As Boring As We Want to Be

"The systems are analog and the students are digital" -- Congressman George Miller.



Consider this my mission statement for the 2011 school year.

I have heard it so often for so long now that it's become the mantra of my students: school is boring; it isn't relevant; we do what we have to in order to get our "A" and then we let the 'knowledge' ooze out our ears as we walk out the door after we fill in the bubble test . . .

At the same time, I hear colleagues lament how entitled these students are, how they can't relate to what we have to offer them, how just won't work.

They want us to entertain them; we want to educate them.

But are 'entertainement' and 'education' mutually exclusive?

A colleague often voices his derision over the newly coined term, "edutainment."  He makes some great points - what will happen when they get out in the real world and their employers aren't willing to entertain them?  What will happen when they get to college and have to survive a freshmen chemistry class of 600 and all their professor does is lecture and give a mid-term and final?  What will happen when they tire of the newest form of edutainment (ooh, great . . . We have to watch another YouTube video!  Or ooh, great . . . We have to sit through another PowerPoint!  Or, ooh, great . . . We have to use the internet yet again!).

These are valid concerns, but I don't buy them.

Why not?  Because even after 13 years of teaching, I'm still a student, and I don't tire for a second of having knowledge packaged in appealing or convenient ways.

Don't believe me?  Just look around some time when we have an in service and the presenter is lecturing.  You text me and tell me how many people (including yourself) you see tuning out and whipping out their phones, reading the paper, grading papers, or drawing up plays.

And when we have a presenter that incorporates technology and is engaging and personifies the best of what we call 'edutainment,' you won't even be able to text me how many people you see tuning out . . . because odds are you will be just as engaged and motivated to learn as the rest of the crowd.

Yet, we rarely adopt those best practices.  Instead we say "wow that was really something, but it wouldn't work for me . . ." and we head back to our classrooms to (often) do what we have always done, which I believe if you delve in deep enough to exercises and assignments and projects is probably not that different than what we had to do when we were students decades ago.

So much for progress.

And we wonder why students are bored, tired, or just plain fed up with school. Or in the best case scenarios, students sit quietly when needed, answer questions when needed, and do well on the tests when needed.  This is what Denise Pope Clark calls Doing School.  And it passes for education far too often in our schools.


I don't see why we would settle for this --

or this



When we could strive to be this instead --



or this




Just today as my College Comp II class discuss the introduction and first chapter of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, students talked about how they wished school was more engaging, like video games or athletics or CAP. . . well, just about anything done outside of school.

Johnson makes a great point in his book: "If you create a system where rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you'll find human brains drawn to those systems, even if they're made up of virtual characters and simulated sidewalks.  It's not the subject matter of these games that attracts . . . It's the reward system that draws those players in, and keeps their famously short attention spans locked on the screen" (38).

Why can't we structure our curriculum in that same way?

Students say they love gaming and athletics because they get several things - instant feedback, a chance to create, the opportunity to immerse themselves in an environment where they are forced to make numerous decisions, a feeling of belonging to a community, a willingness to work insanely hard to attain a goal (Johnson claims that the dirty little secret about gaming is how much time you have NOT having fun), the ability to learn as they literally play or do that which they are learning about.

How often does this happen in school?  When are students able to get instant feedback (cell phones do allow for this somewhat . . . if you take advantage of them)?  When do students get a chance to create something original (I have to admit that I think we do a good job here.  I see kids working on iMovie or Keynote projects all the time)?  When are students forced to make decisions (as opposed being told what to think.  Or being beaten down over the years of schooling so that they are conditioned to just sit and wait for the teacher to tell them what to think)?  When do you ever see students willing to work hard to attain a goal?  And, finally, when are students able to teach themselves or each other?

Of course, much of what I'm talking about here are the higher order thinking skills of Bloom's Taxonomy.  A quick Google search revealed this image.

Bloom's Taxonomy


Now how often do schools allow students to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate?  How often do they get to make impactful decisions and create meaningful projects?

While I looked over the image, I saw what amounted to a slap to the face of secondary education.  Just look at the lower right corner where they basic skills of knowledge and comprehension reside.  You'll see on the right hand side that these areas are covered by high schools.  Is that all we're capable of?  That's an insult.

But when we are often as boring as we want to be, we bring it on ourselves.

