You are a Genius

"They learn to be nonreaders, or that they are nonspellers, or that they can't do mathematics.  They learn who they are.  If they learn they are leaders or geniuses (or clowns or fools) they behave accordingly." Frank Smith p. 10

It is the last line that Smith says that struck me the most.  "If they learn they are leaders or geniuses...they behave accordingly."  If we show our children that they are geniuses with amazing abilities in this life, they will believe it and be it.

My friend and mentor Angela Maiers has talked about the idea of letting kids know that they are their own genius quite a bit in the past couple of years.  She has challenged many teachers to tell their students "You are a genius and the world needs your contribution" when they enter their rooms.  It is through this labeling of each child and identifying them as geniuses that children take on the characteristics of a genius and the attitude of a genius.  They hone their "habitudes" of curiosity, imagination, perseverance, self-awareness, adaptability, courage, and passion to be leaders and geniuses of this world.

Photo used with permission from Angelamaiers.com

So imagine putting this out there for students in your classroom and see how they learn who they are.  They ARE leaders.  They ARE geniuses.  They will learn this without "learning" it...and because of this, they will also learn to change the world.

Photo used with permission from Angelamaiers.com

Probing

Probing Principle: Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reflecting in and on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; reprobing the world to test this hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis.

Once I completed the tutorial in The Settlers, I was on my own.  My little settlement that I had established was busy making things, but I wanted more.  I set out to search for quests by wandering or probing.  I was stuck on my part of the land and in my settlement without the ability to move anywhere else.  I hypothesized that by accepting a quest I would be able to leave my settlement.  In the initial tutorial, the quests kept you in your own settlement, but allowed you to explore further out than where your settlers lived.  I was hoping that it would change once I finished the tutorial.  I wandered around (reprobed) trying to fulfill the challenge, but in reality the challenge was to send one of my explorers to do it for me.  I never really knew where they went.  When they returned, they informed me that they had found copper, gold, rebels needing to be killed, etc.  It was not until after they returned that I was able to see where they had gone.  Much of the time, it was just a little beyond where everyone lived, but still on our piece of land.  This often made me rethink of my original hypothesis in order to regroup and try again.  Perhaps a different quest would finally take me elsewhere...  Thus far, it has not.  I'm frustrated about that.  I was hoping to interact with other players a bit more than just chatting.  

Just Keep Swimming

What happens when you don't have the chance to open your email until 30 minutes before class, only to find out that you're leading your own class and you better come prepared?  Give yourself a brief moment to panic, quickly brainstorm some topic ideas, and then find out where everyone is meeting.  This is exactly what happened to me tonight after a long day of work and trying to eat somewhere along the way.  Fortunately, I have an amazing group of people who are all in this with me and we managed just fine.

14 of us assembled in our meeting space and quickly typed up our myths for our discussion.  Not one to waste any time, I called us to order by reading through the agenda for the meeting, and then we all agreed to go through in which we all typed our myths.  I have to say that as simplistic and "ordinary" as it may be, I quite like going in order because it makes sense, when so few things do these days.  We quickly discovered that time was dwindling, so Joel proposed that we set a time limit on our talks so we all had the opportunity to discuss our myths.  We all agreed and he became the official timekeeper with his foghorn letting us know that 3 minutes had passed.  Ultimately, we were all able to share, have a brief moment for actual discussion (if not during our 3 minutes, we did so via text), and still managed to debunk some myths that we all have faced at one point or another.

As an elementary student, I attended a private Christian school that used the PACE curriculum.  It was called PACE because students went at their own pace and worked through the workbooks with as little or as much time and help as necessary.  I did a lot of my own self-guided learning in third through sixth grade and am familiar with how it needs to be addressed.  Tonight's class took me back to elementary school where it was up to me to pace myself.  Yes, there were others along for the ride this time, and I wasn't completely alone, but in fact we were directing our own learning.  This tends to be how MALT works in many ways.  Most days I feel like I'm barely staying afloat with all of the demands and am doing much of my learning in a self-guided format.  My peers are here to help me along the way, but I am in charge of my own learning.  When I feel like I might be in danger of drowning, I think of Dory's song from Finding Nemo..."You know what you gotta do when life gets you down?  Just keep swimming, just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.What do we do, we swim, swim, swim.  Oh ho ho how I love to swim."