I was reading Karl Fisch’s post, Is It OK To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher? (caution - even he admits he was grumpy when he wrote it), when something he wrote in response to a comment by a Language Arts teacher really stood out to me. He wrote:

“You see, I don’t think it’s your job to teach literature, that not why you “exist” as a teacher. Literature is just a means to an end. We don’t teach Macbeth in order for kids to understand Macbeth, we use Macbeth so that kids can understand good and evil and trust and betrayal. Our goal is not for kids to be experts on Macbeth and know who Malcolm is, our goal is to explore some of the universal themes of humankind and help make those themes meaningful and relevant to our students’ lives. To help our students better understand those big ideas so that they can apply them to their own lives and to the lives of those around them. And it doesn’t matter whether we use Macbeth, or some other piece of literature, or no literature at all.”

He goes on to say:

“… it’s not about what you teach, it’s about what students learn. And what students need.”

This one was a tough one for me. When I was teaching Social Studies, it was the subject that I loved. I used to tell my students that history was filled with everything that you could find in the best movies–the difference was that movies weren’t real, but our history was.

I knew, though, that leading them to the mastery of the content was not enough. They had to be able to DO something with that knowledge. The greatest “highs” I had in the classroom were when the “lightbulbs” would go on and you could tangibly see when students made important connections, applied critical analysis, and truly understood the relevance of the content in relation to today’s world. Admittedly, those moments were few and far between for me.

David Warlick has written that in today’s changing world one of the most important things we need to teach our students is how to learn. If we concentrate primarily on the subjects that we teach, on the content, are we doing them a disservice? They will know enough to pass the SOLs, sure, but will they know enough to live in this digital age where what is true in one instant is no longer true in the next?  How do we teach them to adapt, to learn, to live in today’s world?

And with all of our other responsibilities, where on earth do we find the time to even try to do more?

Thoughts?