What's Next?

Is it my students? Or is it me? In lab today, I listened to students sneezing, coughing, and honking. No wonder I have a sore throat. And at the end of the semester, when they all have an opportunity to talk together about their projects, they each sit at the computer and play games or read their Facebook pages. Don't they care? I want everyone to succeed, but logic tells me that students only succeed as much as they want to. It's not hard for a teacher to tell who wants to excel and who doesn't care. I'm looking forward to final presentations. Mrs. B

It's very difficult to know if I'm doing the right thing for my students. Part of me wants to give them books and stories to read, just like I did in my college years. I read books by a variety of writers, wrote essays about the characters and the plot, and got an A on most of them, because I loved to read and write. But the world has changed in just the blink of an eye. As television changed my generation, the Internet has changed these students into digital natives. Their experiences are all digitally based, and the majority of them do their reading on the Web, the cell phone, the iPod, or the xBox. The difference is certainly not in ability; it's in attention span. I can read for hours, but many of them have difficulty reading for more than a few minutes. Many do all their reading online, where they find it hard to keep from straying into games, Facebook, or e-mail. While they can absorb information, they are more likely to enjoy doing it in small bytes. To be fair, my ...