Angus King kicked off the NCCE conference on Thursday. If you don't know who he is, (I certainly didn't) he's the former governor of Maine, who brought laptop computers to all 7th graders in the state. King told this story about how much everyone hated his idea from the start. Kids would wreck them, it’d be a waste, they thought he was stupid, etc. He thought maybe people were just afraid of change.
You know, I don't think that was it, although, I do think people are afraid of change. I think people are much more self-centered, and they know that they got along fine in school without a laptop computer. I still think of myself as young. I'm turning 35 this year and when I think back to when I was in school, even grad school, no one had a laptop computer. No one! They could be purchased by the time I was in grad school eleven years ago, but no one owned one. They were huge and clunky. We all, including myself, went to the computer lab or worked on our one desktop at home. I think the reason people objected is because they didn't understand the value because they've never had one themselves or they didn't see how it could have helped them when they were in school. But the world isn't the same today as what it was when they were in school. And the skills we need to teach students to learn in this world isn't the same as it was when people who are still in school were in school!
I like what Angus King said about progress and change. He gave an example of how the Transporation Secretary was excited that he got funding to pave 80 more miles worth of road that he didn't have last year. King asks, are we just making incremental steps that really don’t amount to anything? Is it really progress if we’re still stuck in the status quo? Do the limits of our creativity confine us to stay the same, making literally no progress? (That last one was my questions.) Another term I hate, just cause it’s overused, is “think outside the box.” (I really hate that term, I'm cringing now as I write it.) But maybe that’s what’s not happening. I’m thinking about this in terms of the new Bow Lake. (I haven't mentioned this yet, but my school is being closed and the district is building a new school to house the students in my school, and the students in a nearby school called Bow Lake. It'll be at the site of the old Bow Lake, so, we'll all be "Bow Lake" starting next year.) Where do we see technology fitting into our ideas of school community, world citizenship, and all the wonderful ideas we wrote into our mission statement? If x, then… what? If what we want in our school is all this wonderful stuff that makes us love to teach and our kids love to learn, how do we get there? And do we do it by continuing with the status quo? With incremental steps or real change? What’s real change? Is it Valley View or Bow Lake that will see the real change? (I'll have to write more about the school closing issue. There's lots on my mind about it, and if you don't know about it, this may not make a whole lot of sense, sorry.)
He closed with two really good quotes that I think are worth mentioning. The first, I didnt write down, so this is a paraphrase. It comes from Charles Darwin. "Evolution isn't survival of the fittest, it’s those that could adapt to change that survived." (Maybe it just depends on how you define "fittest".) And the second quote comes from Wayne Gretsky: "I skate to where the puck is going to be. Everyone else skates to where it is." I've been thinking a lot more about that idea than I expected. It is telling about what we need to do as educators to really prepare students for the world. If we don't know where the puck is going, what use are we?
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