The medium is the....what?

Wow, if everyone had a social self-consciousness (aka a crap detector) the world would be a better place, wouldn’t it? Maybe we can develop a machine to do it, kind of like a metal detector except for crap. Wave it around and it will beep at people who are unaware of the need to maintain the world around them.  Just kidding. Really, though, I always thought that the purpose of school was to help students develop their own “crap-detectors” (although I never used that word). This week’s reading made me think otherwise. The way Postman and Weingartner presented talked, it seemed to me that schools are working in the opposite direction of “crap detecting”. Instead of teaching students to take a step back and look at their society the way and outsider would, traditional classrooms emerge students in only their own world. A good example of this is the fact the many history classes focus only on history as it pertains to America. The worst part is that it seems like most student just sit back and take it without questioning the system. I know I did.  That’s why inquiry and medium need to be tied into the classroom; students need to learn how to learn and how to ask important questions. A quote that really stood out to me in the reading was “what students mostly do in the class is guess what the teacher wants them to say”. SO TRUE. If our students are going to sit and class and try to figure how what we want them to say, how can we show them that what we want them to do is learn how to ask questions that matter? To “matter” these questions need to be relevant somehow, and this brings me to the meaning of the word “relevant”. To me, “relevant” content or questions have to pertain to the students in some way. Relevant material doesn’t have to relate specifically to each student’s life, but it does need to at least have some sort of effect on the world in which they live. Relevant material should benefit students in some way. I keep thinking back to our first article about teaching in the 21^st century and the example the authors used about a student who had to learn the names of the rivers in South America. What a prime example or irrelevant material! I think that having so much data available at our fingertips makes even more material “irrelevant” then there was in 1968 wan Postman and Weingartner wrote their article. Anyway, the point of all this is that in order to help our student become “crap detectors”, we have to be able to decide what material is relevant and what isn’t. We have to know how to teach our students to ask questions instead of just receiving answers.