A Responsibility to Change by Tim Ramsey I had a conversation with an educator recently about the direction that schools in general are moving in order to meet the needs of 21st century children. “I don’t do well with change,” my visitor said midway through our meeting. I cringed. In the realm of education, most people don’t like the idea of change very much. Parents remember the way their teachers taught, the way their classrooms were organized, the way their daily activities were structured. “It worked for me,” they contend. “Why can’t we do the same for my kids?” Legislators create systems that reflect the memories of their own school days. Voters place their support behind systems that maintain the status quo...again, because “it worked for me…” But we as educators must not fall into the same trap. We have a responsibility to change so that we may meet the needs of all children as the world in which they live and learn changes. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the world today is vastly different from the world of our parents. The world today is vastly different from the world of just five years ago! Research shows that it usually takes three to five years for a change to take place in an educational setting. We can’t wait three to five years! Our eighth graders will be voters by then! When I started teaching, we used ditto machines to make damp purple copies of student handouts. If we needed a nicer copy of something, we could depend on the school’s one photocopy machine. Even then we had to give our master copy to the secretary and were allowed only one copy. We usually had to wait a week to get that copy. We had no computers for our students to use. But we were “cutting edge” with one Apple IIc for every four teachers to share. And what lovely documents we produced with the dot matrix printer. We had no curriculum maps with academic standards then. My first assistant principal told me there was no curriculum guide or adopted textbook either. I had complete freedom to create my own! My first students are now raising children (and some are raising grandchildren!) of the 21st century. They deserve an updated educational system. I’m willing to change… Are you? Copyright, Tim Ramsey.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 04:05:24 +0000
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