I have been going through a bunch of tests this summer on my brain to figure out some health issues I have been having.
After an EEG test yesterday the doctor simply told me he did not have an answer. He did not know what was going on and released me to slowly get back to training and exercising to see what happens.
My first thought was pure frustration. How could he not give me an answer? I mean I wanted an answer NOW!
And then I realized that sometimes not having an answer is okay. In my case it is actually a good result because things could have been much worse with a result that I did not want.
I immediately thought of education. Teachers are no longer required to know all the information either. If you are a teacher that still acts like the gatekeeper of knowledge - STOP! Unfortunately we still have too many teachers that operate this way.
Your job is no longer to be up front in the room spewing your information. Your job is to challenge students to use existing knowledge to find new answers to problems that don't exist. Looking at things in only one way does not benefit the students. We need the concept of blending ideas. Taking several perspectives and ideas to figure out how to best find a solution.
It is okay to not know. Leave your ego at the door and embrace the world of uncertainty.
Acting like a gatekeeper of existing knowledge does not prepare students for the real world. All it does is kill creativity and does not help promote deeper thinking. Get out of the way and let them learn. Be a guide, but not a dictator. What we need more than anything is for students to keep their creativity that they are born with and to challenge existing information.
After all, this is what the world needs. New visions of how things operate. The only way to do that is for teachers to sometimes say, "I don't know!"
No comments:
Post a Comment