I was viewing Will Emeny’s video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpeOQHKa01w&feature=player_embedded about improving mathematics when another chord was struck and I could hear and feel the ideas resonating throughout my being (one of the reasons behind the title for my blog). I recalled that I recently told my students as I have told their predecessors about the different ways in which we communicate. I always stressed that proficiency in communication was paramount. I reviewed that in school we communicate through body language, through speaking and listening and more often than not through written products. The major reason for the use of written products was its efficiency, there being many of them and only one of me. I also pointed to the books on the shelf and cited the efficiency of one author writing one book that can be transmitted to millions via the printed page.
However, until I watched Will’s video I never took that thought a step further and considered that my students by and large only had the benefit of me, their one teacher for the whole of this year. Therefore, what has been and will be communicated to them via the teaching establishment is limited to a little more than a dozen or so individuals in their school lives. Of course they are getting input from other sources, but our current system does have the advantage of placing them in front of us for quite a few hours out of their day. (Now of course they are learning from each other and from the various resources–but this is a “self-contained” classroom)
This brought me back to another thought I was sharing with my student intern this past year (see previous post). I told her that I was the filter for my students, information was transmitted through me to them. I envioned this like an hourglass, massive amounts of sand being poured in, through a narrow gap(me) and being distributed out to my students. Thus the transmission of information is limited to how much I can take in and how many different sources I have made myself available to. Since there are only 24 hours in a day, there are only so many books I can read, blogs I can peruse, workshops I can attend, in order to provide the richest possible experience for my students. I am pinching off the flow of what is possible for my students, I am filtering it and what if they are in particular need of something that I in my ultimate wisdom happened to have filtered out.
Now though we have the means of being even more efficient and proficient in our communication. In these times our students can more than ever have multiple input systems made available to them. And this idea was really at the heart of my rationale for having my students blog, so that they could have the benefit of more than just my eyes on their writing, receiving feedback from multiple sources, expanding their readership and that feedback will ultimately make them better writers and better thinkers.
Even if we had one source with multiple inputs, a wiki of some sort perhaps as Will suggests, there is still the problem of finding and selecting what it is you want or need. Even when you find one source it can be overwhelming. Recently I found a Live Binder that provided 100 sites on various aspects of music, immediately I felt deflated. Yes it was a wonderful resource I am sure and it probably contained something I wanted or needed but I did not have the time to sift through all of the sand looking for the one grain I needed. It’s like going to the store and being confronted with 60 different types of toothpaste, it’s no wonder that we pick the same brand we are familiar with, to have to choose is overwhelming.
Is this why we tend to end up choosing to teach the way we were taught, to teach the way we have always taught, to learn the way we have always learned? It is hard and uncomfortable to get out of our comfort zone. It is hard to experience disequilibrium but we must every once in awhile so that we can increase our learning. And so I must start small, a chunk at a time like the ants feasting on the elephant carcass, and the ant can’t eat the whole thing in one bite. And so I will continue to reach out as much as my half-century old brain allows, gathering in as many grains of information as I have capacity for and distributing them to my students all the while feeling slightly frustrated at the limitations I have as a vessel of transmission.