Alright! I've been reading this cool book called "The Irony of American History" and it has made me think a lot about the ironic facets of Education in America as well as Irony in general (which is fitting with all the Shakespeare going on in my room at the moment).
Teaching Othello and Macbeth at the same time is like a cool oasis in the Spring. Just when students are getting most antsy because summer feels impossibly far of, BOOM! ACTING! STAND UP AND PARTICIPATE! WHO WANTS A NERF SWORD!
ALLCAPS! SORRY!
I've been thinking about how ironic it is to increase only the quantitative data that the state consumes from student's efforts (testing yadayada) in an effort to increase the qualitative output of a generation.
I think the cost of this ironic failure (ironic because in education we are in it to facilitate growth not measure stasis) will be unimaginative and cookie cutter minds, just when the world needs more radically connected and synthesis oriented people.
I'm not afraid of data though. The game that I run in my gamified sophomore classes produces oodles of data from which I can extrapolate many useful things. Increased or decreased engagement. Specific learning modalities as chosen by students (based on which kind of assignments students choose most). Preferences for giant candy... and on.
Part of my goal in implementing gamification in my classroom is to produce data that can be considered meta-data by the end of student tenure with me at my school (also, big honking portfolios), I think that as an educator I owe it to the students I am working with to show them how their trends make them look. The world (and the job market specifically) will only increasingly define them by their behavioral trends as expressed through meta-data and data mining algorithms.
I want them to know that they will be judged not by their single best day, but by all their days (that are measured) combined.
So. Open comments. Your thoughts on Spring Break, Meta-Data, the Irony of American History, or Semi-Sythetic organisms (Science Friday was SO COOL today).
Teaching Othello and Macbeth at the same time is like a cool oasis in the Spring. Just when students are getting most antsy because summer feels impossibly far of, BOOM! ACTING! STAND UP AND PARTICIPATE! WHO WANTS A NERF SWORD!
ALLCAPS! SORRY!
I've been thinking about how ironic it is to increase only the quantitative data that the state consumes from student's efforts (testing yadayada) in an effort to increase the qualitative output of a generation.
I think the cost of this ironic failure (ironic because in education we are in it to facilitate growth not measure stasis) will be unimaginative and cookie cutter minds, just when the world needs more radically connected and synthesis oriented people.
I'm not afraid of data though. The game that I run in my gamified sophomore classes produces oodles of data from which I can extrapolate many useful things. Increased or decreased engagement. Specific learning modalities as chosen by students (based on which kind of assignments students choose most). Preferences for giant candy... and on.
Part of my goal in implementing gamification in my classroom is to produce data that can be considered meta-data by the end of student tenure with me at my school (also, big honking portfolios), I think that as an educator I owe it to the students I am working with to show them how their trends make them look. The world (and the job market specifically) will only increasingly define them by their behavioral trends as expressed through meta-data and data mining algorithms.
I want them to know that they will be judged not by their single best day, but by all their days (that are measured) combined.
So. Open comments. Your thoughts on Spring Break, Meta-Data, the Irony of American History, or Semi-Sythetic organisms (Science Friday was SO COOL today).
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