Life lessons from a digital watch

David Warlick's blog called "Reasoning Our Way In..." brings up an interesting point in our education. He begins by explaining the relevance between a digital watch and life. How he has a regular watch that does the one thing it's supposed to, and it does it well. However, digital watches have a ton of buttons that in different combinations cause a whole bunch of stuff happen that maybe you didn't really need or want to happen. He compares this to life because sometimes we don't know what to do, and we have to try different things and reason our way through it. Life doesn't come with instructions, we have to figure it out for ourselves. Are students learning those skills nowadays?

We are sort of just told what we need to do, and how we need to do it. A lot of the teachers are realising this predicament, and have sent us off on our own a little bit. In a way we are sort of teaching ourselves. We are learning from our mistakes and taking control of how and when we learn, if we want to learn. In elementary school the teacher would tell us how to do everything, and it was even so in middle school. Now we are in charge of our education. If we don't get something, it is our responsibility to get help so that we can. The teachers aren't going to hold our hand through our entire learning career, we have to learn how to walk on our own. I think the teachers at Arapahoe are doing a great job of teaching us that skill that will be so important throughout our entire lives.

He also mentions that we as youth are always ready to work through problems, but not remember how to do it. Is this a basic skill that we will need to learn? If so, then how should it be taught? Is it enough to just get through the problem? Or to learn how to do it for next time incase it should come up again? I think that it's up to us. Clearly this skill can't really be taught in school, so it's up to us to decide for ourselves. We need to ask ourselves, do I want to learn from this experience, or figure my way through it again? Is this a skill that we need in our lives? Maybe so. But it's up to us to change the way we think through problems, because our schools aren't going to.