Teachers Are Learners, Too

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Some time ago I encountered the following in Proverbs 18:9: “Whoever is slack in his work, is a brother to him who destroys.” It almost seems–OK, not almost–that this quote is related to conversations I have had with students about their need to be more diligent about their work in order to improve or increase their learning. You mean I wasn’t the first one to think of that. Hmm!

THEN, I noticed in Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat the following quote (an African proverb): Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.

Although Friedman’s context was arguably different from mine, I contend our contexts are at least indirectly related. In today’s world of learning OR teaching, the results of our failure to attend to what needs to be done to best prepare our students for the 21st century may make us (and them) wish we had started “running” when we saw the sun rise over our digitally “flattened” world.

When is a dead horse really dead?

I recently received an e-mail (from Edward Fields, CEO at HotChalk.com–http://www.hotchalk.com/), part of which invited the audience to “inform me on what you’d change about teaching in general”.  So I took some license with the “teaching” AND the “general” and wrote what follows:

1. We educators need to behave as though we believe that high stakes testing is not the only reality for which we need to prepare our students–we MUST prepare them for success in the 21st Century.
2. Parents need to send their students to school ”ready to learn”.  For that to happen, parents must teach their children the morality (broadly also including  — besides all the forever important right & wrong stuff — work ethic) required for their success as individuals and as members of “teams”.  
3.  Parents and grandparents must behave as though they KNOW that they and we are preparing students for a very different work world than that for which they/we were prepared.  Stop it with the “If it is good enough for Noah, it is good enough for me”!
4. Government (legislators, et al) must join us by funding education that is “best for kids” with NO thought about what is “best for MY re-election.”