teachers who hate learning

yes, folks, this is a rant. put up your filter guard now, if that's how read.
i have been involved with several conversations recently aimed at increasing student engagement and active, personalized learning. these are important topics, and i think these are core goals for creating classrooms that invite and encourage learning, rather than assume and vacantly proscribe the same. the problem, however, has little to do with human nature, inherent student apathy or any of the other excuses we educators like to keep ready in our hip pockets to deploy in post failure self coddling . i'll return to this in a moment. be ready.
the buzz phrase of the day has of late been "buy-in." we need to increase student buy-in to create a culture of engagement within the classroom. yes. herein lies the floor slab of our problem: this converstation is one i regularly have with in-service and pre-service teachers who, in graduate classes, consciously aim at the minimum requirements to complete the class with a decent grade. many have completely disengaged from activities designed to provide insight into those activities that our students do all the time by their own volition, activities that offer incredible learning possibilities if we teachers understood how and why students do these things. e.g.: electronic social networking, video gaming, independent media creation (video, music, comics, visual art, writing, etc.) in most cases, i actually hear words such as, "i think that would be a lot of work. i just wanna get this done." the ugly head of the western-results-above-all monster reareth. and you wondered how "Git-R-Done" became our national mantra.
these discussions about student buy-in take place between teachers who are students, and who are unwilling or cannot even figure out how to "buy in" for themselves. i am afraid, within the educultural context of these graduate school classrooms, the student by-in discussion has become little more than pathetically doomed cul-de-sac smalltalk.
back to OUR students' buy-in: we are learning that modelling is one of the most effective methods of teaching. here's a new cliche'd maxim, because i am making it one: do not as i say if it is not as i do. as a group, our students are very observant. they pick up on everything we do, whether we pick up on it or not. we cannot embody poor learning teachnique and expect our students to develop good learning technique.
we are attempting to create a classroom culture that differs from that of the outside world. how can we change the way students learn if we are unwilling to change the way WE learn? students are apathetic because we have not shown them why our activities are important to them (sometimes the activities we design are not actually important, and students identify that as well). students only do enough to get the grade because, for over a century the grade has been the understood goal of formal education procedure. actual learning has been cast as the third-string benchwarmer/waterboy and is only brought into the game when we have either given up hope of winning or discarded the possibility of loss. most students play school with a tighter score, though, and consequently look off-field to see poor ol' learning sitting dejected on the sideline in gleaming white spotless disappointment.
and we are the coaches who keep it this way.
why not give true learning a little field time and strengthen the weakest link?

shifting from neutral

in or around 1998 i had an experience driving three friends and myself home the morning after a late night thunderstorm climbing trip in which i shifted the automatic transmission of my friend ben's 1982 honda accord into neutral while descending a long hill at 70 mph. in an attempt to shift back into Drive, i inappropriately moved the shifter toward Reverse. though the car moved forward at 70 mph while in Reverse for only a brief moment, the error was sufficient to do two things: it burned enough rubber off the front tires without even a glimmer of brake light to convince my tailgater t'was in his best interest to leave me a little more room and it converted a significant portion of the honda's internal transmission componentry into small pieces of ferrous debris. i spent a day, a sweatshirt and a couple hundred bucks laying the deceased to rest and replacing it with a salvage tranny.
cleverly embedded life lesson: shifting from neutral may result in an inappropriate reversal that can swiftly destroy one's means of moving forward.

blam!

we like to see comments on our blogs. activity on our pages let us know we are doing something useful to others, something that generates interest and thought in at least one or two people. however, i have noticed commercial commentary on a number of blogs, especially those of some of my classmates. i guess this is not a new phenomenon, but blog spam or blam seems a bit less checked that email spam. the conspicuously translated wording is very similar to the various viagra (and herbal analog) spam messages i get via email. does anyone know of a filtering widget or service that can help reduce these abusive commenters without blocking desirable contribution?

DOPA: onomatopoeia or necessary protection?

anyone care to comment on the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006 (DOPA)? this bill passed the house of representatives, but stalled in the senate before session ended, forcing a reproposal next session. i ran across a detailed reposted july 2006 discussion of DOPA at Vicki A. Davis's Cool Cat Teacher Blog. i particularly enjoyed one of the comments in which it was noted that many of the students who are the apparent targets of "protection" know more about how to protect themselves from malicious online activity than those designing this clumsy legislation. maybe we can help our lawmakers feel this one out. can we afford to block students (and teachers while at school) from using online networking and idea exchange tools? how might we decrease students' exposure to malicious activity without eliminating their ability to use the online tools available to learn and interact with their peers and the rest of the world?

one voice good, two voices bad

i ran a blogsearch for 'collaborative art' hoping to find like-minded collaborative artists and educators. instead i found this.
consider the following, quoted from the above-linked site:
"The best writing is always writing created by one person because good writing is characterized by an individual vision and style." ~Shelley Uva
is the best writing that which is produced by only one person? though this is written in reference to a particular type of writing, the comments seem to be intended as much broader strokes. can multiple authors produce a single piece of writing with strong voice and style?

zoomquilt

here is a gorgeous online collaborative electronic zoom project: the zoomquilt. what do you think about it?

social constructivism

i have been perusing dawn hogue's online english resources site and her many linked resources, finding a lot of content that relies on, operates in support of and discusses openly the social constructivist approach to learning and teaching. as is evidenced, i hope, by my last post, i believe this is an essential consideration in education, though it seems neither embraced nor understood by most educators. with the increasing importance of and reliance on wiki resources, social constructivism is the primary framework within which we are creating and accessing knowledge. i weep for door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen, though only for a moment, because they have become extinct as a result of the evolution of knowledge itself, not merely the changes in methods of knowledge development. as we change our ideas about what words, places, ideas and people mean, who can cause this change but we who think about them? education is not a unidirectional heirarchy as it once was. education operates in all directions: student to teacher, teacher to student, student to community, country to student, world to teacher, student to world, student to student. many of these avenues are restricted by one limitation of schooling or another. we are peeling these restrictions away bit by bit, though we seem to be approaching it in a straightlined chronological method, placing obstacles behind one another clearing only one at a time and without looking ahead to the next barrier. the collaborative communities i see forming will help change this, as each of us work on our own ideas and those of others, sidelining isolated patterns of thought to put collective cognition on the field. since we are all students as well as educators, it makes sense that we should learn how to teach in the same way we teach students how to learn.