Who am I?
Rich Debutante: Who are you?
Bukowski: Ah, the eternal question; the eternal answer… I don’t know.
(From the film Barfly)
I have worked in education for twelve years, which is long enough to know that in general we, as educators, don’t know much. I’ve worked in a hakwon (cram school) in Korea, a Project Based Learning, boarding school in Alaska that the administration shut down, a bi-lingual, national school in Turkey that wasn’t bi-lingual, an international school on a small tropical island basically ran by the parents, but in a good way, and in an international school in Korea that is actually an American school. All the things that teachers should be doing in classrooms — blogs, podcasts, wikis, projects — are mostly avoided and feared by the average teacher. What I know is that students learn by doing, not by being told; they learn by sharing and connecting, not by listening to a lecture. All of the different styles of learning can be accommodated, if teachers are open to learning and exploring.
