The Gee article was very interesting to me because it presented ideas that seemed like they should be obvious through an unexpected, but very relatable, template. Normally, most people don’t connect video games and education. Video games are more likely to be viewed as a hinderance to education than a model. Students sitting in front a screen day after day, not doing work, frustrates and concerns many. However, it also proves the point that, to a lot of people, video games are driving, even addictive. Since most teachers would probably love it if students found their classes driving and addictive, why not examine the principles that make video games this way?

What I find interesting is that these principles–interactiveness, understanding, customization, and so on–seem so basic, so self-explanatory. Of course we should be making lessons with these considerations. Reading them, I think back to one of the first things I read for an education class, an essay in which Freire condemns the “Banking System” in schools. Gee points out that video games–where the user is actively participating and making decisions, not just taking in the directions and information the game has to offer. I’m not making an argument that everything in schools should become virtual, by any means. I just think that he makes a very good point about what we could take from the way games are designed. I remember in elementary school and middle school, we did these sort of historical role-play units where we’d have to go down the Oregon Trail or come on a ship to Plymouth or something. I don’t think we really learned a lot with these because most of the game actions were based on luck (a die roll, for instance), and most of the “assignments” involved drawing pictures, but the idea behind them, of a game acted out in real life, was good, and we all loved them. If they could be redesigned to actually feel relative to students and teach important concepts, I think they’d be a really interesting tool and embody the ideas Gee proposes.

To fulfill this week’s assignment of playing a video game or doing an interview, I tried playing the game Portal at a friend’s house. Now, video games are a little out of my realm. I loved computer games as a kid, but only the ones that let me creatively design and customize thing–I liked kid pix, and I liked all the “tycoon” games, where you would design and run a zoo, or an amusement park, or something. I didn’t really care about Sims once the virtual people came to life, but I loved choosing their appearance and designing dream houses for them to live in. I think this makes sense, because I always liked creative projects, and the games let me pursue them on a much larger scale than I could in reality, since my mother had no desire to fulfill my dream of painting every wall a different color. So, I wasn’t really expecting to like Portal. But it was actually really interesting. The game is essentially a series of puzzle that you must get through by blasting portals–one to enter, one to exit–into the walls. You go into it knowing nothing, and must retain knowledge about what has worked in the past, and well as basic principles of gravity and physics. The levels become progressively harder–I got through about half of them before deciding it was time to stop replaying a dead-end and do other work. Another interesting component of the game is that throughout it, a female voice on an intercom is giving you false instructions and trying to discourage you, only to praise you when you solve the puzzles anyway. Before you begin, she will say the the puzzle has been proven impossible, they are sorry, and you should give up now. Then, if you succeed, she says that the previous statement was a lie, and well done. I don’t think this is something we should bring into the classroom. However, I do think it is interesting in that it shows how much people want to prove themselves. When confronted with a supposedly impossible task, we want to solve it. So, the idea could be toned down for the classroom–students should not be told they will fail, but they should be given interesting tasks and challenged to find ways to complete them.

Overall, I think this article really made me look at video games in a new way–it helped me see them not just as distractions or stress-busters, but  as successful learning devices. If we can bring the same inventiveness, involvement, and forward momentum to classroom lessons, we could surely achieve our own version of that success.

Tom Romano’s and Donald Murray’s chapters on writing both made me think back to my earliest academic writing experiences, in elementary school. When I was in second grade, my small, rural public school began a system that they called, creatively enough, “Writer’s Notebooks.” Basically, everyone had to buy a notebook, and they had to write in it. That was pretty much the whole thing. I don’t think there were many requirements to the project–as I recall, we simply had to write, and from time to time the teacher would collect the notebooks to see how we were doing. If we had written something we wanted to keep private, we could fold the page over (I remember thinking “yeah, right,” and watching what I wrote on folded pages too, but still, the option was there). In short, the only goal was to get us writing. When we got the notebook back, there’d be maybe a few spelling corrections, but mostly just reactions to the small events of our second grade lives, and questions to push us furtheron our topics.

I guess they liked the results, because the program continued through the rest of my time at the school. The school began provided the notebooks, which would we decorate at the beginning of the year. We were supposed to write for 20 minutes in class, anything at at all, progressing to 30 minutes as we got older. We were supposed to do the same at home every night. I found I loved doing this. I started off in second grade writing about my day to day life, my ideas for the future, etc, but from third grade on discovered that I loved writing stories and poems. I don’t think I would have the interest I have in writing as an adult if not for this early, forced daily work. It would not have occurred to me, as an eight or nine year old, to make time to write, so my teachers did it for me.

