For the winter break I will be posting daily reflection prompts from earlier in the school year, from before I began posting prompt on this blog. Many of them are connected to the date when the prompt was originally posted, that will be pointed out in my response. Enjoy.

You’ve gotten through your first week at school. This week some schedules might change for you, your classmates and even some teachers. Some people hate change, some love it. Which are you (love it/hate it) and WHY? (From 8/16/22)

So, if it’s been some time since you darkened the doors of a classroom as a student, you might not know or remember how jarring it can be to go from summer break at home to the constant movement of school and the classroom. I have vague memories of junior high of crowded hallways, but what I don’t remember is how your classmates from week one to your classmates in week two might radically change. Even more concerning is how many students drop in much later in the term and quite frankly how many never show up. But this prompt is more about how one adjusts to change and not whether one agrees or doesn’t agree to the craziness of dropping students mid-term into classes… [hard to let go of that teacher rant].

So, week one you have these seven classes, week two of the seven,  two or three have changed. What do you do? How does that make you feel? I’ve worked in technology for four decades, change is a “feature” of technology. The point of these devices is to improve and iterate the product or process on a regular basis. Learning is about change, about going from version one to version twenty (eventually). It’s not that the earlier versions weren’t important or great, but that the point of learning is to improve, to gain in skill and understanding. So change is part of the process. Too much change, however, is not part of the process and can break down the learning experience into chaos.

Who decides what too much change is, I don’t know. It’s helpful to have as many “regular” things as possible to enable energies needed to put to learning. This is a basic concept that was taught to me early in my teacher training. The mechanics of the classroom needs to be fully understood from the beginning: when and where are we meeting, what book or information are we working with, what tools do we need to have ready to go? Then all of the energy is spent exploring or trying the new information/skill. Now there are some students who are in fact dedicated to not learning, so they will not follow any instructions to the point where they’ll say that they don’t have a charger for their Chromebook even though I’ve been telling them to bring that device for the past 19-weeks. But that’s a completely different problem. Having schedules change is a fact of the classroom and school, and when someone is dropped into my advanced robotics with no robot experience in week 11, I explain the basic routine, where all the information can be found. The better students adapt and move along with the others as if they’d been with us since the second week of August when the school year began. Again, apologies for the embedded teacher rant. 

Change is part of learning. But it can be used as an excuse for the lack of progress or ownership of the learning process. The inability to adjust to change is not a survival trait. We live in a world of constant change. It’s not always good or welcomed, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s a “feature” of our modern culture. I appreciate that I grew up in a time before “all of this” but my interests have been technology adjacent since watching the first Apollo missions on TV as a kid. 

What for you is too much change?