WHAT?! Teachers? Obsolete? Wednesday started off with a debate on the weird motion that teachers are obsolete. Students as the opposition, teachers as the proposition. It hadn't even started and it was already keeping me on the edge of my seat. The proposition proposed that technology was going to take over education and the world would solely rely on it for the education of humans. When the opposition inqured about third world countries that don't have access to technology and internet, they offered mentors and home-schooling as a solution. However, the opposition wasn't satisfied. First of all, there are a thousand and one distractions that can occur when it comes to the use of technology. How do we know that they're learning and maximizing their time? Also, how can we be certain that the content that children are learning is even true. Or if they're even learning content for that matter. Another point that the opposition pointed out is motivation. Children, teenagers, humans in general need motivation when it comes to doing things. How would a computer motivate humans more than another human. They're not able to push them to higher levels. In the end, it's just a machine. Yes, I agree that technology is useful on so many levels but we can't rely solely on it, especially not for something as vital as education. The proposition also proposed that mentors or supervisors would suffice, especially someone who has known the child since their infancy. They didn't agree that a person who has experienced world cultures would be a good mentor. Well, why would a mentor suffice but not a teacher? How is a child supposed to get a global education when they are being shown ideals by only one person who hasn't experienced the world? I shouldn't be refuting everything that the proposition said because they did have a good point: experiential learning is the way to go. Actually, both houses believed that experience was necessary regardless of their belief on teachers being obsolete or not. To no surprise, the Innovation Academy came up various times during both side's arguments. However, there has to be correct balance between content and experience. Teachers are not obsolete and it's something that we've realized as an academy this semester. On Tuesday, we had a Blendz meeting and realized we haven't learned as much content as we would like to have by this point in the semester. We came to the conclusion that this is because, apart from reading The Lean Startup, we haven't really learned content; we've just gone out and tackled things the way we thought we were supposed to tackle them. In reality, we could have been doing things much more efficiently if we read about things more specific to our business and not just startups in general. Also, we are starting a business without much knowledge in business and businesses. It doesn't sound logical. At all. Not only that but we wanted to have the opportunity to improve our vocab and English by reading (SSR) and having constant Socratic seminars; we wanted to improve our media skills by having the chance to play around with Photoshop; we wanted to become more effective and efficient with our endeavor. This is where Mr. Topf steps in. Recently, he has been more a mentor or supervisor rather than a teacher and we realized that this was not the best idea we have had. the last half of the week. Regardless of not yet having had content "lessons", we have had two successful Socratic seminars and SSR and are already finding ourselves to be more efficient during Blendz time. This takes me back to my main point: we had a supervisor and relied on technology way more than we needed to. Accordingly, we took matters into our own hands, asked Corey to give us lessons and are now ecstatic to try a new structure in the IA.
2 Comments
Corey Topf
11/12/2014 08:07:36 pm
You know, finding that balance between experience and theory, between hands-on work and content is always a challenge. But I'd always rather error on the side of too much experience than too much content. :)
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Paolo B.
11/16/2014 04:44:52 am
Cool, blog Carolina, I agree with all of what you state, we are in a weird time in history. For the first time most of the world can have all the information we want by searching it in google, yet we still need people to teach it to us and that is where the the teachers come. I really enjoyed your format.
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