Found this rather funny video on Edublogs TV. As a Tetris fan from way back, this just made me giggle…
Speaking of Tetris, I take a class of kids with some pretty severe learning difficulties once a week to do some computer stuff with them. A few weeks ago, one of the girls finished her work early and since there was only a few minutes till the bell she asked if she could play Tetris online. A moment later when I walked by she was playing the game and she was totally awesome at it! I mean, I was blown away at just how fast and accurate she was… this is from a student that usually really struggles with many other intellectual tasks. Tetris, although based on a simple concept, is a game that requires a good sense of spatial awareness, timing and multitasking to play well… and this girl was playing really well!
I called her regular teacher over and pointed out how good this girl was at the game. Her teacher had never actually played Tetris before and wasn’t quite sure how the game worked, so I asked the student to give her teacher a lesson in how to play it. It was great to watch this student, who normally struggles so much with even relatively simple learning tasks, showing this teacher how to play the game… and being quite the master at it in the process. The teacher was hopeless at it, the student was awesome.
I wonder what sort of places our classrooms would be, and how it would affect our students’ attitude, morale and performance, if teachers were hopeless at stuff more often while allowing their students to be more awesome at the things they are good at. Often in schools we judge our students performance based on the things that we deem to be important to us, rather than what is important to them. I’m not suggesting that everything should always be a game, but I suspect we should always be actively looking for opportunities to let our kids be “smarter” than us.