Risk Taking Rush
If there were one thing I would like to model to the teachers I work with and students I teach, it is risk taking. Yes, I know that many teens need no encouragement to take foolish risks. (I raised two kids and taught hundreds, maybe thousands.) Those risks, the physical kind, are not the ones I am advocating. To be real thinkers, we need to be willing to share ideas out loud which might otherwise stagnate in silence inside our skulls — or insolently kick up a lasting intellectual headache.
A day or two ago, I was fortunate enough to hear that one of my presentation proposals was accepted for ISTE 2010 (the conference formerly known as NECC). It should not surprise me that, of my three proposals, this was the one that was the greatest risk: an idea I had never really shared out loud but had held for some time. I don’t know if I have ever even heard or read anyone on the topic. It is just an idea that had been kicking the dirt inside my head for quite a while.
The rush of validation I feel that others thought this idea was “worthy” is a rare occurrence. I can point to times in my life when I have felt the same way, always because I took the risk to step off a creative cliff. I want all teachers to feel that rush, to model it, and to help their students find it.
This may sound as though I am advocating for wholesale disruptive behavior or challenge to authority. Actually, I am simply saying that we, as teachers, need to say those things that we wonder inside. We need to say them to kindergarteners and to high school seniors. Such opportunities should not be reserved for professorial types or op-ed writers. We need to be honest when we question, muse, or mentally hum:
Sometimes I wonder why we teach this…
Was this really the cause of the civil war? The way out of the Depression? The Founding Fathers’ greatest hope?
What would Martin Luther King, Jr. say if he saw me teaching about him this way?
Why is this story the one they chose to put in this anthology?
Why is this work considered a masterpiece? It’s hideous.
I know we cannot confuse students by barraging them with risk-taking ideas when they have no solid ground, but dropping a few into the conversation once in a while is the most honest way we can help them find lifelong curiosity and innovative thinking of their own. Maybe you could raise a flag with a question mark and cliff icon as a signal when you ask them, but you must ask these things aloud.
You never know. You might be asked to speak at a conference among your peers and those you admire. Oh, the presentation topic that was accepted, you ask? “Dimensions of Creativity: A Model to Analyze Student Projects.” Guess I am kind of hooked on this creativity thing.
I’ve been re-reading a lot of primary sources in conjunction with my effort to move my class online this year, and in the process my students have read a number of Pliny the Younger’s letters, one of Suetonius’s biographies, and such. I’m constantly amazed by the verbal parsimony and sheer mindlessness of the textbooks we read, and the degree to which we have turned the ancient Romans into such bloodless people. Who knew it was possible to say so little in a thousand-page textbook?
I’m also startled, though I guess not surprised, by the degree of pushback from my administrative supervisors to return to standardized teaching forms using the self-same textbooks.
Comment by Andrew B. Watt — December 10, 2009 @ 10:55 pm