A Very, Very, VERY Long Road

Supposedly, I'm on the home stretch of what has been a very long, intensely painful, very miserable four years. It involves finishing a dissertation, prepping a 10-day summer institute for Chinese teachers, and revising a paper required for graduation--all in the next three weeks. (We won't even talk about the cross-country move that awaits me after that.) From my vantage point, the road ahead looks very long, very muddy, and filled with irritating mosquitoes (like IRB renewals)!

I'd rather be writing about the abundant life that fills the rest of the world, like the inch-long ant (seriously!) that came to visit me last night, my favorite tree--perfect in every season, the bird parents that faithfully feed the babies that live above my balcony at 5:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., or the idyllic farmscapes on the way to my friend's houses. I guess "real" life, and its accompanying stories, will have to wait for another day.

For now, here's the Twitter version of my dissertation (plus a few additional characters):



The world has changed. School hasn't. Although learning is inherently joyful, school is absolutely mind-numbing. Most educators lack the vision and the transliteracy skills to create compelling learning environments. High quality professional development shifts perspective through powerful paradigms, playful pedagogy, and the modeling of multiple representations. As teachers view their professional responsibilities through new lenses, changes in their practice follow.

And this is the Twitter version of my current take on graduate school: Dissertations make you dumb!

A Dangerous Presumption

I know a five-year-old who is intrigued by the way things work. He can tell you all about the mechanics of any number of things and is especially enamored of trains. Although he prefers to explore the history of their development and their technical specifications, the extent of the train offerings in the children’s section of local libraries tend to be limited to Thomas the Tank Engine. I know another child who has developed an interest in astronomy. Of course, the only information his mother can find in the local library insists that Pluto is still a planet. I am also acquainted with an eight-year-old who can engage political science professors in discussions of political theory . . . in Asia. That same eight-year-old is fascinated by string theory and fractals. However, after perusing the shelves of the children’s section of the local bookstore in search of high quality, conceptually rich, factually accurate materials that would provide him with a solid foundation in the key ideas behind the theory (such as the String Ducky video from Discover Magazine’s String Theory in 2 Minutes or Less Contest), I discovered that they don’t exist.

Meanwhile, books ostensibly written for the “average” non-scientist adult are so full of text and mathematical equations and so lacking in pictures that they are basically incomprehensible–even to a highly educated adults, unless they happen to be physicists, of course!

My point is three-fold. The first is that the proliferation of information and the speed with which it can be disseminated has resulted in an increasingly acute need for students to leave schools equipped with the cognitive flexibility to adapt to rapid change, the creativity to generate innovative solutions to complex problems, and the transliteracy to create and interpret meaning across cultures, genres, and platforms. Yet, there is little in the children’s sections of our local libraries and bookstores that would build the interest, understandings, or skills from which future innovations in traditional fields could be leveraged, much less in fields like design, environmental sustainability, photonics, or quantum computing. The second is that the majority of teachers lack even basic digital literacies (which might explain why so many of the tools critical to developing them are banned or blocked in most schools) and are therefore ill-equipped to guide students toward suitable alternative resources online. The third is that the presumption that children’s interests are narrow and that their capacity for understanding is limited is a very dangerous one. What’s more, it is often untrue.

In The Little Prince, St. Exupéry lamented the inability of grownups to understand anything of real consequence. I suspect that many of the children I know would heartily agree!