Thursday, October 13, 2011

"Come On Man!" Moment for Teachers

My daughter is taking civics in high school and I went to her Open House (yeah, I still do that stuff). Her teacher is a young guy who has a degree in humanities and just happens to be teaching that class because it just happen to be the open position. He has never taught civics...or any social studies class.

So, I send him an email noting three websites, specifically stating that icivics.org is a great site and relevant to his students. Its perfect for the class because they are a science and technology school with a focus on project based learning. The website, I tell him, is almost a blue print for his class. I also tell him about my background and how this is sorta what I do for a living.

Well, he completely ignores my email. A few weeks go by and then one day my daughter asks me about this web site. I get excited and ask her if her teacher was using it with her class. She replies no, her friend found it. It seems that during lunch, (they all have laptops at the school) they have exploring the website. My daughter and I begin to have discussions about various civics topics and about the debate issues that were brought up on the website. You know, stuff she should be doing with her teacher.

I ask her if they brought this site to their teacher and she says yes, he told them he would take a look at it.

Well, here it is. Two months later and they never used the site in class. My daughter complains about how boring the class is and how they write papers and read about Federalists and how she could care less. She has no enthusiasm and complains about reading this and writing about that. I missed that light in her eyes that and the newly discovered passion for a topic that most people find boring.

Come on Man!