I had dinner with the GF last night.  Note 1)  Don’t go to East Side Mario’s anymore.  They have 2 pages of pasta – well, 1 page and the 2nd is the same but BIGGER – and 2 pages of pizza.  That’s it.  Plus the GF had her pasta served 2 minutes after ordering, a full 10 minutes before either of us got our salad and a full 20 minutes before I got MY pasta.  Amazing.  Garbage food I might add.

That’s off topic anyhow.  Here’s the meat of it.

School Reform

For the past 50 years (since WW2), the schooling system has been the same.  A very military/hierarchy system where a person recites something and students are graded on memorization.  When’s the last time you had a math project in class?  This worked great for our parents and ok for Gen X.  Why won’t it work for Gen Y/Net Gen?

Kids today (I use the term loosely as it includes people in their 20s) are inundated with multiple streams of simultaneous data.  I can read my laptop, stream music, chat and watch a TV show at the same time without issue.  This baffles our parents.  Technology and multitasking is our birthright, we don’t know any different.   We’re in a continuous period of adaptation where we believe our input should matter; after all, we’re the intended target!

I’ll give you an extreme example.  World of Warcraft.  Watch the following video first, it will take about 10 minutes.

I wanted to show you before I explained to you what it all means.  There are big groups of people, called guilds, made up of people from around the world.  Everyone has a common goal, to succeed in challenges.  They participate in the game in groups of 5 to 25 (in the above case, 25) in order to achieve what seems impossible at first.  There are 9 types of playable characters (classes), each with their own dynamics.  Some heal others, some do damage, some take damage to protect the rest.  Each has the ability to affect the performance of the rest of the group with beneficial temporary effects (buffing).

In a boss situation, as you can see above, each person’s screen is inundated with information.  Damage your doing, taking, commands and what the boss is doing.  Misstep for a second, attack when you should fall back, take a fraction too long to heal and boom, someone’s dead.  There is a continual stream of information that you need to concentrate on, all the while maximizing your output.  Let’s say the boss has 1 million life points and after 10 minutes he goes bonkers and will kill everyone (enrage).  You need to do 100,000 damage per minute.  Now, with the types of characters above, only 18 of the 25 really can concentrate on damage, the rest are healing.  That’s about 5000damage per minute.  The strongest player can do about 4000 alone, the weakest about 2000.  How do you reach 5000?  Synergies through buffs.  Not only do you start at a disadvantage but you need to always be on the ball.  If someone dies, then the average damage needed goes up (from 5000, to 5500).

On top of all of that, you have voice chat going on where a leader or two are explaining what needs to be done and when.  They coordinate the group efforts and you must listen to every word as it will make or break an event.  It requires maximum damage output, minimum damage intake and maximum attention to the environment to avoid dying in a single strike.

In a given evening, a group will spend 2 to 4 hours doing this.  10 minutes of intensity with 15 minutes of calm if you win.  If you lose, then it’s repetition until you get the job done.  4-5 sources of data, non stop where your results affect the entire group.  Hours at a time.  Failure is PART of the job.

Then you go to school and listen to someone read a book.  How in the world can school’s ever compete with that?  There’s no interactivity.   There’s no feeling of “I helped make this”.  You just sit back, no stimuli, no talking, no concentration, just boredom.

What am I proposing?  Moving from a 1:25 format, where the teacher doles out information to a 25:1 basis, where the students are the structure of the classroom.  The teacher is still there as a moderator, a reference point, a guide.

For example, parenting class.  You could have a teacher just read books, watch movies, give you the “protect the egg for 3 days” project.  What are you really learning?  Nothing, you’re just committing to memory.  Turn it around.

One day, you get the students to write down parental roles and situations.  Based on those suggestions, on the Monday you have a role playing situation with random students.  They have to resolve some conflict and stay in character for 5-10 minutes.  After that’s done, the class discusses what went right and what went wrong.  Tues, Wed and Thurs you go over material that would assist with that conflict.  Visual aids, real life stories, guest speakers.  On Friday you repeat the same role playing with different students.  Afterwards, the class sees how the discussion has changed from Monday’s attempt.

The content is still in the teacher’s hands.  The method is in the student’s.

This can be applied to any subject.  Have math students design a house as the year project; groups of people concentrate on rooms and have to make sure everything fits at the end of the year.  History classes have to make a comic book about some battle, each person having their own module.  Civics classes build a charter of rights.

The point is that you can’t expect someone to sit there, listen to you, repeat it and be happy.  Do you tell your friends to shut up, sit down and listen?  Of course not, you talk it out, grow as a group, learn new things from everyone else’s experiences.

There’s more to discuss on this topic but that’s definitely for another time.