Anti-Teaching

In the age of the 21st Century where myspace and facebook has become the popular past time among our students, we as teachers need to seriously contemplate a much needed paradigm shift in the way we approach teaching as well as learning. The "historical" way of teaching as Michael Wesch calls it in his article "Anti-Teaching" whereas the teacher stands in front of a classroom of neatly vertical rows is becoming arcahic and "Anti-teaching" (Wesch) or even anti-climatic for our leaners. Relevancy has become a huge issue in the classroom, the number of students that ask me, "Why are we reading Beowulf, Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc..." has increased drastically. Most of the time the teacher answer very defeated and says, "Itis part of out curriculium. As a first year teacher I used to be one of them. But what if we as teachers decided to have outr students get into groups of no more then three and discuss why we read the classic literature? The students would have to come up with the questions and the answers in their own small groups. I belive this is what PLE is trying to convey. The message that teachers need to allow their students to own their education and take on responsibilty without knowing their are at first. PLE is taking group activity to another level and using our students skills ie: setting up facebook. myspace, and social blogging, and incorporating it to learning. What better way for not aonly the teacher to understand, but the students to understand the concept of multi-intelligences." Each student could feed off of the others strengths and build their talents by helping their group members weakness. This all sound so wonderful, but the problem is lack of resources in our schools and or in the homes of out students. I think we as teachers could all start by introducing these strategies right in our classroom in order to better prepare our students for the future.