Making it through the gauntlet

I've been doing a lot of professional reading this summer in anticipation of my new role as a Teaching and Learning Coach.  I've got a three-year-old and a four-month-old, so in between playing and napping, I poured over texts by Joy Kirr, George Couros, and Kylene Beers and Robert Probst.  I love the direction in which education is going, but I can and will admit that I understand why the struggle for change and growth has been so real for us.

We all came to education with a certain idea of how education should look.  And that look was pretty much based on what we experienced as kids.  In fact, in the midst of this great educational transition, one of the largest points of controversy is with those who feel that "if it worked for us, why change it?"  I am so routinely frustrated by this line of reasoning, but not because of the frequency of its utterance.  My frustration lies in the idea that, if we really thought about it, the way we were educated didn't "work" for us.

I was an advanced student, and I genuinely enjoyed school, even during those socially awkward years like middle school.  When I was small I played learning games and watched educational videos on repeat.  I've always thought that I was one of those kids who just liked learning.  It wasn't until later (as in like this year) that I realized that I didn't enjoy learning; I enjoyed compliance.  In fact I relied on it and became anxious at the thought of not succeeding with compliance.

I've seen it in a couple places lately, the idea that we as children start out wanting to learn, but by the time we leave elementary, school becomes less and less appealing, until when we finally graduate and refer to schools as the "jails" we are dying to break out of.  And the big question is "what happened to cause this?"  The simple answer is that the traditional way of education "happened."  Being directed to read specific books that are completely uninteresting, to write reports and essays that always felt forced and for no authentic audience, and to memorize facts and processes with no real applicational understanding.  Sometimes topics would come up that interested us, so we gave a little bit more to them and potentially learned about new or interesting concepts as a result.  By and large though, we learned how to comply with the system, the gauntlet of education.

And that's where the frustration comes back in.  Those of us that persisted and continued to comply through the years did "well."  We finished school with good enough grades, and went on to either continue education or get a job that helps us feel successful.  But what could we have done?  If we weren't doing things because of compliance, but because we wanted to, how much further could we have gone?  And what about those people who didn't see compliance in school as important?  What of them?  They were usually deemed "lazy" or just "not that smart."  And once the system made that judgement, that was all she wrote.  Their course was set.

You know the type of classmates I'm talking about right?  I'm sure you had some; I know I did.  Kids who, when you spoke to them about their true interests or just about life, you saw brilliantly intellectual people.  But the system didn't foster their flame, so it died at the spark.  Sometimes they can get it back, and sometimes not.  But they should never have lost that flicker in the first place.  It was taken from them, really.

I'm not at all absolving myself from blame.  I spent the first several years of my teaching career doing the same things that I thought were what we were supposed to be doing.  Its only in hindsight that I see that I was perpetuating the problem.  With every assignment that isn't authentic or interesting, we are chipping away at whatever level of engagement a student can have with their own education.  Even though we don't like to admit it, it happened to us and continues still to our kids.  And it's something that has to change.  Just because we "made it" through, it doesn't make our current education system acceptable.

As I've gotten more involved in twitter and professional communities in education, I see more and more people who are in the same mindframe as me.  We know it's not okay and we are trying to fix it.  So I'm going to keep trying, and as these wonderful authors have suggested, I'm going to write about it.  If a lot of people read it and find it beneficial, awesome.  If not, that's okay too.  It's as much for me as for anyone else.  If we keep it all to ourselves, then what progress are we really making anyway?