Over at Dennis Fermoyle’s always entertaining blog, In the Trenches of Public Education, there’s a fantastic post and discussion about Marc Prensky’s article Engage Me or Enrage Me. Dennis Fermoyle is, well, enraged by Marc Prensky’s ideas. Mr. Fermoyle’s argument starts like this:
This morning when I got to school, I found that copies of a "motivational" article had been placed in all of the teachers’ mailboxes. The name of the article was Engage Me or Enrage Me, and when I read it, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or vomit. I hope you’ll excuse me for putting it so crudely, but the article really was sickening. I talked to another teacher who said he went and banged his head against a locker a few times after he read it. The point of the article is that we need to make school more fun for the students. The implied message was that if kids aren’t performing, it’s the schools’ and teachers’ fault because we haven’t engaged them.
And he quotes enough from Prensky’s article to give some credence to his frustration.
I suggest you read not only his blog, but also the comments, because Doug Johnson of the Blue Skunk Blog and others have some really interesting points to make. In fact, some of his are very similar to what I’m going to lay out here, I think.
I think Prensky’s article is flawed, but still has some valid points. The biggest and best point he makes is about engagement. I think our schools do need to do a better job of engaging our students. I think we do have to find ways to integrate new tools into how we teach, and I (clearly) think that the technological tools we use outside of school need to find their way inside of schools as well. I even think that there are moments with simulations and games can play a major role in what we do in our classrooms.
But I’m going to also say that we also have to teach gumption. We also have to teach kids how to slog through things even when they aren’t fun. And we have to teach kids what it means to see something through, and we have to teach kids that some values are not immediately fun, but are worth it long term. I used to say to my English classes, "Hey, on a warm spring day, I’d rather be outside playing Ultimate frisbee than teaching English, but we all have to be here, so let’s find a way to make it meaningful." The flaw in Prensky’s article is that there is a difference between recreation and work. It’s wonderful when they overlap. It’s wonderful when we learn from our recreation. But it’s not always the case. And we need to teach kids how to find entry points into ideas that are not, prima facie, of interest to them. We need to find ways to teach students how to keep going, even when the thing they are engaged in gets hard or boring.
And that’s the flaw with Prensky. We have to find ways to engage kids, yes, but we can’t assume that just because a student can play a video game for eight hours without a break for recreational purposes that they know how to apply those lessons to chemistry. Or that the right way to teach them chemistry is through a game.
Most things worth doing get hard, and most things worth doing well force us to overcome a gumption trap or two when we would just rather give up. (And yes, I’m borrowing the phrase "gumption trap" from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.) Right now, in my basement, there’s a 2 x 4 half-screwed into the wall where I was planning on building a peg-board tool wall for myself. It ended up being harder than I thought and, at least for now, I gave up. What did I do instead that day? I went upstairs and played with Jakob and Theo. More fun, more immediate gratification, and I’m better at it than I am at building things. But the 2 x 4 is still back there. And I won’t get any better at this stuff unless I slog through it and figure out how its done.
Games and simulations take us so far, but they don’t take us all the way there. There is a difference between having a hobby that you love and spending a few zillion hours on it and doing what you need to do be a productive member of society. What we have to gain from Prensky’s argument isn’t that we should use games to teach, even if that is what he suggests. What we have to gain from the argument is this — what is it that our hobbies have in common that engage us? What is it that causes us to fall in love with doing something such that we can do it for hours? Hopefully, in the case of computer games, it’s not just the cool graphics and opportunities to blow stuff up (or build civilizations or find a way for the 2005 Eagles to win the Madden Bowl) but there’s something about the way we play that is engaging. Hopefully, when it comes to internet communication technology, it’s not just the immediacy of the communications or the ability to have seventeen IM conversations at once, (or even that because the conversations happen more slowly than verbal conversations that you don’t have to have as much to say) but that there is something new and interesting about the way we talk online that is exciting. How do we mine that and bring it back to the classroom? How do we find a way to teach kids that finding your own path to engagement and not always relying on others to do it for you is a powerful tool for self-actualization?
When I coached, I would have some kids for whom school was a real struggle. The idea of sitting down for two or three hours a night to study was horrific. But those same kids were at the front door to the gym or on the Ultimate field at 6:30 every morning, ready to practice. And trust me, no matter how much you love basketball or Ultimate, when that alarm rings at 5:00 am, very few people are excited and engaged about the idea of practice. And practices under me were tough… lots of conditioning, lots of skill work, lots of walk-throughs or controlled mini-scrimmages, but very rarely did we just play. And getting better didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t always easy. And kids came and came and were engaged. And I remember one student who, late junior year, started to really pull his grades from the C/D range to the B/C range all at once. We were driving home from a game, and we were talking about it, and he said, "Well, I had success on the Ultimate field, and I loved how it made me feel. And once you have that feeling in one place, you want it everywhere else. And so I thought about how I could take what I learned on the field and use it in the classroom." (And yes, I almost drove into a pole, listening to this.)
That’s the ideal. That’s the moment you spend your career waiting for, but it’s also the moment that is so important when we look at what value Prensky’s ideas have for us.
We need to do a better job of finding a way in with so many kids. We need to find the spark inside them and then fan that flame so that it can sustain itself. Engagement is not a one time thing, it’s a daily struggle — as the 2 x 4s in my basement will attest — but if we can find ways — be it with computer games and cool technologies or if it’s through more "old fashioned" ways like after-school activities — so that more students can experience that engagement, then we will have started on the right path.
The next step is when it gets hard. We have to find ways to help the kids see the connection between what they love doing now and the work and learning we’re offering. It’s about moving kids toward meta-cognition. What questions should we be asking?
How much time do you spend on that game?
How do you know you’ve gotten better?
How does it make you feel about yourself?
How did you solve problems in the game when you got stuck?
What lessons does that hold for you?
What do you think this tells you about the way you like to learn and experience new things?
* How could that play out in your classes?
And so on… it’s not just that we need to play games in class — there, Prensky doesn’t hold much water for me. Instead, we need to create meaningful, relevant curriculum that allows students sufficient opportunities to really step up and take ownership. We need to use the tools that every other aspect of our society and update our schools and our classrooms. But let’s also be sure. We can do all of this. We can make our schools inviting, progressive, technology-rich schools, and there will still be kids who refuse to engage or who simply push buttons and press boundaries, even with a curriculum full of new ideas. There is no panacea in education, and some kids will struggle simply because, on a nice spring day, they’d rather be outside too. Or on the internet, or playing games (on the internet). We have to keep working with them to understand their role in their own learning process. We have to make explicit the steps we would take to them to create an engagement classroom and assigments, but then we also have to make sure they are willing to interalize those lessons as well.
