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.
When you don’t understand something important, where do you go or who do you talk to about it?
(From 8/24/22)
We were midway through the third week of the school year when I wrote this prompt. I’ve been watching students work long enough to understand that if they’re motivated to learn something, they’ll find a way. Going all the way back to the last time I taught middle school in 2008, I saw students figure out how to get around district network restrictions so that they could play video games. I know it’s the same when they play at home. They don’t give up if they don’t understand something, they find a friend or go online and find the answers that they need.
I wrote the prompt/question to nudge them to see that whatever the subject is, if it’s important enough to them they figure out a way to get the answers needed. That’s how life works, you don’t give up because it’s difficult or at the moment, unknown. You find a solution. How do you think I got into computers or robotics. I don’t have degrees in either, but it was important enough for me to figure it out.
In the early 1980s I was motivated to get a micro-computer because they promised to be much better for writing than typewriters. I couldn’t afford the just released IBM PCs or Apple Macintoshes, and sadly the manufacturer of the computer I picked, Kaypro, went Chapter 11. So I learned how to support and troubleshoot the little beasties through user groups and magazines. I found a way. And once YouTube became a thing, it became my go-to on almost every thing. That’s not to say that I believe everything I see on YouTube, but it’s a great way to survey what’s out there on the question at hand and get to a workable solution. I saw this same drive in my students when they were trying to figure out their games.
I’m not naive enough to assume they should transfer the same enthusiasm to their studies, but I also reject the notion that they should be given a pass because something is a challenge. It’s really a matter of how important the thing is to them. If it’s something important like a video game, then they rise to the challenge. It’s kind of universal to learning. But it might be too messy for institutional learning. Personally, I don’t care. Learning is learning. The point is to move forward.
I’m reminded of a girlfriend’s granddaughter who was trying to play a game about puppies on her Nintendo hand-held. Problem was that this game was mostly text driven, so she had to figure out what the game wanted and how to do the tasks reading the text, and she didn’t know how to read. But whenever she could she plugged away click buttons and trying to decipher how to play the game. I don’t know if it really boosted her entrance to reading, but she was highly motivated.
Where do you go when you’re trying to figure something out (tech/school/life)?
