BLC2008

I am blogging from the BLC2008 conference. This is my second year attending and I am once again pleasantly surprised at how meeting and listening to so many innovative and talented educators feels ---tbe brain cramp that I have learned to live with on a daily basis (caused by the paradox between what I think learning should look and feel like and what it actually is in most educational settings) is nearly gone! Of course, I'm already thinking about how to bring these wonderful ideas that make so much sense to me back to my district. How can I improve my own practice to model the use of these tools? How can I get better at expressing my own professional voice to engage teachers and excite them about these tools?

What's your mindset?

Several years ago I dropped my child off at college. I was all ready for the "let go" speech at orientation, but instead the speaker shared something even more alarming. He shared the Beloit College Mindset List with us. http://www.beloit.edu/~pubaff/mindset/2011.php . The "list identifies the experiences and event horizons of students" entering college, in other words, the world according to an 18 year old. What was striking about it was how many things an 18 year old has never experienced...from the obvious (they never “rolled down” a car window and have always had "bottled water"...) to the more subtle. Here are a few items from the Class of 2011's list: Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre, Fox has always been a major network, Wal-Mart has always been a larger retailer than Sears and has always employed more workers than GM, and the World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.

Just thinking about the "mindset" of the average K-12 student gave me a shudder. Imagine walking into a school where everything from the textbooks to the technology is so much older than you are???