What Do You Expect?

I went to see “Die Hard” with an octogenarian friend yesterday. I was terribly disappointed. Turned out it was a Bruce Willis action movie. I had been told it was a risqué movie set in an old folks’ home where the male residents fatally overdosed on Viagra much to the pleasure of the female residents. My expectations were not met, and I found the movie boring compared to what it could have been. No one else in the theatre seemed bored. They were on the edge of their seats. But they did not have the expectation I had. They came to see stuff explode, people get beat up, and Officer McClain escape from situations that defied the odds. Ho Hum. I lived through the Depression, World War II and the Korean War and such Hollywood special effects mean little to me.


The issue is expectations. We feel joy when our expectations are met or exceeded and disappointment when they are not. Settings in which we are consistently disappointed are not where we want to be. Hence, if I have two bad experiences at new restaurant, I am done. If I have years of positive experiences at a restaurant and then have a bad experience, I am likely to come back and try them again.

So, let’s look at this from a 16 year-old point of view. I am a 16 year-old boy, I have access to my family car and several 16 year-old females. I have a computer. I have a smart phone. And I have an X-box connected to my TV. I have instant communication with all my friends, I can surf the web, and I can play exotic, erotic, visually stimulating games on my TV, and I can watch blu ray movies in HD. I live in a world of digital connections, instant answers to every question, and amazing digital entertainment. I unplug, power down and go to school.

There I find one adult female standing in front of a group of other 16 year olds telling me stuff that came out of a book. A book for Hector’s sake! No pictures, no click here for more info, a bound piece of dead paper that will be just the same tomorrow as it was today. The teacher expects me to sit quietly and listen. She does not want me to interact with my peers. She does not want me to go on-line to gather information about the topic of the day. She wants me to absorb. She would rather me be a sponge than a person. I barely survive the boredom until the bell rings, I quickly power-up and catch up with the real world, then power-down to go to another room with another adult female who expects the same thing of me as the first adult female, except this one is talking about another subject. Subjects? What is that all about? The world is connected, not subdivided into little knowledge compartments. Issues flow across social science, science, math and the written or texted word all the time. This deconstruction must be for the adults because it makes no sense to me.

And I do not get this notion of cheating at all. If I do not know an answer and the teacher tells me that is not cheating. If I do not know an answer and I look it up on my smart phone that is cheating. How do you figure that? Isn’t all learning cheating and then remembering the answer? OK, sometimes I figure out the answer by myself, but I use technology when I do that. Why must I perform individually based only on my own memory when no one does that in the real world? There is just too much to know. But I have a gizmo in my pocket that knows everything!

I am bored and I do not want to be here. I do my time, and then escape to a real world, an exciting world of friends and information on the digital highway. I am having fun until I power-down again tomorrow and go back to school. I am a 16 year-old boy.

No wonder kids do not want to go to school. We are way behind them in technology, way behind them in the speed of information processing and discovery. Way behind them in the ability to multi-learn, not multi-task, but from a given digital page learn a host of information by following links, clicking buttons, etc. No textbook can compete. No teacher can compete. We are boring and our information is static. No kid expects to come to school and learn in ways that are exciting, vibrant, flexible, digital, and interactive. They expect to be bored. They get what they expect. They become problems for teachers who sit in the lounge and wring their hands about today’s youth. This hand wringing is more severe than in the past because today’s youth know more than teachers do and they know how to learn faster than teachers can spit it out. The best a teacher can do is slow them down long enough to listen. They are probably pocket texting while it appears they are paying attention.

Die Hard was not what I expected it to be. School has become what kids expect it to be: a mandatory structure where they are at the mercy of adults who don’t get it and will not allow the kids to get it. If we keep the confirmation of this expectation going much longer we will not have any real learners at school, just compliant kids. Time to rethink how we teach and how kids learn. Forcing them into the model we experienced will not work. Let’s surprise our kids and make school interesting, stimulating, interactive, self-learning, collaborative learning citadels of digital excitement! That would be so cool.

Yippee Ki Yay.