Fun & Exciting Stuff

After sitting through a staff development on our new web page, and getting sheets of paper that are clogging up my desk. I read this post from Will Richardson.

This was the kicker for me:

It all reminds me of the time last year when I got to an event and the person in charge had copied, collated, stapled and distributed six paper pages that she had printed of my link-filled wiki online to 50 or so participants.

“It’s a wiki,” I said. “You can’t click the links on paper!”

“I know,” she replied. “I just need to have paper.”

Um, no. You don’t.

That’s going to be us. I am just sure of it.

That was the discussion last week when I gave a quiz to the 10th grade global class on imperialism. They had to name one colony and one imperialist country. The colony = Asia or Africa. The imperialist country = Europe. So I threw the same question out to the 11th graders. Too many of them didn’t know it either. That’s one of those basic facts 100% of the students should know. I am not worried about higher order thinking skills. I am worried about basic content.

Granted they don’t use that type of knowledge regularly (what teenager is asked “Is Europe a country or a continent?” regularly?) But it is basic common knowledge that they should know so that they don’t look like a moron regularly.

I was born 20 years too early. I was not a Rhodes scholar by any strech, but I had a good dose of common sense and I paid attention. If you are a high school senior today and have a basic understanding of specific knowledge, you are already head-and-shoulders above many of your peers.