I'm not saying school has to be one big video game.  I don't want that for a second.  I do, though, want some serious attention paid to how and why we teach.  One benefit of the (genuine) learning that occurs outside of school via gaming or sports or whatever students find personally fulfilling (restoring cars, working on motors, building and remodeling, writing code or hacking into computer data bases) is that it is typically faithful to Vygotsky's zone of proximal development.

Here is a diagram of what learning according to Vygotsky's theory should look like.

Video games brilliantly incorporate this into their development.  And it is one reason they are so addicting - people are learning and thinking.  It's just that we might not value the knowledge that is being gained.  Fine.  I too doubt what knowledge a person gains from such games as Grand Theft Auto or Dead Space.  But I think educators could learn a great deal from the fact that kids are devoting hours and hours to learn and think, even if it's a different way of learning and thinking than we are used to valuing.

Ask yourself this - what would a graph of thinking in our courses look like?  Hopefully, not a flat-line.  But when asked how often students are truly engaged, the results suggest that we are running a morgue.


Here is what a former class had to say about being engaged during the school day.

Here is what they elaborated on regarding the question.

Here is what those students had to say about being bored in school.

And here is what they elaborated on being bored.

Now, I'll concede that I'm all for variety in teaching. We all don't have to be techies or the "sage of the stage" or even the new "guide on the side."  We all have heard it before: students learn in a myriad of ways. Howard Gardner was right - we have multiple intelligences (linguistic, mathematical, musical, kinesthetic, spatial, and interpersonal). The problem arises that schools have historically catered to the 'biggies,' namely linguistic and mathematical, which tend to historically lead to lecture and rote memorization.

(And to find out what type of intelligences you possess, click here).

After all, how did you spend the bulk of your time in class when you were a student?

I bet it didn't take long to answer that question. Let me venture a guess, taking notes and listening to lectures? Right?

I hope I'm wrong. Or at least partially wrong.

For the record, I spent a lot of time taking notes on grammar and memorizing vocabulary. (Now, teaching grammar is almost a total waste the way it is (or has been) traditionally taught and I learned far more about vocabulary by reading extensively and either looking up the words I didn't understand or asking my mother than I ever did by taking weekly vocab tests).

Time came out with an interesting article some years ago (How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century) in which they argue that if old Rip Van Winkle were to wake up in our modern world, there would simply be two things he'd surely recognize: churches and schools, for neither have hardly changed over the years.

What hasn't changed in our culture? If you haven't noticed, the students most certainly have. After all, when I started teaching at Lincoln 13 years ago, I had to crack down on students using the bathroom pass all the time in order to use the one public phone in the whole school.  Now, that phone is rarely used.  If I have 20 kids in a class, I most likely have 20 different phones in the class.

I just can't teach the same way I did 13 years ago.  I suppose I could, but my students would be missing out.  They are vastly different than the students 13 years ago.  So why teach them the same way?

These students demand so much more.  Suddenly, my students went from consumers of knowledge, to what many call prosumers of knowledge.  Just look at how much students are able to create and decide outside of school: design and update webpages, blogs, and Facebook pages.  Compile vast amounts of music and videos on their mp3 players, creating playlists with ease.  They can upload video (via youtube) or their writing (Scribd) or their slideshows (slideshare) to the web in minutes.  They can conduct meaningful research for free (zoomerang). Thirteen years ago, I was the main audience for what most of my students did.  That is not even close to the case anymore when a student can upload a video to youtube and have hundreds of people view it from all over the world.  Or they could upload the grandfather they wrote for my class to Scribd and expose it to the world.

For all we know about multiple intelligences, how often do we seek to engage (more about that later) our students via these different ways of learning?

I bet it's rare. Again, I hope I'm wrong.


But in case I'm not, I say "Bring on the Learning Revolution"





And here are some more ways of engaging (rather than enraging) students.

Marc Prensky, Keynote

View more presentations from HandheldLearning.

Engagement as Information Prosumers

Education as Information Prosumers





Our students live in a digital age.  Something as simple as a blog - like this one - can allow them to incorporate such a broad range of areas (hypertext, writing, video, music or iTunes, slideshows, and gaming) and can illustrate how easily a teacher can use these various mediums to engage their students.  If a geezer like me can do it, just imagine what our kids could do when we turn them loose.