Today was the first day of the AVID Summer Institute. I was delighted to see friends from my school, friends from other schools, even an intern from our science department that is a teacher now.
AVID is a program with a mission. Paraphrased, AVID strives to make college a reality for the forgotten middle. So many federal programs are focused on moving up the lowest 25% of students, and the top 25% will likely continue being the top 25% without much work, that the middle quartiles seem to be forgotten, just drifting along with no one to bother them. (The AVID literature spoke of the "extensive" gifted programs as well, however anyone that works with the gifted knows that they are possibly the most forgotten of all when it comes to meeting their needs...but I digress).
One of the key features of AVID is to equip kids for college by teaching them organization. HERE is where the rant comes in, and here is where I will collect my thoughts before petitioning our principal. As we dove into our clunky AVID manual, we were instructed to place sticky notes on pages 45, 64, 83, etc. We were told to highlight the fourth line of page 93, and underline the main point of page 128. We were told to take notes on the pages of our books. We were asked to fold our into the pages of our (did I mention clunky?) manuals so that we could find them later.
As I was sticky-noting, I found myself wondering about the sticky-notey-ness of the future. When our middle schoolers begin their college careers, will they even have textbooks? Will our then 20 year olds carry paper notebooks? Will they even hand in sheets of paper? My guess is no. According to Educause virtually ALL college students own both a computer and a cell phone. Almost 75% of computers owned are laptops. Further, 36% of students own TWO computers.
The organization that we need to teach our students is NOT sticky notes and highlighters, it's files and font.
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