nuts.)

When you see a statistic, I hope that you are looking past the number and seeking the definitions and the methodology.  I hope you’re teaching your students to do so, too.  I continue to be worried that, for all the data we’ve got, it isn’t any good.