At the end of this month, high school students will take a break from academic studies to enjoy sunshine, the outdoors, travel, games, summer jobs, and relaxation. It’s also a time of transitions. Sophomores become upperclassmen; athletes rise in status onto varsity teams. Clubs, activities, and community service become embedded as part of a larger equation of identity for resumes. Soon, SATs will help establish pathways to college and career. College visits will follow.
To the high school students who read this blog, you are a child no more. You are a young adult who’s made some initial decisions about your life and future. You’ve traveled a very long path to be at this sometimes tenuous, sometimes wonderful moment in time. Before you take that last step off your high school campus for the summer, I’d ask you to take a few moments to think about life as it was for you as one of America’s children, especially in your role as a student. You can also help those of us in the field of education to know your generation a little bit more, if you will. (Please note that the comments to this blog are pseudonyms. Anonymity offers a certain freedom.)
Consider the Native American proverb, “No river can return to its source, yet all rivers must have a beginning.” How do you look back on your years of formal education? Are you nostalgic? Relieved? Reticent? Why? Do fond memories of simpler times resonate? Or was life never really simple? Do life lessons that once seemed traumatic now seem just an awkward stage, even cathartic? What was it like for you to be a learner at the cusp of a new millennium?
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet and essayist, said, “Not in his goals but in his transitions is man great.” Life when Emerson wrote surrounded small New England community enclaves; discourse rose primarily from family and religion. Your life is very different. How did the society and culture in which you were nurtured create pathways for your academic integration into school culture? Pesky calls you “a digital native” due to the complex technology in which you have been emerged. He says:
It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdfDo you agree with his statement? What advise to you have to offer to educators? If you were given the power, what institutional changes would you incorporate for other students in public schools who follow you? To what degree do you feel that school has been a microcosm of society? What were the best parts of school? What challenges continue as you become an upperclassman?
Dr. Michael Welch, a cultural anthropologist and digital enthnographer from Kansas State University, recently uploaded a short video to YouTube called Web 2.0, the Machine is Using Us. The video discusses how the Web is changing how and how fast humans around the globe communicate. After you view the film, offer a socio-cultural critique of Wesch’ argument. Is his view accurate? Why or why not?
As you think about your answers to these questions, I’d like to thank you on behalf of educators in the United States everywhere. You have offered us vicarious links to the energy and enthusiasm of our own youth. You’ve also introduced us to many new ways of knowing our own worlds. A part of you will live on with us and in the students we’ll help to grow as learners in the future to come.
6 comments:
I think the above statements are mostly correct in the fact that our generation learns much differently than the previous ones. I think it would benefit students in this day and age to be able to use computers more for daily assignments in school because they have become so familiar with them. Most students at this point in their life would probably say that there school career all the way up to this point was just okay, and a lot of good and bad memories have came from it. I also agree when the post says that the new generation is much more different than the educators could imagine because the society that we have grown up in has shaped us differently than their generation shaped them. The challenges that we now face as upper classmen are that we take on responsibility to control our education from now on.
I think the argument made by the video I somewhat correct because more people everyday are investing more time into the internet, and the internet is also linking people that have things in common that would never have met before.
Simpler times resonate with the feeling of being younger. Although the times probably were not simpler, the youthfulness of our minds let stress and other grown-up feelings pass by us, like a high-speed train on the course of its tracks. My years of elementary education reminds me of a time when the biggest problem affecting our lives was whether or not the boy in front or next to me stole my pencil. These problems have evolved into something much greater; the college we are attending, the score we are going to get on our SAT, driving, and many other pressures and troubles coming from growing up. No matter what river we decide to take, the path we chose will evolve for us, and the changes we go through will shape us into who we will become.
The pathways we are beginning to choose have been shaped by society and culture. Younger generations today were born with the current technology, yet our parents generation and beyond have had to learn it with the many years before of not having such resources. That transition can be difficult for the teacher, as well as for the learning process of the student.
