New Year, New Brains, New Literacy

Check out Alison Gopnik's NYT review of Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene.

I zeroed in on it particularly because, in two weeks, I'll be starting my studies in reading and new literacies at MSU.

Here's one excerpt of the review that is particularly applicable to our schools:

Each new generation of children grows up in the new environment its parents have created, and each generation of brains becomes wired in a different way...

These changes are especially vivid for 21st century readers. At this
very moment, if you are under 30, you are much more likely to be moving your eyes across a screen than a page. And you may be simultaneously clicking a hyperlink to the last Colbert Report, IM-ing with friends, etc. etc. We are seeing a new generation of plastic baby brains reshaped by the new digital environment...There is every reason to think that [the brains of current and future children] will be as strikingly different as the reading brain is from the illiterate one...

So, when you walk into a Montclair elementary classroom, why does it so
clearly resemble, both physically and pedagogically, the classroom I attended in the 70's, and the one I taught in during the 80's?

How are we addressing the demands and realities of brains wired for, well, being wired?

Students shouldn't be spending a lot of time on "handwriting," and filling in
worksheets and doing research reports whose topics are dictated by the
teacher, from primarily old-style reference sources, with little
collaboration and only the most superficial application of revisioning
skills. (And always handwritten.)

At least by third grade, kids should be using Google and Wikis and social networking effortlessly, naturally, in the classroom, and should know basic programming and maybe even some aspects of game theory.

As Gopnik points out, "We parents have to watch our children glide irretrievably into a future we can never reach ourselves." And watching as that future happens is the minimum we must do. First, we must admit it is here.