Literacy in the 21st Century

Tonight I was over on Tom Vander Ark’s blog.  TVA, you might remember, was formerly of Bill Gates’ ed foundation and one of the short-listed candidates in the last LAUSD Superintendent search–the one that yielded. . . da-da-da-dah. . . Admiral Brewer.  He’s posted a bit from Fareed Zakaria’s interview of Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google:

ZAKARIA: And we are back with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google.

You know, I wonder about how we educate kids. I watch, you know, my kids go to school. And one of the things they have to do with great — what takes a lot of time is to learn to spell properly.  Is it worth teaching people how to spell properly in a world in which every — there’s spell checks everywhere?

SCHMIDT: You can imagine education changing a lot. After all, when I was growing up, they forced me to memorize everything. But now, why do I need to remember that? I just need to learn how to search for it.

So, whether it’s Google or your other choices for getting information, teaching will be learning about how to ask the right question, and then sorting through the choices and answer.

Most people now believe that the right way to think about education is, rather than a fixed textbook, rather here’s a subject, here’s a subject, here’s a subject. You guys go figure it out. All the information is out there now.

What you really need to do is to teach people to be curious.

After a grueling post-Thanksgiving-vacation day trying to get thirty-two 5th graders to focus but instead seeing them write gems like

I was board on the brake

I was ready to worship anyone who told me not to worry about spelling.  Really, I was.  But in my heart of hearts, I knew the discussion didn’t fly.

Put the lovely sentence ‘I was board on the brake’ into Microsoft Word’s spell check and you get:

The spelling and grammar check is complete.   OK.

Now I wouldn’t mind my student’s sentence at all, if, as I’ve been trying to teach my class, you use language and mistakes to create a comic strip or some sort of wild invention.

Imagine a surfboard cruising the Venice boardwalk equipped with wheels and gears and brakes. . .

or skinny-jeaned skateboarder high fiving his slouching friend: “Dude, I was board on the brake!”

(translation: “that was so amazing I cruised right through even though everyone was trying to stop me!”)

Connect language to visualization and see what emerges:  metaphors. . . poems . . . Rube Goldberg machines. . . collages. . .characters. . .

Creativity, in my classroom, forgives a lot of sins.

But of course that’s not how the student used the sentence.  Quite the opposite.  It meant to convey  disengagement (with a vacation?!!!) and, quite unintentionally, enacted those feelings in its very own structure.  Board-bored, break-brake, who cares.  Those details or rules don’t matter (even though the kids have been learning homophones since 2nd grade).  Those details or rules don’t matter because they’re not entertaining.  I don’t want to pay attention to them–that’s what my student was thinking.  It’s boring, Ms. B., he said when I asked him.

Boring.

Everything is boring.

Could you find a way to make it interesting, I asked him.

I completely agree with Schmidt and Vander Ark.  We need to help students rediscover and value their own internal curiosity.   We need to generate sparks.  If you’re curious, nothing is boring, especially not your mistakes.

But that doesn’t mean you don’t pay attention to details & rules.  You can only make those poems and machines if, in the first place, your mind can visualize the difference between board and bored and break and brake.  You need to know the grammar in order to improvise.

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