“Old School”
Can you imagine walking to school…down the dirt road, with all of the other town kids…to the one room school building where all the kids from town, no matter their age, would be seated in the same room with the same teacher? “I want everyone in this room to be able to read and write, I know it sounds crazy, but it’s going to happen. Now pull out your slate and chalk and let’s get to work.” Hard to imagine? Now think about what your k-12 experience was like. Mine consisted of waiting for a bus for many years until I could drive my own car; taking up to eight different subjects at any one time with a different teacher and different peers in each class. Furiously scribbling notes from the white board before the teacher erases them to make space for her next thoughts. Sitting on the edge of my seat in anticipation of the bell to chime over the intercom signaling my next class in our state of the art computer lab with twenty of the newest desktops to be shared by the entire school….college bound and proud.
And now, as a practicum student standing in the back of the class room to be able to see the screens on everyone’s chrome books to make sure they are watching CNN kids news and asking the girl in the corner to put away her cell phone as music plays through the speakers next to the smart board. Nervous about jumping into a career where I will be teaching children to be prepared for jobs and careers that I can’t even imagine. School and its purpose has changed drastically since the one room school house and so has the idea of literacy. “It was ground-breaking work by Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole in their book The Psychology of Literacy(1981) that first disentangled the effects of literacy(the ability to read and sometimes write) from the effects of schooling as we know it in the west.”(Gee, 25). The work of a teacher today is still to develop literacy in our students, but this new literacy looks more like the ability to obtain, process, understand, and use the correct information in the correct context. So as a future teacher I hope to be able give my students the ability to have discourse in or about mathematics while the teachers of other subjects will be accomplishing the same in their subjects. When these perspectives come together our students will be better for it. As in Unflattening this is the idea that “in this new integrated landscape lies the potential for more comprehensive understandings”(Sousanis, 37).
Back to the future hill valley high school scene. (n.d.). Retrieved September 07, 2017, from http://www.youtube.com/
D. (n.d.). Futuristic school. Retrieved September 7, 2017, from deviantart.com
Doss, M. (2017, September 04). Old School House between Osage City and Burligame in Osage County, Kansas. Retrieved September 07, 2017, from https://www.flickr.com/
Gee, J. P. (2015). Literacy and education. New York: Routledge.
Sousanis, N. (2015). Unflattening. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
