The jailbreak

After weeks of website hosting challenges, forgotten passwords and fiddling, I’ve finally made it to the point of posting!  Hello!  I have decided to call this blog, a digital place for my reflections on teaching, “My classroom jailbreak.”  Last night my husband and I were having a TED evening and watched 13 year-old Logan Laplante give his talk, “Hackschooling Makes Me Happy”.

It’s an amazing presentation on many levels but one aspect that caught my attention was his comparison between his home-schooling experience and computer hacking.  It got me thinking afterwards about “jailbreaking” my students.

I am looping this coming year (teaching students for two or more years in a row) and am super excited to work with 8 of my students again.  A few of the students who will be joining me for another year are extremely bright, motivated students who over the course of this past year learned to hack their own education.  They took ideas that we were working with in class and ran with them, making up their own projects, doing their own research at home.  They became passionate about educating themselves.

The other students are bright, motivated students as well. But they still operate solely within the existing “operating system”.  They do things for marks, complete assignments to a high degree of competence…but not more. They work hard, but more in terms of strategic compliance rather than a deep desire to learn for the sake of learning.  These students need a jailbreak.

So this is my new plan, I’m going to “jailbreak” my classroom and this blog will be my hacker’s notebook.