If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
–John Quincy Adams
I know what you teachers are thinking. The sand is escaping the hourglass of summer. Pretty soon, you will start teaching in the classroom. This is cause for great jubilation and also great anxiety.
Huge curriculum, so many youngsters, meetings, memos, papers to grade and data to track. It is daunting, so let’s pan out and think about what you are really doing with all those beautiful young souls.
With the internet, students have more information than ever before. The average second-grader has instantaneous access to documents that a PhD candidate would have struggled to accumulate just a few years ago. Teaching students how to find information is no longer the primary job of the teacher.
Could anything be more useless than a library lesson on the Dewey Decimal System?
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Kids don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care
How has the mission of the teacher changed? The primary task now is how to inspire curiosity and imagination. The real job is to show students how to fall in love with something, how to embrace a subject with full heart and mind.
You may remember taking copious notes in class. Now, when the teacher fills up the board with notes, the students simply listen passively and then photograph the board with an iPhone. I don’t blame them; they are doing what humans have always done–solve a problem with maximum efficiency.
But we should get out in front of these changes and make them work FOR us instead of resisting and denouncing them.
Students must learn to reason broadly interpretive propositions, how to assess the validity of ideas, how to stake intellectual claims while anticipating and refuting counterclaims. To be convincing and compelling. The internet teaches them to be impatient with complexity and that the extent of knowledge on a subject can be reached in 140 characters or less. So instead of the traditional report on the 1787 constitutional convention, assign something like: How would America’s history have been different if the constitutional convention abolished slavery?
Don’t cover the curriculum–Uncover and discover It
Now more than ever, we must inspire kids to want to learn. Too many students perceive school as a chore, just some drudgery to endure. That perception creates minimalism. The power of a teacher is the power to inspire. So when school starts, remember that your enthusiasm for the subject is everything.
You are their leader. It’s your attitude toward the material that matters the most. If they see you just covering a subject, they do as little as they can to get you off their backs so they can get back to Pokémon. But if they see you loving it, some of them will fall in love with it too.
All humans are naturally curious, and our job is to liberate that curiosity. Curiosity inspires inquiry. Kids don’t need teachers for information; the internet gives them that. They need you to learn how to reason.
Next month, go to school with a smile on your face and love in your heart. Love for kids, love for the subject you teach, love for the great questions of life. Set the example of, and with, love. Set the example by teaching from the heart. I say this in summer, while teachers still have a moment to reflect. Soon, the annual sprint begins again and it will be very easy to lose sight of what must actually happen. It is urgent to remind ourselves what we are really trying to do and why.
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