About Veritasium
As will become apparent over time, my feeds are rather eclectic. While I don't teach science as a general rule I do subscribe to a few science oriented places on the internet because the background information helps me when intelligent questions from students come out of left field. This channel is very easy to watch (or listen to as I cook dinner and so on) and they obviously have done their research and have the backing to make effective and engaging videos.
This week's Veritasium Video; "This will revolutionize education".
Well, I've been busy so it's actually last week's Veritasium video... The week before maybe? The end of the year is so close I can taste it, the lines are blurring.
This one came up on a couple of my feeds this week and struck a chord because it's something I've tried to blog about for quite a while now using exactly the same examples I was going to use. It's never seemed to come out right so I've never posted it and of course I have a bit of a different point to make overall.
Part of the post I had in mind (which this video essentially does for me) was that instead of looking at what was changing in education I wanted to take a look at the constants. The parts of Teaching which haven't changed in many many years for teachers in spite of the changing mediums we have had access to in order to deliver information.
So to bring in a relatively new happening, we now have websites available to us that give us access to anything up to full units, semesters or years of planning for the price of relatively few dollars. Websites like Teacher's pay Teachers, Teacher's Marketplace and even Scootle are able to remove a large portion of necessity of spending so much time for planning.
Which means that full time teachers are beginning to follow through on other people's planning. That should sound very familiar to us CRTs because that's exactly what we do... It forms the core of our job descriptions.
I think it's worthwhile observing how the modern age is starting to blur the lines between CRTs and other brands of teachers. As the possibilities open up because of how the digital age is able to transmit information it's moving past the search for worksheets and other core resources and evolving to a point where the job of the CRT is going to become more normal and to some extent become more normal in the average classroom.
As CRTs though, we all inherently understand after a while that following through on someone else's lesson plan isn't as easy as it seems when observed from the outside. When you write a lesson plan you have an inherently deep understanding of it because you know exactly what you expect the students to get out of it in intricate detail. When you're delivering someone else's though, it can be a mad scramble of on-the-fly thinking to try and understand these deeper issues and do a good job. You also might not have the solid knowledge surrounding the topic either, meaning if the students ask a question "out of the blue" you might not have the answer where whoever wrote the lesson probably has a higher knowledge of the general information surrounding it. They have, after all, selected the focus of the lesson based on things they are personally knowledgeable about.
It will be interesting to see whether initiatives such as these sites that supply lesson, unit and full-year plans continue to grow or sort of plateau at some point as the issues we deal with every day become more common knowledge in mainstream teaching.
And, of course, whether it will result in a little more respect for the difficulty of what it is that CRTs do and the skills they are required to accrue in order to do it well.
Regards,
Mel.
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