Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
I teach chemistry.
(Explosion)
All right, all right.
So more than just explosions,
chemistry is everywhere.
Have you ever found yourself at a restaurant spacing out
just doing this over and over?
Some people nodding yes.
Recently, I showed this to my students,
and I just asked them to try and explain why it happened.
The questions and conversations that followed
were fascinating.
Check out this video that Maddie
from my period three class sent me that evening.
(Clang) (Laughs)
Now obviously, as Maddie's chemistry teacher,
I love that she went home and continued to geek out
about this kind of ridiculous demonstration
that we did in class.
But what fascinated me more is that Maddie's curiosity
took her to a new level.
If you look inside that beaker,
you might see a candle.
Maddie's using temperature to extend this phenomenon
to a new scenario.
You know, questions and curiosity like Maddie's
are magnets that draw us towards our teachers,
and they transcend all technology
or buzzwords in education.
But if we place these technologies before student inquiry,
we can be robbing ourselves
of our greatest tool as teachers: our students' questions.
For example, flipping a boring lecture from the classroom
to the screen of a mobile device
might save instructional time,
but if it is the focus of our students' experience,
it's the same dehumanizing chatter
just wrapped up in fancy clothing.
But if instead we have the guts
to confuse our students, perplex them,
and evoke real questions,
through those questions, we as teachers have information
that we can use to tailor robust
and informed methods of blended instruction.
So, 21st-century lingo jargon mumbo jumbo aside,
the truth is, I've been teaching for 13 years now,
and it took a life-threatening situation
to snap me out of 10 years of pseudo-teaching
and help me realize that student questions
are the seeds of real learning,
not some scripted curriculum
that gave them tidbits of random information.
In May of 2010, at 35 years old,
with a two-year-old at home and my second child on the way,
I was diagnosed with a large aneurysm
at the base of my thoracic aorta.
This led to open-heart surgery. This is the actual real email
from my doctor right there.
Now, when I got this, I was -- press Caps Lock --
absolutely freaked out, okay?
But I found surprising moments of comfort
in the confidence that my surgeon embodied.
Where did this guy get this confidence, the audacity of it?
So when I asked him, he told me three things.
He said first, his curiosity drove him
to ask hard questions about the procedure,
about what worked and what didn't work.
Second, he embraced, and didn't fear,
the messy process of trial and error,
the inevitable process of trial and error.
And third, through intense reflection,
he gathered the information that he needed
to design and revise the procedure,
and then, with a steady hand, he saved my life.
Now I absorbed a lot from these words of wisdom,
and before I went back into the classroom that fall,
I wrote down three rules of my own
that I bring to my lesson planning still today.
Rule number one: Curiosity comes first.
Questions can be windows to great instruction,
but not the other way around.
Rule number two: Embrace the mess.
We're all teachers. We know learning is ugly.
And just because the scientific method is allocated
to page five of section 1.2 of chapter one
of the one that we all skip, okay,
trial and error can still be an informal part
of what we do every single day
at Sacred Heart Cathedral in room 206.
And rule number three: Practice reflection.
What we do is important. It deserves our care,
but it also deserves our revision.
Can we be the surgeons of our classrooms?
As if what we are doing one day will save lives.
Our students our worth it.
And each case is different.
(Explosion)
All right. Sorry.
The chemistry teacher in me just needed to get that
out of my system before we move on.
So these are my daughters.
On the right we have little Emmalou -- Southern family.
And, on the left, Riley.
Now Riley's going to be a big girl in a couple weeks here.
She's going to be four years old,
and anyone who knows a four-year-old
knows that they love to ask, "Why?"
Yeah. Why.
I could teach this kid anything
because she is curious about everything.
We all were at that age.
But the challenge is really for Riley's future teachers,
the ones she has yet to meet.
How will they grow this curiosity?
You see, I would argue that Riley is a metaphor for all kids,
and I think dropping out of school comes in many different forms --
to the senior who's checked out before the year's even begun
or that empty desk in the back of an urban middle school's classroom.
But if we as educators leave behind
this simple role as disseminators of content
and embrace a new paradigm
as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry,
we just might bring a little bit more meaning
to their school day, and spark their imagination.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)