Thursday at 10
When an Apple falls from the Cupertino tree, the world listens to the earthquake and reports each aftershock. In the ramp-up to an anticipated Apple “event,” the predicto-blogs and tech columnists crank out preshocks. Edtechers from every basket, including Apple core-owners, Apple picker-enviers, and rotten Apple sighters, all stop and pay attention. This week was no exception. Predictions of Apple’s Thursday “event” at New York’s Guggenheim tallied over 4000 Google News results 20 hours before the event. By the time you read this, that number could easily exceed 10,000. Exciting but sad.
What if we and our students anticipated school as an “event” as widely discussed. What if the buzz about what we’d be learning were a topic for bloggers, consumers of learning, and every basket of self-proclaimed “expert”? Wouldn’t it be nice if just the kids in our classes generated as much excitement about what was going to happen Thursday at 10 am?
What if we asked our students: What will happen next Thursday at ten? What do you predict? What do you really wish it would be? Knowing what you know as a seasoned school-goer, what will you tell your audience to expect? Could you possibly shape the “event” simply through your predictions?
As teachers, how will we react to what they say, especially if they are brutally honest and predict something as unprecedented as peanut butter and jelly? Are we willing to allow some of their more unique or intriguing prophecies to come true? Are we willing to let our students make their own visions happen? Are we willing to act on their responses to, “What do YOU think?” It certainly is worth asking them to play the role of expert prognosticators. Try that as a writing/thinking prompt this week, if you dare.
