Here in New Zealand the school year is kicking off. Staff are returning full of vim and vigour. I’m sure you’re familiar with this.
But I always find this time of year intimidating. I hear lots of words, loudly and confidently spoken. So many words are about how things will be fixed this year. Lots of solutions abound, enthusiastically seized on by school leaders.
The continual emphasis on what needs fixing gives the education ecosystem this air of perpetual crisis. — Too many kids are failing in this or that and we need to fix it, urgently!
And I hear all these loud and confident words, and I can’t shake this feeling that they’re right. And then I think, there is so much to do. And then I wonder, how does a teacher have time to fix them all? And then I think, some kind of prioritisation is needed to have a chance of coping. And then I feel, man I must be way down the priority list. And then I think, maybe I’m misguided, my ideas part of the problem.
Doubt clouds in.
So here I am sitting writing this, grappling with the thought that what I have to offer is irrelevant to the crisis it seems we’re in, that soon people will stop paying me because they’ll decide my ideas and approaches don’t help them, that there’s no one else out there who’s interested, that my app has no place in a system in perpetual crisis, and that On Learning says unrealistic things about a world that doesn’t and won’t (and perhaps shouldn’t) exist.
I hope I’m wrong.