I think the above statements are mostly correct in the fact that our generation learns much differently than the previous ones. I think it would benefit students in this day and age to be able to use computers more for daily assignments in school because they have become so familiar with them. Most students at this point in their life would probably say that their school career all the way up to this point was just okay, and a lot of good and bad memories have came from it. I also agree when the post says that the new generation is much more different than the educators could imagine because the society that we have grown up in has shaped us differently than their generation shaped them. The challenges that we now face as upper classmen are that we take on responsibility to control our education from now on.
I think the argument made by the video I somewhat correct because more people everyday are investing more time into the internet, and the internet is also linking people that have things in common that would never have met before.
Marc Prensky, from On the Horizon, says, “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach”. I agree with this statement. Technology has drastically changed the way students learn. Students are using the computer for almost every academic class. The Internet is being used for online research, online dictionaries, and many other belongings. Students are being forced to use the computer as their source of schoolwork. With research papers due and literary analysis papers due students are constantly using the Internet to find their information, where out educators used to have to look through books and go to the library for their information. Many students do not even know how to work a simple Dewey Decimal System. I advice educators to realize that students are using the internet more and more everyday and that if by chance all computers were not working, they would not know how to function.
I do not believe that school is a microcosm in society. I consider it to be a macrocosm of society. Schooling supplies you with many things that many students take for granted. Schooling supplies knowledge, social skills, leadership skills, and learning techniques. We learn through the good things in life. The best parts of school for me are, getting to meet new people, experiencing new unfamiliarity’s, socializing with friends, after school clubs, projects that get everyone involved, and school events such as prom and banquets. I hope these parts of school continue to be a part of my life as I graduate from a sophomore to a junior at Franklin High School. I will face many challenges as I move into the spot of an upperclassman. One challenge I will face is setting a good example for the freshman and sophomore below me. From knowing some of the 8th graders coming in, I know that the seniors will eat them alive. And I think that if more juniors start sticking up for the freshman the school will be safer. Another challenge that I will be faced with is if the override does not pass the size of the classes will be large and our teacher to student ratio would increase to almost 1:28 in each class. This new environment will effect people’s grades because the teacher will not be able to give as much one on one teaching and some students will fall behind. The last challenge I will face is the SAT’s. The SAT is one of the biggest test you will ever have to take in your life and when becoming an upperclassman you are going to have to experience that test. The SAT paves your road to your future, to whether or not you are going to go to a good college. But overall I believe that students have changed dramatically and I think that all students have many obstacles to overcome and I believe they were persevere.
Looking back to years before I was in high school, or even born, there have too many changes in the world to even start to count. Some of these changes were for the good, and others not so much. Some changes I personally noticed and that have affected my life have to do with my education. My mother is an elementary school teacher, and just from looking at when I was that age, to now, is a huge improvement. In both what the students are learning now compared to what we were learning when I was that age, and how their teaching the material. Also, there a huge impact that the kids now in school in America have that they didn't ten years ago is computers. Almost every school and household in America has a computer, which is really incredible if you think about it.
In my opinion, I think that life was never really as 'simple' as people thought it was. Even back before we had any technology at all, there was killing, hunting, and conflicts that arose throughout ever day. The only difference is that today we have much different problems or conflicts.
Overall, I think that there are many differences, and huge improvements, between society and our culture today and how life used to be.
-Linda
I agree with this article a lot. Looking back at my childhood as an american, things were simpler when I was younger. I remember when the biggest problems I had were about making friends and learning how to get along with others. This may still be an issue teens deal with today but it does not compare to some of the other things we go through on a daily basis. My parents and grandparents often compare my life to what they were like in high school. A lot seems to have changed. The way they talk about life it was simpler then. They tell me how they could go out without worrying about dangerous people surrounding them. There were no cell phones, so they did not have to check in with their parents as much. One a normal night out, I have a whole list of things to do.
-ask permission to go out
-make sure their will be an adult at a house I'm going to
-tell my mom whoelse will be there
-who is driving?
-call when i get to where I'm going
-ALWAYS answer when mom and dad call to check in
The list seems to go on forever and I feel like our generation is definitely different from previous ones. My generation spends a lot of time with electronics. I think that this has many positive and negative effects. My parents say it makes people lazy but there are some benifits in my opinon. You can do work a lot faster and more organized and the internet can teach you a lot.
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