What one-billionth of one percent are we going to choose to teach in school? (Seymour Papert)

Photo by RhondaK Native Florida Folk Artist on Unsplash

At our Senior Educational Leadership Team (SELT) meetings we often discuss the curriculum we should be using in our schools.

We know our current curriculum is not cutting the mustard. 

We know we are basing our teaching and learning on an outdated structure, a hold over from the industrial age.

A hold over from when NZ opened for business as a branch of the British Empire. Some universities and some prestigious schools needed stuff to teach and it may have made sense then. 

We are perpetuating that circumstance in some form or other, and it no longer makes sense.  

We know our schools in 2017, with our desire for career ready students, have different needs to those that existed 100 years ago.

Yet, as Will Richardson reminds us, educationalists have long seemed loathe to mess with the recipe.

From the junior school until Year 8 we are holistic in nature, but then from Year 9 we introduce discreet subjects designed to funnel students into NCEA.

The NCEA boat is a canal boat going through a narrow channel; those babies are tough to turn around once they are pointing in one direction. 

But, at some point, we have to do it.

As Seymour Papert posits, now that we have access to pretty much all there is to know, what one-billionth of one percent are we going to choose to teach in school?

I'm the greatest, and you better believe it baby! (Ringo Starr)

Will Richardson is a parent.

He's also a writer; he blogs on educational things. And while his photos indicate he is still shamelessly rocking a ponytail in 2016, I'm prepared to look the other way, because he recently wrote this:  

Many kids don’t seem to have the dispositions, the self-determination, initiative, and networks to problem solve their way out of their dilemmas. They’re waiting for the answer.

He doesn't live in NZ, or teach at Woodford House, nevertheless, I think he's right.

I've written about the lack of failure before, to that I now need to add the 'driven to excessive desire for Excellence on everything' category.

I may be wrong (shock horror) but I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be any staff member at my school who got Excellence grades on every University paper they ever did, nor did they get straight A++/100%/Excellence on everything they did at school.

I know I didn't!

But that's what many of our girls increasingly demand. Yes...demand.

Please, don't get me wrong - it's cool to aspire to an Excellence, but, Miss Student, it isn't always possible.

Or, it is, but Miss Student doesn't want to experiment and redraft to get it. They want the excellence grade from draft 1 and they want draft 1 to be perfect.

I'd much rather see a student build some resilience from a failure in early drafts to be perfect and then have the dispositions, the self-determination, the initiative to improve next time!

William Wordsworth began working on an extended poem (later known as The Prelude) when he was 28. He was STILL working on it when he checked out some 50 years later!!