A Revelation

This week I launched the use of a digital visualizer in the classroom in conjunction with a new class website...The response has been overwhelming. 125 students, give or take, have signed my guestbook and the students have even voted in our own Presidential Straw poll (Barack Obama & Mike Huckabee are the class leaders respectively). After three days of toggling back and forth between the visualizer & eUniverse I decided to crack our textbooks back open. While all of the students were diligently completing vocabulary & questions about the American banking system and the FDIC, an exclamation arose from the crowd. "Mr. Anderson! My textbook has black mold in it! Gross!" Even though freshman can be known to exaggerate, it was anything but. Sure enough, mold spores had taken hold in the 10-year text. Bewildered and a little embarassed I started thinking...

What if we closed our textbooks and started opening their minds?

The idealist in me saw a vision of Robin Williams in his 1950s prep classroom in "Dead Poet's Society" tearing out the literature book pages. It warmed my heart. When I recovered my senses the following hour (the same course, different class) I apologized to my students. I told them that yes textbooks serve a purpose as backbones for our curriculum, but I assured them that until further notice, not a book would be cracked without a dire need for it.

Have you ever seen a deer in headlights? How about at 70 MPH? That is what these Social Studies freshman looked like. Just then, for that split second, they were mine...And that is where the learning began. We slammed our books on the ground (WE DID NOT TEAR OUT PAGES) and turned on the visualizer. We found our answers, only this time, they were seeking them instead of copying them. On the e-Universe we searched & Googled & traversed from one economic indicator site to the next and back again. We stumbled upon the "Death and Taxes" website featuring President Bush's budget plan for 2008. They were amazed with a few things: First, the amount spent on the military in proportion to other government funded services. Second, they were appalled with the spending on education (HA!). And third, they actually started asking questions like "Why do we spend $15 billion on farm subsidies" and "How come we only spend $1.25 billion on alternative energy research?".

Imagine students asking cerebral questions about our economy. It was a relevation.

Realizing the Vision 2.0

Paradigm shifts are holy experiences...the world you knew, or thought you knew, ceases to exist. Today I realized, despite being a young professional still pretty fresh off the collegial setting, that I am but a "Zack Morris" cell phone in a land of iPhones. It is not like I have resisted this meteoric launch into the future. To the contrary, my first purchase as new homeowner was a brand new Visio flatscreen HDTV w/DVR capabilities and as a wrestling coach I tend our humble freewebs team site while posting a bi-weekly blog. However, today as I sat watching & absorbing the likes of Will Richardson of Seton Hall and Annette Lamb at a professional development conference pour on about "wikis" and "twitters" and "skypes" my head nearly exploded. Seriously, I felt like Barry Bonds' hat size fresh off an andro hit in the gluteus. It never occurred to me that not only were students, young students, blogging, podcasting, & creating advanced social networks but they were forging the very near future in which our society will reside.

I consider myself a "fisher of men"...my job is to "hook" 15 & 16 year old children into learning United States History, Economics, Civics, Geography, & Organizational skills. The hooks I have used for the job are somewhat equivalent to telegraphing your mother in Morse code to wish her a Happy Mother's Day...Overhead projectors, bulleted powerpoints, lecture notes, a textbook from 1995 (Bill Clinton's presidency is the unfinished chapter at the end of the book) are my tools of the trade. Boy do I feel like a blacksmith in a Honda plant. Today, my vision was realized, a very clear vision at that. First, the world around me changes whether I am or not. Second, I can no longer wonder why my students are sometimes disconnected, unengaged...shuffling papers back and forth is archaic and they know it, why don't we? And third, if I am going to exist in this new paradigm of a "wiki" world I better do like the man on the donkey...

Big Dan..."What did the man who was riding the donkey up the mountain do when his donkey died? He got off his dead ass and started walking..."

It's about time I started walking.