Monday, May 17, 2010

Well Now that that class is over...

I can really use this Blog for what i have wanted, Welcome to Positively 4th Street Bait & Tackle's Passaic River FishFinder Blog.

Monday, May 10, 2010

For Week 5, 21st Century Skills/ Creativity

Where do you stand - is it a Fad or is it the Key? Refer to the resources presented above and cite your reasons and arguments. There is no length to your Post but be clear about where you stand and support it.
I have gathered by reading both sides of this argument an understanding that such movements as 21st C skills have come and gone in the past. Ravitch, an opponent, shows as proof of 21CS's faddishness that movements such as this have come and gone in the past. She insists that these movements have lacked "
disciplinary knowledge that young people need to make sense of the world" but there is a flaw here. History texts my classes relied on as i grew up are worthless, fraught with errors, misinterpretations and outright lies. Fact fiends would have our students gather knowledge like money, but how are students supposed to use them. Ravitch says these programs "required activity, not docility, and awakened student motivation. " What is the problem with students that actively engage with their curriculum? The problem is that they think for themselves. They do not defer to management. They don't make good factory drones. They will always question authority, question fact, and question the given perception of reality. They make good leaders, models of independence and problem solving professionals. The problem is that there is only so much space for leaders. Another question might be how many teachers do anything but model unquestionable domination in their classrooms? How many of them are willing to hand over control of their classroom to the thinking patterns of their students?
Ravitch concludes her denunciation by saying "
The intelligent person, the one who truly is a practitioner of critical thinking, has the capacity to understand the lessons of history, to grasp the inner logic of science and mathematics, and to realize the meaning of philosophical debates by studying them." But what if all they are ever taught to do is accept information. What if the lessons of history are extracted from the text for the students to absorb like facts? Docile students of this Banking system of education take in information to save for the expense of the test to come. they are not taught the logic within science or math. They become workers, not managers. Followers, not leaders.

What do you think? Is there room for this in our schools. Think about your schooling. And more importantly, think about the state of our economy.


I think if we don't start moving in this direction the state of our economy and the current way schools are run will be the least of our problems. I think school is designed for efficency, stuffs every available minute with what the state deems to be important and so there is little to no space for creativity. If the other parts of our education need time, money or resources creativity is the first to be asked to give them up. None the less we must make room or make creativity a priority. Creative outlet was always considered an elective, an unnecessary extra curricular outlet that could have been filled with something better, more productive. As for our economy we just might be creative enough to come up with something better and actually put it into place. Its been imagined before but rarely attempted. Why should we be such slaves to digital numbers and green colored paper anyway? We have to really think about this. How are we supposed to make anything change by doing the same thing we always have. That is insane!