Wisdom

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Wisdom?

Symphony and Pink

According to Webster, symphony refers to an elaborate composition for orchestra, usually in four movements of contrasting tempos, but if one reads on further a harmony of sound is also expressed. Pink describes the sense of symphony as "the ability to put together the pieces" or to "synthesize rather than analyze". As teachers, we aim for this level of thinking every day, but I feel we easily get bogged down in the understand and demonstrate levels of Bloom's taxonomy first. Maybe that is because we approach our students with the misunderstanding that they don't already posses the information we are feeding to them. What if we start with the big idea questions first and then work on the skills to get them there, only if they don't already have them.

With students accessing web 2.0 technologies today and becoming their own creators of media, I ask are teachers helping or hindering? Are students really using the web to create meaningful knowledge and ideas or are they just socializing? And which kids are we talking about? I argue that these kids are those of upper-middle class status, not the ones in rural communities (that probably still operate on dial-up) or inner-city minorities. Today we still have the underlying bias of the governing and the governed, those who have all the toys/technology and those who don't, those who can post to YouTube and those who have never even heard of it.

Pink brings out several points in this chapter of the book, including the idea that "like drawing, symphony is largely about relationships". How are we teaching kids to understand and create analogy? If one were to listen closely to kids, I argue that this is something they do every day. Kids naturally make connections. I have heard them often say, "Oh, that's like when...". Unfortunately as a teacher, I often cringe because their analogy refers to something they have seen on television, but as we all know it is a medium most kids are all too familiar with. 

So to encourage teachers to make better use of symphony in their classrooms, I am suggesting we do these three things:

1. Listen to our students ideas with open minds,
2. Consider their strengths, not their weaknesses, and 
3. Ask yourself what you can do for them, not what they can do for you.

Maybe our kids are really big picture thinkers, and it is us as teachers, that constantly want to take things apart to analyze them, forgetting to put them back together in the end.

Story

The second area Pink discusses in A Whole New Mind is Story, a trait I believe we have all had since birth. Teachers of young children and parents know that story is how children make sense of their world. Today that story sharing has moved to a new means, the web.

In the future, will these children look back at historical web files to remember their history, or will they have some other technology we have yet to imagine that collects their stories? When I visit my grandmother, I try to remember her stories to pass on to my children. What will my children do with these stories? StoryCorps archives, for instance, will help carry some of these stories into the future. And just like history that is taught in schools, story can teach us not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

As for big business and the medical profession sharing their stories, it only makes sense that they can learn from each other, as we are stronger when we share collective knowledge than when we go it alone. This I also believe teachers have been aware of for years, why else would we form groups to support students in need and discuss ways to solve problems in our schools.

Sites like YouTube give us more places to share our stories or our constructed knowledge and as the technological savvy youth of today expand their ideas, pushing the envelop as all new generations do, I predict we will see changes in how and what we see on television and in films. As consumers of knowledge have more choices for learning than ever, television channels like Discovery, The Learning Channel, and HGTV help us to chose the stories we want to add to our own. Ted.com pushes our thinking and gives us those connections that make for ah-ha moments.

So what stories do you want to share? What stories do you want to live?

Reflections on the Conceptual Age and Design

Recently I finished reading Daniel Pink's book, A Whole New Mind, and my mind is still whirling about while considering all it's connotations as I try to make connections to what I see in my little corner of the world today. If we are truly in a "Conceptual Age" as he describes, what does this mean for the gal who delivers the mail and the man who stocks the shelves at the grocery store? Yes, Asia and automation are changing the look of production and the workforce in our country, but even in the most advanced countries service must exist.

With technology and the internet only beginning to be taken out for a test drive these "concepts" that we as consumers utilize every day may be changing and growing before we can even get accustomed to them. And how is that different for those in the "google generation" than for myself, born before 1993? For instance while trying to determine which digital camcorder to purchase for work today, I found that the hardware is ahead of the software at this point and even though I may buy a camera that is capable of creating great pictures and storing 30 GB, I may not even be able to convince my computer to acknowledge its existence.

Pink presents Six Senses that we need to develop in order to adjust and get ahead in this new age. I personally love the first. Design, just saying it makes you feel in control. But being the type of person who likes to get a little artistic and create just for the fun of it, maybe design just fits my personality. Again, how will this fit with the gal delivering the mail and the guy stocking the shelves? Maybe design is just one of those innate human traits and web 2.0 technology is just giving the next generation a new place to try it out. We can even design our new selves these days with avatars, MySpace, and other platforms. And of course, who hasn't heard of designer babies?

So tomorrow I will get up and design breakfast for my family. I will design lessons for my students. But I will still ask what does this mean for the gal delivering the mail and the guy stocking the shelves? What will they design? What will you design?