Creating Lifelong Learners

My girlfriend’s mom never let her have video games because she warned her, “you’ll rot your brain.”

Well, it’s happened we just bought a Wii. Our brains are gone. Fried. Even Barack Obama just warned me on CNN that I better “turn off the video games and start demanding excellence.”

I’m not a video gamer. Never was. I wasn’t even allowed to have toy guns as a child so blowing digital people up was never appealing either. I’ve only heard of Halo and Grand Theft Auto because my first graders told me about them. (Turns out those games might not be so appropriate for five and six year olds).

However, when I first saw Super Mario Brothers at Jeremy Dicker’s house back in the fifth grade I knew I had to have it. I think my first memory was watching Mario go down into the pipes to uncover the subterranean world below. Maybe it was some sort of child curiosity about what lay beneath (remember this was before the movie, What Lies Beneath which might have answered that question if only I’d seen it).

I told my mom about my new obsession and she bought me a Nintendo Entertainment System (did she not care that my brain would rot?). And I spent hours playing it. I remember I lost interest at one point. Then I met Alex. He knew how to get to the secret warp zone and I was hooked again.

Twenty three years later and we’re using the state of the art and hard to come by Nintendo Wii but our favorite game to play is still Super Mario Brothers. What is it about the game that is so hypnotic.?

• Perhaps it’s the music. I notice the music in a several of the most popular video games has the same quality of getting into your head. A search of Youtube uncovers many covers of the Super Mario song played by different instruments.
• It’s also a game with very clear beginnings and endings. You want to complete level eight. While this guy can do it in five minutes. It’s going to take me much longer and you keep playing to try beat the game.
• There are many secrets. Warp zones. Bugs. Hidden bricks and unexpected pipe escapes. Like a primitive version of the TV show, Lost, it always feels like there are hidden secrets if only you knew where they were. Youtube reveals many of these secrets but in the 80′s all we knew was what we discovered by accident or heard about on the playground.
• Pattern recognition. If there’s a redeeming quality, it’s this. Enemies and obstacles move in predictable patterns that you only realize after repeated play. Your ability to notice and remember patterns increase through gameplay.

Is this mindless entertainment? There’s got to be something to video games. Chris Walsh makes the point that students will try and fail at video games thousands of times while they drop out of school when encountering similar obstacles. If there’s a point to this post it’s this…how can we harness the addictive qualities of these games and interest students through the same placement of mystery and wonder in our lessons?

My readers, I’m sure, have excellent classroom management. However, you may be called upon to help out a brand-new colleague or an overwhelmed veteran next door. I have a theory that much of a classroom’s success all depends on the teacher’s voice.

Pitch

Think low.

Student teachers I’ve worked with who have poor classroom management often speak in a very high voice. While you can’t change the voice you’ve been given, having taken singing lessons I know that we all have a register which spans from our chest to the top of our head. When managing a classroom, speak from the chest. It gives you power, it’s believable, and it’s not straining. My acting coaches would say, “think low.”
If your voice is too high pitched, it can sometimes sound desperate, apologetic, and it seems as if you are asking students for permission when you are giving directions.

Tone

Be calm.

It is no wonder that the teacher having a nervous breakdown in the teacher’s lounge has a classroom full of students having nervous breakdowns. Students tend to take on their teacher’s personality. Even an emergency like a fire, an earthquake, or a first grader wetting his pants requires the teacher to remain calm. If you’re not relaxed in tone then hyper students are more hyper, distracted students are more distracted, and it’s also a lot less fun.

Don’t yell at students. Okay, you might lose it now and then, but don’t be one of those teachers who barks at students on a daily basis. Barking teachers breed barking students. Don’t confuse meanness with firmness.

Intent

Mean what you say.

Prepare consequences in advance. Don’t start doling them out as an afterthought. Students don’t believe you when you do that. In every class, there will always be at least one student who tries your rules.

When administering consequences like missing recess or missing out on activity, be prepared to follow through with that consequence. If you make your consequences less severe it’s easier to follow through with them. Five minutes away from the group are going to make a student feel the consequences of his actions but not so much as to punish me or be unreasonable to administer. If it comes out of your mouth, you have to follow through with it. So don’t say you’ll go to the office or you’ll call him unless you’re prepared to it (and again, I suggest having a more reasonable plan in effect to deal with offenses which will most likely be minor.)

Elona, a Canadian middle school special education teacher and author of Teachers At Risk, writes today about the inequity of excluding special education students from activities designated for gifted students.I’d like to think these things happen only in Canada but they don’t. I’ve written before about how technology tools like movie making are often saved only for those students whom the teacher believes are “gifted” when in fact the lower students are the ones who need additional and varied activities in order to “get it.”

While I agree with Elementary Educator when he points out that false praise hurts students rather than helps them. However, I do think that every student has some talent that teachers can find and recognize. The student who can’t do “anything” really can’t do anything that we typically do in the classroom but may be able to pick up a musical instrument, edit a short film, or act out a story with a certain flare if only given the opportunity. We have to give students opportunities to demonstrate ability in different ways and we cannot save those opportunities for students who have been identified as gifted.

We need to challenge all students on whatever level they’re at now to take them to the next level. Gifted students aren’t the only ones who are bored in many of our classrooms.