The Dream

This past week was draining in so many ways. I am formulating multiple things to write about, and this post is not about any of them. This is a quickie. My dream for what education could/should be. It hit me tonight as I thought about several of my students who are struggling with particular content areas.

This is not the whole of the dream, but merely one small aspect of what I could do to teach my students to learn and to help change lives. Both theirs, and mine.

I believe in marketing as a key strategy in my classroom. How something is pitched to the students often plays a significant role in how engaged the students are in the content. I would love to capitalize on my students' natural inquisitiveness and pitch to them that we are focussing on how stuff works: Here's how understanding other people's writing works. Here's how expressing our own opinions, ideas, frustrations, thoughts, feelings, points of view works. Here's how governments work. Here's how civilizations work. Here's how money works. Here's how numbers and data works. Here's how life systems work. Here's how our body works. Here's how the creative process works (well, that's a stretch since the creative process often takes what works and pile drives it into something new). Here's how language works, both ours and others'. Here's how communities work. 

Instead of segmenting everything up into different blocks both within a schedule and within our minds, we would show that, while they are all separate cogs, here's how it all works together and here's why you are essential to keeping it all going. Here's when you're going to learn how to change things to make them work better.

If I do not impress upon my students that they do indeed have an essential role to play in the beautiful and messy synergy of it all, I will continue to see students staring out of windows or into screens looking for where they belong and why they should care.