This seems to me to be exactly what Romano and Murray recommend in their essays. From Romano, to write constantly and to write everything, in order to become comfortable working in diverse genres. And Murray, right in his opening, forcues on simply making the time to write, unplanned and comfortably. This seems so obvious–how are we to know what interests us if we cannot explore, and how are we to become comfortable with different tones if we are always trapped in a single, academic form? Further, how are we to think of writing as a means of communication, of expression, if we only ever encounter it as a rote task, a way to respond to basic questions?

And yet, when I think beyond my elementary school years, to middle and high school, and then to the middle and high school classrooms I observe now, and even to some of my own college classes, it is so rare that older students are simply given time to write. Why is this? Students do not naturally lose creativity or curiosity and they get older unless they are taught to. But after elementary school, the only times that I remember being given the space to simply write were a couple elective courses late in high school. During my observations now, a few years later, I have never seen students given time to write, or assigned daily journaling. This confounds me, because it seems like an equally important, if not more important, time to be writing. If, as children, we are exploring, then as adolescents we are discovering. We are getting a hold on our own voices, on who we want to be and what we want to do as we reach adulthood. Therefore, this is an essential time to be developing a strong writing voice–but where is the space to do that? Perhaps I’m mistaken, and it is just my limited experiences that make me think students no longer have the kind of required free-writes I had as a child. But if not–why? Why does this open reading and writing space disappear when it’s needed most? Is it a lack of time due to test preparation, or basic skill reinforcement? Could twenty minutes be found to work on something that helps even nervous students get comfortable with the basic process of writing, of not worrying about errors? I know this would’ve helped me in middle and high school.

While reading the Harper and Jong article on Misconceptions about English Language Learners, the overall idea of treating a second language learner as a first really resonated with me. Of course it does not make sense to treat both the same, but what is the solution here? As Calvin noted in an earlier post, the article does not offer much in this respect. However, on a basic level, why is it that when a non-English speaker is trying to learn English in school, we treat it so differently from an English speaker trying to learn, say, French or Spanish? I guess the easy answer is that there is more pressure in the former situation. There is an urgency around getting ELLs up to grade level in all courses, and up to testing level. But if we disregard pressure as a culprit, is there perhaps another idea present–the idea that English is the norm, and that the onus is on ELL’s to meet that norm. This is not intended as a negative generalization; there are many wonderful educators who do not take this view. But it is certainly something I have seen in classrooms where “ENGLISH!”  is the frequent command to students chatting in any other language.

On that note, I wonder if there is a way we could treat English more like any other second language. When middle schoolers learn French or Spanish, they are not taught at their grade level in that language, even if they have had some slight prior exposure. Nor are all their other classes taught in that language. They begin with the basics and progress towards fluency. I realize this model does not work for foreign language speakers in an English speaking world. However, I’m thinking about an experience one of my friends had at a later age, when she studied in Germany last year. While there, she took all her classes in German at a German university. But before she reached that point, she had several weeks of a daily intensive language course, meant to boost her fluency level in German so that she would not fall behind once her real courses, in different disciplines, started. Could we come up with a system that had ELLs spend their first year as English learners taking courses at their grade level in their native language, while doing an intensive English course?* The students could integrate English into other disciplines at a more gradual rate this way. There are potential problems here, of course–students might work at different rates and come out at the end of the year with different fluency levels. But surely treating English as the second language it is will have more a success rate than expecting exposure to do the job. Or perhaps this idea is still too limiting, and something that incorporates English and native languages into the “mainstream” curriculum is of greater value. This idea certainly doesn’t fit into the testing system–the system itself would have to change for something like this to work. Sorry, I’m sort of brainstorming into the blog post at this point. But I just think that a school system that allowed students to take the time to really focus on English as a second language, rather than as an expectation, could be worth the year “behind” for the amount it would put students ahead. Students could maintain grade level knowledge while really working toward English fluency. And, of course, they could continue to expand literacy skills in their native language, working ultimately towards a bilingual education–as stated towards the end of Rubenstein-Avila’s article, “educators at all levels ought to realize that alllanguages are assets to be built upon, often simultaneously, in an additive—not subtractive—manner. Once students are becoming more proficient in English, their native language should not just be dropped–it should still be a part of the curriculum, so that they can learn to express themselves in two equally valid ways. We do not assume that teaching native English speakers another language will damage or hold back their performance in English, so why should we assume that working with speakers of other languages in their native tongue will prevent them from learning English?

I’m not saying any of what I’ve outlined above is perfect. I think it’s actually innately flawed, because I’m sort of trying to fit it into a system that is flawed–to truly make a change, I think more of an overhaul would be necessary. But I hope it’s a step in the right direction.