The crux of what he was explaining is that whether you are doing your job well or not, and whether the class is learning effectively or not is irrelevant. All that is of concern is whether you are following the modules and the time allocated to those modules exactly.
The first thing that came to my mind is that if you are a teacher and have additional and interesting course work that you would like to cover in a class, but you are on such a time constraint just to get the work done then, where will you fit in all of that valuable information you collected for that subject?
Simply put there would be no time to explain and relate any other concepts outside of what is in a book. To me this makes no sense at all. Here is a individual who has gone the extra mile to gather important and exciting additional content for their class, yet they are unable to share that information because of a calendar?
I don't believe that type of thinking is going to solve anything. Of course everyone has a timeline to follow and the topics that need to get covered must get covered, but should that be at the expense of everything else? No.
Now more than ever I believe the divide between what gets taught at school and what is actually going on in the real world are very different things. In my previous articles I have discussed how we are moving away from an industrialised era. We are currently and will continue to be in the information generation.
What does that mean for the youth we are teaching? Simple - there is so much focus being placed on following rules and red tape regulations that the content along with the teaching of the content is not as effective as it should be.
This is cause for great concern, because if we are unable to fill the divide between what is relevant now and supplement it with book based content whilst providing the educator the freedom to showcase the subjects in a different manner, we are not achieving the goal of getting youth educated.
The B Smart team is working hard at changing the way in which this process is facilitated. Still allowing for the rules and regulations of the standard calendar based education structure to be followed, but providing that opportunity for more valuable and relevant information to be included in the process.
This will allow teachers not to pause the amazing work they have been doing in getting external information to their students, but to truly integrate it in a manner that will better educate their class.
Using this kind of methodology I believe that the results we will be seeing over the next two years will be simply mind blowing.
I leave you with a quote from Albert Einstein "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
