In 1967, media critic Marshall McLuhan predicted that within two decades, technology would make school unrecognizable. “As it is now, the teacher has a ready-made audience,” he wrote. “He is assured of a full house and a long run. Those students who don’t like the show get flunking grades.” But if students were given the choice to get their information elsewhere, he predicted, “the quality of the experience called education will change drastically. The educator then will naturally have a high stake in generating interest and involvement for his students.”
McLuhan was right about one thing: students can now get much of their information elsewhere. Many young people “are now deeply and permanently technologically enhanced,” said business and education consultant Marc Prensky—his observation will hit home to anyone who has watched teenagers sit in a Starbucks, wait in line at a Walgreens checkout stand, or attend a family function. But in school, those who don’t like the show still get flunking grades. However, these students have a vision of something different. They now have the experience, outside of school, of diving into worlds that are richer and more relevant than anything they get in school. There’s a technical term for this phenomenon, in which someone sees the possibilities that lie just out of reach but must spend time doing lesser things. It’s called boredom, or as theologian Paul Tillich once described it, “rage spread thin.”
In spite of our teachers’ heroic efforts, our schools are fighting a losing battle with boredom. Indiana University’s High School Survey of Student Engagement finds that 65 percent of students report being bored “at least every day in class.” Sixteen percent—nearly one in six students—are bored in every class.
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Each year, Keith Devlin, the popular Stanford University math researcher, observes an unusual little ritual. He is invited annually to address the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and each time he asks teachers to raise their hands if they are gamers. By 2010, he’d been posing the question for five years, and each year the results were the same: just a few hands went up. Then, in 2011, at the group’s annual meeting in Indianapolis, he saw something different: nearly every hand in the room went up.
Devlin mostly attributes this to a generational shift (also, the iPad had first appeared in the spring of 2010). But he said nearly all teachers are realizing that games are here to stay. “Nobody would think of being a teacher if they could not read,” he said. “Well, video games and other digital media are new literacies.
” According to Devlin, teachers have a responsibility to learn about kids’ interests. “It’s not the students’ responsibility to put themselves in our place. As teachers, it’s our responsibility to put ourselves in the students’ place. And if they are in a digital world, where they will invest many hours solving difficult, challenging problems in a video game, it would be criminal if we didn’t start where they are and take advantage of the things they want to do. That’s the world they live in, that’s the world they’re going to own and develop. As teachers our job is to help them on that journey. We have to start where they are, and if they’re in video games, we need to start there."
Read the full story at Salon.
Keith Devlin is the executive director of the Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute at Stanford. Read more about Keith Devlin's Introduction to Mathematical Thinking MOOC .
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