Gopnik, author of The Scientist in the Crib and of The Philosophical Baby, was also in town at this time last year. I was fortunate to hear her talk then, juxtaposed alongside Carol Dweck, and to later chat with them both.
At about minute 48 of this September's talk, while answering a question about the impact of new 'entertaining' technologies on young children's learning processes (Xbox versus climbing trees), Gopnik makes the point that 6 to 16 is the age at which cultures begin training their young to become adults. So this is when they learn the hunting or farming or artisanal skills that they will rely on as adults within their culture. The optimistic side of her wants to believe that learning to use your thumbs to send texts is the modern day equivalent of leaning the throw a spear.
My first reaction is to disagree with that viewpoint. Up until the current generation, technology morphed at such a slow rate that the elders generally felt that teaching youth to use current technologies would be largely useful in their adult lives.
However, now we are finally at the point we can clearly see that today's bleeding edge technology will be extinct 30 years hence. "You used to use your thumbs to send text messages!!?"
Seen this way, probably the key purpose of using the latest technologies is too keep the imagination alive, so you can continue to be creative in whatever the next medium to emerge is. (By you in the last sentence do I mean the student or the teacher?)
When I got home my wife was on the verge of turning out the lights. When I told her about the class, she said that I should have caught All Things Considered last night. Claudio Sanchez, NPR's national education correspondent did a 8 minute piece on What Should Go Into A Teaching Degree? . Here are some of the lines that made her sit up.
Leila Christenbury, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va
Christenbury knows all too well that some education professors are clueless about kids and just about everything else that happens in classrooms these days. She once taught at a university in another state where students were baffled that some of their professors had never set foot in a school.Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, want to blow up some colleges of education and start over.
Education schools have, in many cases, become irrelevant and often of very low quality
Teach for America makes teaching sexy. It gets very bright people who would've never considered teaching to become teachers," Levine says. But, he says, "there's no evidence or very little evidence indicating that any of the alternatives are any better than the university-based programs
And then I discovered that the day before yesterday, Larry Abramson did another long piece (Career Changers Find Way Around The Classroom) in which he profiles a 25-year veteran of Citigroup who quit as VP in 2007 and is now teaching 33 first-graders.
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