Will writes today about the impulse some teachers have to face pedagogical difficulties by cutting the world down to size for students. Facing increased use of shoddy sources grabbed uncritically from the web, for example, some schools respond not by teaching critical skills but by doing the research for the students:
"I think it's better for everyone if we just give them a list of sites they can use when they do their papers," the principal said, "and tell them they have to have a certain number of those resources in the final product."
...Instead of teaching effective use of the tool, the easy way is to limit the reach of the tool, rein it in and limit its effect. If that is or will become the prevailing view, we are all in serious, serious trouble...
This impulse will probably always be with us -- how many times have we all sat in the faculty coffee room and heard a colleague list off the things students can't do, can't be trusted to do, won't do, don't want to do, etc.? The only remedy I know to this unteacherly cynicism and defeatism is to do something dazzling with our students and, even better, to help them do something dazzling of their own.
Luckily, we have some advantages that teachers and students didn' t used to have -- we have the massive, quirky resources of the web, we have publishing software, and we have models for collaboration inside classes, between classes, and between our students and others. And judging by the number of edubloggers who write every day, we have a pretty good supply of energy to devote to things we care about. I'm optimistic.
I wish, though, that we'd make more things that have staying power -- in Will's blog and in lots of other good sites, I read amazing things each day, and then they slide down the screen and into the archive and risk being forgotten. Don't we need a more visible model here among education bloggers of making something out this work we do alone and together? In the lingo of writing teachers, then -- we're getting pretty good at process, but where's the product?
I opened a book almost at random in the library today and happened upon a sentence that began, "Culture is a process..." -- and that's right, and we make lots of mistakes when we forget it. But products -- the important play or book, the historic speech or march, the invention, -- these things give us something to learn from and push off against as we move ahead with our projects and our lives. Let's make something once in awhile, let's put a stake in the ground and measure from there, let's place a cornerstone, let's write our names in the fresh cement, let's add a new wing onto the old building, let's write a new verse to the school song, let's change the mascot, let's not just do but make.