When I was 12 or 13 years old, I was obsessed with learning about the baseball card industry.
At some point, that passion switched to sports writing. I wanted to work for Sports Illustrated, and even self-published a few sports magazines using an electric typewriter.
Around the time of the Seattle WTO protests, I dove into the literature on economic globalization.
I’ve also spent time teaching myself the structure of screenplays, basic video production, the fundamental contradictions inherent to civilized societies, and—most recently—the principles of marketing in the 21st century.
In some cases, I spent several months pursuing these passions. In others, it took years before I decided I’d learned what I wanted to learn. Each time, when I was finished with the subject, I simply redirected my energies to learning something new.
Here’s the thing: at no point did I ever know in advance when I would be ready to move on. It would always end suddenly. That’s when I would say to myself: “I’m ready to dive into something else.”
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What if students didn’t take classes? What if, instead, students took on projects?
There is a lot of support for “project-based learning” in schools, but that is often interpreted to mean that instead of students taking a multiple-choice test to prove they learned what the teacher thinks is important, they will make a video or build a sculpture.
That’s not what I mean.
Imagine a school in which students, literally, don’t take classes. Instead, they work with an advisor to identify projects they want to work on right now. For example, that might mean 1) gaining a deep understanding of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, 2) moving up a grade in one’s bouldering skill level, and 3) gaining exposure to the basics of botany.
Or maybe it’s those three things, plus learning about #OccupyWallStreet, and the life of John Belushi.
Or maybe, it’s just one of those things, with a total immersion focus.
When students are focused on projects, structured learning opportunities can be offered in support of them. So a teacher may offer a tutorials in 20th century American History based on the request of a group of students. The individual working on the Civil Rights project might sit in on only the classes dedicated to that time period.
As schools move away from transcripts in favor of resumes, students are freed to focus on meaningful achievements in fields of inquiry that they find fascinating.
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Dr. Tae, the skateboarding physics professor, gave a talk in Seattle this week that asked the question: How do we know how long it takes anyone to learn anything?
The answer, of course, is that no one has any idea. However, when teachers design prescriptive units of study that end at a predetermined time, we’re operating as if we do.
When schools give students the space to design their own learning projects, these projects can then last only as long as they need to. I once took a class on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and got the information I was looking for in about four weeks. For the remaining six weeks, I politely followed along and listened as the teacher explained what he thought was important.
I don’t remember much about those six weeks.
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