This is my first attempt at a blog. It's going to be an educational blog...sort of. Maybe it's an UNeducational blog...an unlearning blog. I'm going to talk about some things that might not be very popular and maybe somethings that are.
I believe the education system needs to change. The grade nines that I am teaching this year are the same age as Facebook. To me, it's crazy that we still think we need to be teaching students in the same style as we have been teaching them since...I'm going to say it...the industrial revolution.
I have been out of teachers college for 11 years now. I was a supply teacher for two years, I did two years of Long Term Occasional (LTO) work and then worked 6 years as a teacher in a developmental disabilities class, (or Community Living Class as I like to call it) and now I'm finishing up my first full year back in the mainstream system. If you ask me, those six years in the Community Living Class were transformative for me as a person and as a teacher. I can't even tell you what I learned from those 10 kids, but I know they taught me more than I ever could have taught them! It was amazing. I had to change my entire paradigm about what I thought teaching was and what I thought it was supposed to be. It is through that lens that I believe we need to make some changes to the mainstream programming.
We're in the middle, but maybe even just at the beginning of a technological revolution, and just like the industrial revolution, I think we need to change some things up to make it work better for our students. We can't even pretend to know what the world is going to look like in five, ten, fifteen years, when our students are in the workplace, so how can we be so arrogant to assume that we know how to get them ready for "what comes next"?
The more reading and research I do about education, the more I am starting to believe that it is not my job as a teacher to "get them ready for what comes next", but to meet my students where they are and to build them up from there. As of right now, that's what this blog is going to be all about. How to build up my students from where they are to get them the skills that they might be able to use in a world which looks like something I can't imagine.
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