Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Thanks to Assorted Stuff

I thought I'd share this post from Assorted Stuff about classroom rules in a college art class. In the post he shares the following rules.

Rule 2 - General duties of a student: Pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.

Rule 3 - General duties of a teacher: Pull everything out of your students.

Rule 5 - Be self disciplined: This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.


Going to the source of the rules I found two others that caught my attention.
Rule 4 - Consider everything an experiment.

Rule 6 - Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.

I can see how these "fit" an art class, but shouldn't they also apply to our work in public schools, especially 4 and 6? With rules like these maybe kids wouldn't lose the sense of wonder and discovery that they bring to kindergarten. We wouldn't be stifling curiousity by the journey to find the right answer to get the right grade, that leads to the necessary grade point average needed for continued learning to prepare for a world where curiousity and creativity will again be part of the currency for success.

Kind of leaves a lot of time in between that can be seen as very boring for many of our young people that have been conditioned or refuse to be conditioned to the norms for success in traditional K-12 learning. If curiousity and creativity are requirements for success in the 21st century we need to ensure that our curriculum and instructional practices provide opportunities for all students to continually use and enhance their capacity with these tools.

(Spell check isn't working and didn't for my last post. Normally this would bother me and force me to read the post multiple times before publishing. Iv'e decided, however, to reread only one time and if I miss anything so be it. My self worth is no longer tied to spelling and typing errors on my blog. I will though, accept any guidance one can give me about my problem. Thanks for listening and overlooking the errors.)

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