Interesting

I was asked last week to speak at to the TRF Rotary in January.  Since then I've been kicking around ideas to talk about: teaching millennials, how education has changed in the 15 years I've been teaching, engagement, enchantment, the flat classroom . . . But I think I've found my topic, thanks to this link from Twitter.

The title is "To Stay Relevant in a Career, Workers Train Nonstop."

This reminds me of a question I posed to faculty members several years ago: "What is the most important knowledge we can teach our students?"

As you can imagine, the responses were wonderful and varied.  I think my favorite is also the simplest: "To learn."

I think that one - volunteered from Mr. Powers, one of our math teachers, - fits well with the thesis of the story above.

Look at these quotes -- and then tell me if we are really preparing our kids to handle these tasks.

When he could not find a good curriculum for information architecture, he and a colleague developed one themselves. 

As a pretext to learn from the luminaries in his field, Mr. Hallock even produces his own podcast.

“You’re always reaching for something that’s kind of like unknown, because you don’t know what is really going to be the future,”

The need to constantly adapt is the new reality for many workers, well beyond the information technology business.

Car mechanics, librarians, doctors, Hollywood special effects designers — virtually everyone whose job is touched by computing — are being forced to find new, more efficient ways to learn as retooling becomes increasingly important not just to change careers, but simply to stay competitive on their chosen path.

“Being a generalist is, in my view, very unwise. Your major competitor is Wikipedia or Google.”

They have experimented by paying employees to share their expertise in internal social networks, creating video games that teach and, human resources consultants say, enticing employees with tuition help even if they leave the company.

The struggle is not just to keep up, but to anticipate a future of rapid change. 

 The bulk of her learning has been on the job, supplemented by the occasional course or videos on Lynda.com.

In an economy where new, specialized knowledge is worth so much, it may seem anticompetitive to share expertise. But many professionals say they don’t see it that way.

Mr. Moss, 55, said technological advances and proprietary diagnostic tools had forced many garages to specialize.

On top of that, he has to master constantly evolving technology. “The amount of information that I learned in medical school is minuscule,” he said, “compared to what is out there now.”



Just look at the words I highlighted.  Ask yourself, is my kid learning those things in school right now?

No.

That's the simple answer.  I think we are educating students, on the whole, for jobs 10 years ago.  

But if we - as Mr. Powers noted - teach kids how to learn (or to use a buzzword - to become life long learners), then we at least have given them a fighting chance.

But if we turn out kids who are turned off to learning, then we're screwed.

One problem that we have LHS have run in to is that we have had staff - especially in the English department - cut (we are actually down 2.5 positions since 2002).  So how can we hope to design classes in specialized areas (such as tech writing) when we just don't have the teachers to teach those classes?

Yes, I know there are some staff who struggle as much as modern workers staying current in their field.  It's not easy.  And it's scary as hell.  But constantly tweaking and updating what we teach (and why we teach it) is vital.

How often do we allow our kids to create? To adapt? To anticipate? To learn on the go? To share their expertise? To experiment?

Not nearly often enough.