Cognitive Interfund Transfer

“tenure is a proxy for fairness”

Weingarten deflects the accusation and suggests the real problem is a lack of “support” for teachers, aka funding:

Then Gates nails it: No, we spend more on professional development than they do. We spend more on salaries than they do. We spend more on pensions than they do. We spend more on retirement health benefits than they do. But we have less evaluation than they do. In many districts you have to give advance notice before anybody can come into your classroom. That’s part of the contract. So there are some real differences in terms of the personnel system in these other countries.

“Instead, we should be concentrating on making them truly knowledge-able. Imagination and curiosity are the heart of that idea; if we have those qualities, learning becomes joyous.”

n the pursuit of these new learning environments we find ourselves asking those wonderfully fundamental questions: What are “the basics” and “basic literacy skills” today? How might our students best learn them? How are schools/classrooms/desks/subjects/schedules/teachers necessary to this learning process, and how are they not? And these are the best kinds of questions, because their best answers are just more questions. And so we find ourselves exactly where any great learner would want to be, on a quest, asking question after question after question.

The problem is not with the teachers, but with the very definition of 'media literacy' itself. What is it, really? Can we swap the term out with 'digital learning' or 'ed tech' or 'culturally relevant education'? If so, all these terms are essentially meaningless. A student learning how to use an iPad in the classroom is not the same as a student asking critical questions of the messages in television. One is about using the media; the other is about analyzing it. These skills are as different as reading and writing. Before we can take any steps toward a national media curriculum (like the UK has had for a long time), we need to come to a consensus about the meaning of these words. If the average American can easily articulate the difference between reading and writing, he should also be able to quickly explain why we need media in the classroom. Only then can our students get the forward-thinking education that they deserve.