Changing Necessities

I recently started planning for the courses I will be teaching in the fall. It's exciting and a little overwhelming. I have so many ideas floating around in my head which makes it difficult to focus and be productive.

One of the courses I will be teaching is called Practical English. The course has been designed to stress the reading and writing that students, as future adults, will do in everyday life. While it may seem simple, I'm having a hard time distinguishing what is necessary to teach. Some of the material seems slightly outdated. It's also hard to know what to teach without undermining their previous knowledge.

The world is changing; therefore, our teaching styles and content must adapt. There are some tools that are merely extinct. Like, when is the last time you picked up an almanac? If you need to know something, I'd say, "Google it." So, have the necessities of teaching changed? Do we still need to teach cursive handwriting? How to use a dictionary?

It's not necessarily about learning how to use those tools, but mostly about the process. It is much easier to look up the definition of a word on your smartphone. I do it too, but that doesn't mean it's not important to have knowledge or schema regarding a dictionary. It's still important that we learn the steps it takes to do something.

I'm thinking about shifting gears. What if we focused more on the process? What if we learned how to reach a goal? Use your sources. Use your people. It's more important that we know who to talk to, where to go in order to find the information. I don't know if it matters if someone got the definition from Webster or Dictionary.com. The important thing is that they know it and can apply it.

Food for thought.