Hooked on Learning

Image courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wfryer

I write this as a frustrated parent watching her child shift between two entirely different worlds as if one bares no resemblance to the other.  Those two worlds are home and school.

At home my son will build and play with lego, play make believe games with his sister, draw, ride his bike, play his PS3, play games on the internet and play intuitively with a plethora of different apps on mobile devices. When he doesn’t know a word he is reading or when he wants new words to use in his writing, he heads to the iPad dictionary and thesaurus apps without a second thought.

When he enters the school gates each day however, access to such interactive tools and activities, to which he is so familiar, are limited. In most cases they are replaced with worksheets and huge, heavy text books. Information is static and they are passive recipients.

This is not a personal gripe about the school he presently attends; great inroads are being made into using more technology in the classroom to enhance the great teaching and learning they already do. I am thankful for all their hard work but as an advocate for a 21st Century Education for today’s children, and of course an advocate for my own children and how they learn best, I cannot help but notice the discrepancy between his two worlds and wish that it wasn’t so. Understanding why it is so and arguments for change are a much bigger conversation for another time.

Every night when I unpack his backpack, I unload a heap of worksheets and tests he has fastidiously completed throughout the day and a list of homework tasks, most of which begin with ‘complete worksheet number XX’ or ‘read pages x -x and complete questions’.  Now, I am not suggesting that there is no place for worksheets in his, or any other child’s education, but there has to be more correlation between their two lives. There are most certainly lots of fun activities going on his classroom, he loves the experiments and the projects and he has some great teachers, but he needs more.  Recently he arrived home with a huge science text book, he had to read and absorb several pages of text and then regurgitate what he had learned by answering a set number of questions.  I have to admit, we both struggled with the task! Being a visual learner, the pictures helped but compared to his everyday visually stimulating and interactive world outside of school, it wasn’t enough. His eyes glazed over and I could tell that not much was being absorbed; we had to figure out a way, a better way, for him to learn the content. What to do?

He then suggested searching for You Tube videos and using Brainpop.com to look up the topic.  He was gone, rapidly online and researching his topic. Chuckling as he watched videos that explained the same content but with pictures and animation that brought it to life and made his learning relevant.  We went back to the book, re-read part of the topic chapter and set about talking about the content and making connections between the two.

I realise that there is no doubt that this topic is personally relevant for me, having a child who finds reading large amounts of text a challenge, but I know he is not the only one.  I also know that there are many too that would not have struggled with the text and that’s ok too. We could also review and discuss equity in relation to how much technology different children have exposure to at home, I understand that impacts things. However, I strongly believe that regardless of those facts, life outside of school for the majority of children today is full of visual and interactive stimulants everyday whether it’s TV, video games, dad’s smartphone or their own home computer, they want to be connected and their school life needs to reflect this fact. It’s their future.