"It's Not Your Fault" - Blog Post 2:

The thing that kept repeating over and over in my head today in class was "it's not your fault," as it appears in Good Will Hunting.

In the film, Will is an incredibly gifted and "wicked smaht" young man who never seems to have been able to  apply himself adequately. I think this scene speaks to a fundamental disconnect between students and their teachers/caretakers.  Students are consistently told that their short attention spans and inability to endure face-to-face communication is damaging their ability to be in the world. In truth, I think they are actually light-years ahead of most of their teachers in terms of understanding the connectivity of the world and how it can influence their behavior. Of course they can't pay attention in class: the class model is outmoded. Students are continually derided for their lack of motivation to participate in a system that neither caters to their interests or satisfies their real-world needs in terms of the job market, installing themselves as empowered members of a democratic society, or being able to shape the world around them. It's not their fault.

I believe the educational model currently in place needs to be dramatically recalibrated. Teachers have been positioned for far too long as guardians of some sacred knowledge that if only students could stop staring at their phones they could be granted access to. Most teachers have not stopped to consider that what's happening on their students' phones could be INFINITELY more interesting and relevant to their experience in the world. So much of the information being presented to students in my field (literature) is literally useless to a student with regular access to cliffs notes. Instead, teachers in my field should be teaching students how to generate their own knowledge or augment extant knowledge through creative, collaborative engagement now just with the texts, but with one another. The real kicker to this problem is that this is already how it works in the higher level academe students are supposed to be getting prepared for. Academic work in literature is already collaborative: that's what peer reviewed already means. So why is the teacher still standing at the front of the room and dictating information that's literally already available on students' phones?

Knowledge now is decentralized; it exists in many different forms, in many different mediums, and can be reconfigured based on the whims of new, creative thinking from anyone. Knowledge no longer belongs to academics. Public education needs to accept this and stop trying to teach children the themes of To Kill a Mockingbird and shift towards instead teaching how to use those themes and other mechanisms of literary study to make the world their students inhabit a more graceful, creative, inclusive space; and they need to do so in ways that work with students' existing relationship to information communications technologies. In short, it's teachers who need to update their thinking regarding their own profession. They must redesign curricula to better prepare students for a world in which information is constantly changing and being reconfigured. They must halt the rhetoric telling students to put their phones away. It's the pedagogical methods that are to blame. It's not the students' fault.