Blog Post #2: Baby George

 

Will Hunting: Not your average learner

When I was in elementary school, I often got in trouble for being "off task."

I remember, in particular, my first grade teacher regularly chastising me for being off-task. She would take my crayons away when she saw me doodling, or make me sit in the corner to complete math worksheets, or call home if she caught me singing under my breath when I was doing a reading lesson. Her favorite form of reprimand was to make me put my head down on my desk for an indeterminate amount of time if she felt I had really strayed off the educational path, such as reading ahead of that day's prescribed lesson. (Heaven forbid.)

She relayed my egregious misdeeds to my parents at conferences. My mother, a middle school teacher herself, was incredulous at this accusation. I was getting my work done in my own time and in my own manner, and there was explicit evidence of learning, she argued. The teacher rebuked that my inability to follow directions and stay on task was an issue, and I had to nip in the bud, or I wouldn't be "good at school." My mother retorted that while that may be true--and keep in mind, I was seven years old, so sitting still was not exactly in the repertoire of skills I possessed--I was still learning, and isn't that what mattered?

That teacher was right. I've never been "good at school." I love to talk and go off on tangents and lose myself in a conversation, about absolutely anything. I become enamored with projects, zeroing in on a task at hand. I love to immerse myself in my learning, not just be witness. Like Dr. Michael Wesch tells us, I am--for lack of a better term--immune to the vaccination theory of education, that one shot at a subject will suffice. When I want to understand something more deeply, I jump in feet first and let the water of the topic surround me. My learning style was not conducive to the rigid nature of that first grade classroom, because it was far more fluid. 

My preferred learning style

But that didn't mean that I was a bad learner. Wesch tells us in his TEDTalk, "What Baby George Taught Me About Learning," that education is not just what we learn in the classroom, because the classroom is just one way of learning. He encourages us as both teachers and learners to push against the status quo of the classroom, and reconsider what we categorize as learning taking place in our classrooms. If I were to categorize my learning style succinctly, I would label myself as an kinesthetic learner. I absorb information best when I can engage with it hands on. That's not to say that my ability to internalize information is any less adept or valuable than the individual that can read a book and regurgitate the text back to verbatim; it just means its different, and as educators, we need to recognize that these differences are what make the experience of learning so profoundly special.

It's not to say that one style is better than the other, because as Wesch ultimately points out, it is actually the working together of those with different approaches to education that serves us best as learners. It is the sum of our backgrounds and lived experiences that provide us each with unique assets that we can use productively in the context of the classroom. We all have something to learn from one another, and that may be how we can achieve success in terms of a "final project." Wesch suggests that the greatest "final project" of them all is actually ourselves, and the learning we do when we are "reshaped" by the process of "living inside the learning." He even goes so far as to urge his audience to consider the disenfranchisement of giving out letters grades, and instead urge students to use their unique strengths and special learning abilities to help each other out in areas for growth. He wants us to rethink what we think of as learning, and how we assess it, because the way it's done conventionally doesn't protect us past that one dose of the vaccine. 

Wesch, in his teaching tenure, lived into these beliefs by helping his students learn not only the content anticipated in the curriculum, but about themselves as people. He helped them to achieve success in the quintessential context of the word, but he also helped them learn how to just be people along the way. He frames all of this information by telling his audience of his baby son George, who, when learning how to go down stairs, let himself fall repeatedly. Each time he fell, he would pick himself back up with a smile and go at it again. We have to let ourselves learn from our missteps, and saw them not as failures but an opportunity to get back up and try again, so that when it comes times to descend the whole staircase, we have faith in putting one foot in front of the other.