30 Days of Blogging: Day 14
Teaching computers in a middle school is never an easy job. It’s not so much the crazy kids or the behavior problems, it often getting the right mix of teaching something that is challenging enough for the more engaged students without losing the less engaged students. It can also be about creating a curriculum that other computer teachers, who may not be as “into” computers, can handle.
I often find myself thinking of some exciting and challenging material that I think the students can handle, only for it to be way over their heads or too hard when it comes to the assignments. I can often adjust the assignments as we go but for some, I feel like I have lost them and they are turned off to learning some of these cool things. Then getting my fellow teachers on board with teaching some of this material can really be a challenge if they are not computer geeks.
This year particularly I have felt worn out over teaching the curriculum that we are trying to agree to and I don’t look forward to the future. Every time I try to inject some real 21st century skills into what we teach I get shot down as “they need to learn to keyboard” or “they need to learn to write business letters” or something else along those lines. It’s only been recently that I have won the battle to teach coding in one of our classes. But even that has only been a partial victory since the class is called Creative Computers so that the other teachers are free to teach things other than coding.
In the meantime I have students who want to learn to animate, 3D model, design games and a whole host of other computer skills that we can’t seem to build into our curriculum. One of the things that I would really like to work on is developing a class that is totally project based so that the students can produce a real tangible product when they are done and learn some real computer skills in the process.
Living With Computers 