Death of Education is the Birth of Learning...

"I hate the Iowa Core." I hate this C3 Framework thing." "I learn best from worksheets." "What is so wrong with just reading from the book?" "I passed all my quizzes, what else do you want from me?" "Tell me what good this is going to do for me to pass the ACT or even for life for that matter." "I'm not even learning because you aren't teaching me anything."

So, the Death of Education is the Birth of Learning. What does this mean to me and what do I want from it? By definition, education means the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction especially at the university or school level. Broke down further, systematic: done according to a fixed plan or system; and instruction: detailed information telling how something should be done, operated, or assembled. By these Google definitions, I don't want education in my classroom. I do not want it to be systematic, I do not not want it to be a fixed plan, nor do I want to tell my students how something should be done. Education by these definitions needs to go away.

A quote that has remained with me since the beginning of the school year is, "If you understand everything you're doing, you are not learning." That was in my daughter's fortune cookie,

and it encompasses everything I want my classroom to be. Birth of learning begins with the teacher spending her time building a classroom where confusion reigns, questions are supreme, inquiry and processing are more important than facts, failure is an option, learning is authentic, content standards are met, skills are developed, students collaborate, and the walls of the school are just for structural purposes. I want my students, to put it in plain and simple terms... THINK. Think creatively and think critically. I want them to discover things I never knew and quite frankly, never knew enough to even wonder about. Learning. This is learning to me.

As most of us educators, certainly all of my PLN on Twitter, have come to realize; students have long learned the game of education and have slowly lost the excitement and overall zest for learning.  I also think we could all agree that once they leave the walls of their elementary classrooms, many of us middle school and high school teachers slowly drill and kill low level facts and meaningless information into their brains. The system becomes a set of hoops in which they need to jump through all under the guise of, "We are preparing them for their future." At Iowa's 1:1 Institute Leadership Conference, Patrick Larkin mentioned vision statements and school goals; if we really analyze our schools' mission statements and assessed how each teacher in the building actually was contributing to it; how would we rank? Are we preparing them for a future of unknowns by taking away their desire to learn? Taking away their creativity and zest for learning by telling what they need to know, how they will learn it, and when they will test on it; is this preparing them for their future?

To be completely honest, my students have given me reasons to smack my head against the wall, made me go home wondering why I even try to teach, made me question why I spend so many hours worried about them instead of my own children, and have literally pushed me to the brink of throwing my hands in the air and just calling it quits. In the same breath, however, I can barely wait to tell you these students are also the ones who challenge me intellectually, who carry stimulating conversations, are able to push me to become a better teacher through needed research and study in order to reach them; and have also given me a plethora of reasons as to why I am a teacher. I can honestly say, however, the specific examples in which I am currently thinking about in both positive and negative scenarios have nothing to do with the true definition of education. The frustrations and successes in which I am experiencing are all surrounded by the idea of pushing my students to be learners.

To return to the quotes at the beginning of the blog, these students range from high functioning to students receiving special education services; I strongly believe we are doing a disservice to them all. The push back from students is understandable; they have been immersed in an educational setting that is decades behind our business counterparts for the past ten plus years; this is a mind-shift for them as well. And it is hard. It is hard to think in the manner in which I am pushing them; it is hard to analyze, evaluate, and to be producers of knowledge. It is so much easier to be told and to be mere consumers.  I think we are all in need of making complete shifts in our teaching pedagogy in order to truly prepare our students for their future.  In order to make this happen, we need to get rid of the 'education' mindset and bring the 'learning' back to the focus. Yes, I can declare, I hope for the death of education and for the birth of learning.