I had an interesting day at the institute, and then I had a cup of coffee with my aunt, Hannah, who used to be an elementary school teacher and then a math coordinator, and we had an interesting talk about the culture of education. I was saying something about the reading wars and the way The Knowledge Gap vilified Lucy Calkins, and I said, “It’s funny, all educational debates follow the same basic structure, but I’m not sure I know what that structure is, exactly.”
“I know,” Hannah said: “taking two things that are both necessary and pitting them against each other."
She’s exactly right!
That was one high point. Another was when we had twenty minutes to just sit and read quietly, and our facilitator said, “Most importantly, you’ve got to protect your reading time!”
I agree, we have to protect our reading time, so I was less happy with the amount of time we spent looking at screens, images, and video. Ugh.
I guess I should have known this was coming after Mary Ehrenworth said yesterday, about using video in your classroom (I think she called it, in a strange phrase, “digital read-alouds”): “This is a game-changer,” and added, “You should be using it in your classrooms as much as humanly possible.”
Yikes!
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