to let my cousin down. And I didn’t want to let all the people who helped me learn sign language down. I think though, what really got me is that I didn’t want to let myself down. I’d never worked so hard on a school assignment before. I spent hours and hours after school and on the weekends to get prepared. If I had stopped, that work may have been for nothing. Really, I didn’t even give myself an option not to continue and finish the song in some way.”
This story changed the way I thought about student work. For years, I had worked so hard to inspire, challenge, and engage my students.
Now the tables had turned.
Katie inspired me. She inspired her classmates. She inspired that audience, and her story continues to inspire today.
Yet this was one student. I wish I could say every student of mine had at least one experience in school like this.
Most did not.
I was never a perfect teacher. Not all of my students were empowered like Katie was in this project. And I didn’t spend 100 percent of my time embracing this type of empowered learning that was happening in my classroom that day.
But it was a start.
After this project, I shifted my focus. It wasn’t easy. It was extremely messy. But it was worth it. Empowering students became my goal, and giving students the opportunity to pursue their passions, goals, and future was the mission.
If you grew up in the United States or a country with similar education structure, chances are you spent 6.64 hours per day in school, 180 days a year, for 12–13 years.3
The 6.64 average hours a day in school is actually better represented in minutes.
What are we doing with all of this time? More importantly, what are our students doing?
We aren’t asking what are our students are learning during the fourteen thousand hours they spend in school. That is already well documented.
Everyone knows you learn your basic reading, writing, and math skills in the younger grades, and then start to get very specific with world history classes, physics and biology classes, and algebra and geometry classes as we get older.
We’ve been learning the same subjects in the same pattern for quite some time. Are there variations of this?
Sure.
Are we going to assume most of you reading this book are following the traditional education path laid out more than one hundred years ago?
Yes.
The question is, what are our students doing during these classes?
Are they taking notes? Are they listening to adults speak? Are they studying for tests and quizzes? Are they watching PowerPoint slides move across the screen? Are they filling out worksheets and packets? Are they regurgitating information, filling out problems, and checking their answers in the back of the textbook? Are they writing research papers? Are they raising their hands? Are they sitting in the chairs for 80 percent of the day?
Are they following procedures, filling in bubbles, watching the clock, and acting appropriately compliant in every way possible so as not to upset the adults in charge?
Or are they building the knowledge and the skills to pursue their passions, interests, and future?
If you grew up in an education setting like we did, then you spent much of your time being actively compliant—trying to navigate a system that was designed to produce people who followed the rules and waited to be told what to do. Then you graduated. And you waited for someone to tell you what to do.
It was a dependable formula. You went to school, followed the rules, graduated, and stepped into a job as a compliant worker.
As author and New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman aptly points out,4
So why do we spend so much time in school, playing the game of school, following rules, and waiting for others to tell us what to do? Why do we rarely give students choice in what they learn, how they learn, when they learn, and why they learn?
This problem extends well beyond school. It impacts us as adults. Those fourteen thousand hours we spent in school from K–12 really do make a difference in how we see the world.
Have you ever met an adult who doesn’t really love what they do, who is just going through the motions in their job and everyday life? Even sadder, how many people have you talked with who constantly complain, showing no visible passion for anything in the world?
I’m sure that, like me, you have met those people. I’ve also seen the making of these adults in schools across our country: students who are consistently being “prepared” for the next test, assessment, or grade level ... only to find out after graduation that they don’t really know what their passions really are.
They feel lost and confused.
These are the same students who are never allowed to learn what they want in school. Forced down a curriculum path that we believe is “best for them,” they discover it is a path that offers very little choice in subject matter and learning outcomes.
It would be too easy to throw up our hands and blame “the system” or “the politicians” or anyone else for the game of school that students are playing.
It’s also pretty easy to say that we went through the same system, and we turned out fine!
School doesn’t have to look like this, because the world and natural learning doesn’t look like this.
But what can you do? It’s not as easy as inventing a new school or designing a new curriculum. You have a test, a curriculum map, a bell schedule, and a set of programs
