One of Pat Ciccantelli’s, our superintendent, favorite sayings is, “Kids don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care” and I couldn’t agree with him more. This is especially important to remember in today’s age of accountability in schools. Unfortunately, the pressure from outside sources through standardized testing, has some school personnel taking their eyes off of what is most important in schools. I have gotten some strange looks from teachers in our district when they hear me say that I’m not worried about the test scores. It is not that the scores don’t mean anything, but they should not be the driving force or central focus of our district. Our young people should occupy that place.
I say “young people” to avoid the term “students” as it, although widely used and accepted, feels too institutional to me while “kids” seems too informal and sends the message that our young people are literally minor players in their role at school . When I moved off of “students”, I first started using the term “learners”, but it never felt right either as it seemed too impersonal and sent the message that school is strictly about how our “learners” gain information. See what I mean about being impersonal? I suspect you might be wondering why I am so preoccupied with this vocabulary concept that seems to be fairly mundane. However, vocabulary and how we use it does mean a lot in the classroom. As an example, what helps you to visualize what is going on in the equation 3 x 4 more: three times four or three groups of four? Just a slight change in vocabulary doesn’t necessarily change the meaning, but can make a big difference in the clarity of the message. I don’t want our young people getting the message that they are a cog in the machine. To be honest, I think my rant on the use of vocabulary started with two machines that came to my attention this week.
The first was a video of Boston Dynamic's Atlas Robot demonstrating its agility culminating in a backflip. I was amazed by the video and what latest Atlas version can do, but it is the end of the video, in the “blooper” section, that really caught my attention. It showed Atlas actually making adjustments to keep its balance after one of the flips and even putting out its arms to catch itself after a different failed attempt. The second machine to open my eyes this week came from the Hanson Robotic's Sophia video posted on November 23rd. Where Atlas showed the agility advancements in robotics, Sophia showed the artificial intelligence (AI) advancements. It is my understanding that in this video, she was not “programed” to say what she was thankful for, but rather she was designed to weigh information and ideas from multiple sources, to reason, and then to offer a hypothesis for consideration which she then delivered verbally. I alluded to this idea of a cognitive computer in an earlier post “A Call to be more Cognitive in an Accelerating World”. I have to admit, when I first saw Atlas I thought of Terminator 2 and when I saw Sophia my thoughts immediately went to iRobot. However, where I quickly and ultimately landed on was something I heard Yong Zhao discuss while attending his talk on Education in the Age of Smart Machines at the Cleveland City Club.
Zhao emphasized that education is the “growth of human beings and not just a simple acquisition of skills” (This actually came up at minute 25 and 43 of the video, but I highly recommend watching all the 30 minute message and the question/answer portion). That “growth of human beings” is the difference between instruction and education and schools should be a place where young people come to get an education and not just instruction. In his talk, Zhao also references (minute 8:10) that those programs in school that are focused solely on raising test scores, Study Island comes to mind for me, should come with a “side-effects disclaimer”. Like a disclaimer for those medications you see on TV commercials, these disclaimers should state, “This program can raise your reading scores, but will make your children hate reading forever.”
Our goal, as educators, is not to raise test scores, but to help raise human beings. That is why the parents send their children to us. In the daily craziness that can take place in a classroom, it is easy to lose sight of that fact. However, it is something we can’t forget. Of course we are not there to enable our young people, that is not what I am saying, think of your own kids here. Don’t you love them enough to make the hard decisions as they grow up, so that you don’t enable them? I would encourage all of us to look at all of our young people in our classrooms in that same light. We aren’t manufacturing machines in schools, and even if we tried, what we “produce” would never be as efficient as machines are or will be. We are raising human beings and should be driven by that internal responsibility rather than the external test driven accountability system of today. That responsibility begins with looking at our young people as human beings everyday and act accordingly. If we do that, we will send the message that we care. This is important, because as Rita Pierson stated in her famous TedTalk (Every Kid Needs a Champion), “kids don’t learn from people they don’t like”. Happy Thanksgiving and Go Bucks!
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