This Is Not News

Another off night tonight, but while I was looking on thenotebook.org for details on the latest contract snafus in Philadelphia schools, I found this item that mentions my own school a couple of times:

Students face long odds at many popular schools

Parkway Center City, where I teach, admits the smallest percentage of its applicants, and is one of the high schools in the city with the largest number of applicants. On the one hand, it’s certainly nice to know that lots of parents and students want to be part of our community. But it also reminds us that lots of parents and students want something from their education that they only feel they can get from a selective-admission school. There may be no getting around that, but it sure would be nice if there were even more of those options available for students across the city.

I’m pretty much taking the day off from blogging, but here’s a link to a story on CNN about a high school football team that rarely punts and usually attempts an onside kick after every score. The coach’s logic is that doing everything you can to increase your chances to keep possession of the ball does more to improve your chances to win the game than giving up the ball because you’re afraid of what will happen. I’d love to see this data-driven convention-defying approach tried elsewhere.

Following up on last night’s post, I was talking to a college friend who’s now a library teacher for young students, who are used to being able to type a question into Google and having a website pop up with an answer. (Not necessarily a good answer, but an answer.) It got me thinking about how we use search engines. I’m still used to using keywords from all my time using academic libraries, and I think general keywords are a better tool for understanding a topic because they will present you with a range of general information that you can use to build context. That way, when you do find out the specific detail you’re looking for, you understand what it really means. But that requires an entirely different kind of thinking than a natural language question search, and I’m not sure if there’s a best way to teach kids about Boolean operators. If there is, I wish someone would teach me.

My students have to find an article about “how the world has changed since 9/11/01” and bring it in tomorrow. It’s meant, in part, to be a way to break free of the idea that I have to curate every experience, but I admit I have a little trepidation. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff on the Internet, y’know? Some of it is written by people of questionable talent, honesty, and/or sanity. And I find that a lot of my students don’t differentiate between different sources – indeed, many of them don’t pay attention to the actual website where they get a piece of information. It all comes from Google. I find myself wanting to teach my students my media habits born of a pre-Internet youth, pre-Google young adulthood, and trying-to-keep-up-with-it-all 30s. (Remember portals, anyone?) Should I? Am I sharing wisdom gained through years of experience, or trying to force a new generation into the same world of gatekeepers that I’m comfortable with? Maybe there’s no way to do the first without a little bit of the second, but at the moment I feel like it’s still worth it to try to impose just a little bit of order in the Information Age’s Wild West.