Vertigo in March

I’d like to invite Tom March over for coffee—though caffeine may be the last thing he needs:  his writing reads like the writing of someone who waves his arms around when he talks.  One of the first things I did after reading his article was to go to his other writings and read “Intriguing Ourselves to Death…”, in which he narrates his own meanderings through the web and the tangents he followed.  His ultimate message there is that we don’t allow kids this same opportunity to pursue and solidify their own interests, as we are so busy containing them in our structures—structures which are no longer tenable as the very tenor of communication and learning shifts. 

In the abovementioned article, I also liked his insistence on letting kids play; he maintains that this is one of the most productive means we can provide for kids’ learning.  The problem with this is that it feels unstructured and therefore “dangerous;”  in this age of mandated testing and even merit pay (!),  teachers are under such pressure to “produce” “good” “results” that the element of play—which, truth be told, I value more than almost anything else I can do with my kids—gets lost by the wayside.

That said, I remember thinking as I read/viewed the “flipping the classroom” article/snippet that I have already flipped in many senses, psychiatrically and …J/K, as the kids would say.  (No, actually, they would scoff at me, because that one is passé.)   Even though I am decidedly Old School, I hope I put a lot of emphasis on kids’ experimentation and taking risks for the sake of ideas, to paraphrase Adrienne Rich.    One thing that I learned today is that I am as quick to shut down or become discouraged as many of my students are when faced with an unfamiliar challenge.  Learning curves produce vertigo in me as they do in my kids.