EDSS 531  Journal #3

To what degree do you think you really understand the needs of your students and what they need for the 21st century?  How wide is the “gap” between them and you? In what areas are the gaps? What can you do to make connections?

OK, I may be full of it, but I really don’t think the gap between me and my students is all that great.  Which is not to say that I think I know what they need for the 21st century.  Indeed, I think that very lack of knowledge is what we have most in common.   For all that we all try to pretend otherwise, none of us, I say none of us, has any idea at all what knowledge and skills these students will need to succeed in the world ahead of them.   The professional prognosticators of the world have been proven wrong pretty much every time anyone has bothered to go back and check their predictions against reality.  So for me to imagine that the communication tools and the social interaction paradigms that I don’t share with my students will somehow cripple my ability to relate to them is, I think, wide of the mark.  Those paradigms will most likely be unrecognizable by the time these kids finish college.   More importantly, I don’t believe that the things I have to offer my students depend strongly on those paradigms. 

My subject is Physics and, to be brutally honest, if one of my students were to learn absolutely nothing of Physics in my classroom, they would be at almost no disadvantage in a college level Physics program.  The concepts that we spend weeks covering can be mastered in hours by a student who is intelligent, internally motivated and curious and will never be mastered by one who lacks those characteristics.  Formulas are easy to memorize, facts are easy to memorize.  The heart of the Physicist is skill and persistence in asking questions and finding answers.  So if I want to give my students the best professional gift I possibly can, I will strive to inspire in them a spirit of curiosity, a desire to see beyond the surface values of the world around them and a vision of the beauty they will find when they do see beyond those surface values.  And if I want to give the best human gift I can, I will strive to inspire in them that same spirit, as expressed in the form of charity, compassion and empathy toward their fellows, which really amount to the same thing . 

These, I believe, are qualities that do not depend on the means of communication.  They are, however, also qualities that don’t appear anywhere in the California State Science Content Standards.  I hope that won’t turn out to be a problem.