Teaching Tip #6

Teacherscribe’s Teaching Tip #6

What purpose does school serve?  This is a key question in John Merrow’s The Influence of Teachers.

Purpose #1 – It’s where the knowledge is kept.

When Gen X (and every generation before us) grew up, schools and libraries were where the knowledge was kept.  If you had a question, you asked your teacher or used the Dewey Decimal system to locate the book that had the answer.  If you couldn’t do either, you had to talk to an older person who had already done those things to gain the knowledge.

Teachers under this scheme had a monopoly on the knowledge.

The World Wide Web and Google changed all that.

Any person with an internet connection and patience can gain vast amounts of knowledge that no single teacher could ever hope to gain.

Now we, in school and as teachers, have to realize that students can access just as much information as we can.  But that is not always a terrible thing.

An example from my class - Two years ago in College Composition I was introducing Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map.  The book is about a cholera outbreak is Soho London in 1854.  Now today in the developed world, cholera isn’t a huge threat to our existence, but it was a daily threat 150 years ago.

To hammer this point home, I was trying to paraphrase something I heard from a scientist who was talking about how the dinosaurs weren’t killed off by the six mile wide asteroid.  They were almost already dead, according to his theory, because of disease.  He went on to speculate that the disease that wiped out most of the dinosaurs caused them to die from dysentery, which is very much like cholera.  He went on to say that most life on earth has died from dysentery-like symptoms.

So, in my introduction to the book, I misspoke and said state that cholera has killed more life on earth than any other disease.

Right away, I noticed a student look at me, cock his head, reach into his bag, pull out his laptop, and begin fact checking me!

I had to backtrack and explain in more detail what I was trying to say.  Then he added what he found in his quick Google search, and we applied that back to the book.

In the old days, the students would have just had to take what the teacher said as the total truth.  But today, students can fact check anything!

I like that.