Dear future teachers,
When I was starting my own journey as an educator, my mentor told me something that stuck with me and has guided me through my most hopeless days: teaching is the greatest act of optimism. I think Teachers’ Day is a great time to remind myself, and more importantly, all of you who are about to begin your own exciting journey to shape the future of the world, of this simple and obvious, yet often overlooked, truth.
I want you to take a moment to analyze this line instead of dismissing it as a Hallmark greeting card type message that makes you smile for a second but doesn’t really mean anything.
Why is teaching an act of optimism?
I think optimism requires a sense of excitement about all the weird and wonderful things that are changing in the world around us… And I honestly can’t think of a better explanation for your new role in the world. And the reason I bring this up today is because very soon, you’ll find yourself nearly deafened by a noise that will make you question whether teaching is an act of optimism… or fear.
Because fear catches the eye and is addictive.
It is easier to get students and parents to pay attention by terrifying them with the uncertainty of the future than by inspiring them to look ahead and approach it with positivity. That is the sad truth and the difficult choice you will have to deal with. I can also tell you that there is nothing more rewarding when you achieve the latter. But that, too, takes work. You cannot make students comfortable with uncertainty unless you yourself are comfortable with it, which begins with accepting that the role of the teacher today is not the same as it used to be.
Gone are the days when vocations and professions evolved over generations. Now the world can change in a matter of months. How do we prepare children for a future that none of us can predict with any accuracy? Oddly enough, we have to go back to basics and the past to prepare for the future. Which means helping children deeply learn the foundations of the disciplines of the future, so that they become endlessly curious about everything that is built on those foundations.
We can’t prepare for what the future might be, but we can equip them with a deep understanding of the forces that will shape it. This means that while we don’t know what exact technology they will be using in 5, 10, or 20 years, we do know that technology will be the driving force of the future. We don’t know how much the boundaries of AI will be pushed in the coming years, but we do know that it will be a force to be reckoned with. We don’t know what form national and global financial institutions will take or how entrepreneurship will develop around the world, but we do know that money, trade, and business will never stop being important.
It’s easy to teach children to give intelligent directions about generative AI tools, but it’s much harder to help them understand how that technology came about, what its current contours are, and what its future potential might be. The former requires superficial knowledge and rote learning, while the latter needs the teacher to engage deeply with the subject first, so that curiosity can extend to the student.
I’m not going to pretend that it’s easy. When you’re teaching children evolving, forward-thinking subjects, the learning itself and the improvement of skills can never stop. Add to that the cacophony of fear in the world around us. It’s natural for parents to worry about things they can’t predict or control in their child’s world. Which means that teaching a child a new-age skill to prepare them for the future is also taking their parents on this journey of “everything will be okay” and “no, it’s NOT better to quickly teach them 20 directions or common use cases in 2 classes, it’s better to teach them the actual technology in 20.”
Sometimes, you will have to take this journey with each child and parent several times before they start to believe in it and see the world differently. And I admit that this can be exhausting and overwhelming at times. But it is worth it the day when all the hard work pays off and your student advances much further because their knowledge of a subject comes from a place of understanding charged with curiosity, critical thinking, and culminates in experimentation. It is worth it when you realize that you have changed the way your students not only learn with you, but also how they see the world – fundamentally!
Five years ago, if you had asked me what my biggest training accomplishment was, I would have said it was the transition from primarily physical learning tools to the wealth of online tools now available to educators. I am amazed at how many times I would have changed my answer if you had asked me the same question over the past 18 months. I have spent hundreds of hours using the AI-enabled platform that personalizes and individualizes children’s learning.
This means I spent dozens of grueling hours learning first. We now have the ability to teach each child all subjects taking into account the context, pace, and learning format that interests them the most. For example: if a student wants to design a travel app but also loves history, the platform can intuitively combine these two interests and create simulations, tests, practice exercises, and review material that combine these two things so that the student’s learning process can be much more rewarding and personal.
But first I need to make an effort to learn how such a powerful technology came to be and what its creation entails, and even what ethical questions such an AI might raise for humanity as a whole.
If you had asked me the same question about how to improve my skills eight months ago, I would say that the most important thing I have learned recently is the ability to be discerning about data. The tools we use are constantly giving us millions of data points about what our students need: what they excel at, what they need help with, and even what biases they might be developing. Asking the right questions of the data and understanding the answers I get has been my biggest accomplishment as a teacher over the past year.
Dear Future Teachers, Teaching New Age Skills is not for the faint of heart, but it is definitely for the strong of mind!
(The letter’s author, Dhanjit Sarma, is a senior coding educator at BrightCHAMPS. The views expressed are his own.)
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