Starcraft and Teaching

Confession:  I am a teacher of ancient things who enjoys video games.  Yes.  It is true, I dedicate my life to the teaching of Latin, Greek, the ancient world, and other really old stuff and yet I still get a huge kick out of sitting down with such un-antiquated things as video games.  And on that front, last week was the final set of games in the After Hours Gaming League.  This tournament was based around the game Starcraft 2 and featured teams from major tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon.com, etc.) competing to win honor for themselves and money for the charities of their choosing. 

As I watched these games, one common strand which emerged from interviews with employees from Microsoft and Zynga (the company behind the incredibly addictive Farmville) was how much they enjoyed their jobs programming and solving problems, and how much they enjoyed Starcraft 2 because of how challenging it is and how much depth it has.  Of course, there is a common theme here.  Many of the same elements which keep these people coding, refining, creating, and going to the office every day are the same elements which had them forming practice squads and spending hours on end in order to get better at a silly video game.  (Disclosure- I play Starcraft 2.  For those of you who do not know anything about it, I can only describe it as fast-paced, chess-meets-rock, paper, scissors on the computer in real time.  It is intense and very challenging and is even watched on TV in South Korea.)  The employees at the tech giants love what they do, and I bet they are well-paid and work in excellent environments in order to encourage them at work.

So, what do Starcraft and tech giants have to do with teaching and education?  Yesterday at work I observed and evaluated two very different lesson plans on almost identical topics: the biblical books of Ephesians and Philippians.  The first was solid in the sense that it covered “the content”- major names were introduced and reviewed, map work was done to ensure the students knew where Turkey and Ephesus were, and images were even brought in from the teacher’s visit to Ephesus to help them visualize some of what the area looked like.  And on top of these solid elements (integration of maps, history, a personal connection), the teacher was lively and confident in front of the class!  Wow! 

The second lesson I observed was very different.  There was review of names and locations, including map work focusing on Macedonia, Rome, and Philippi as well as historical context.  However, before the teacher even got to that content, she let the students spend time exploring their thoughts on an easily graspable notion:  “What makes you happy?”  The students spent about 5 minutes drawing or writing words they associated with being happy, including family, friends, sports, presents, and so on.  The lesson ended with a similar exercise, with them writing a letter or poem to explain what they had learned about being “happy” versus being “joyful”.  I confess, I didn’t think it would work out at all.  I thought the directions had been too few and the task too large for the 5^th grade students.  Boy was I was wrong!  When they shared their compositions variety, personality, and differing levels of comprehension and depth were revealed.  Some students had more basic thoughts, basically reviewing and rephrasing the lesson.  Others told narratives of people suffering and still living joyfully.  Still others wrote of friends passing away, tying the final exercise into their 5-minute warm up to start the class.  It was amazing to see.  I was completely blown away and after the lesson began to think about what had happened and why it worked.  My conclusions were that while the first lesson impressed with the “stuff” of content (names, places, dates, amount of material covered, the personality of the teacher), the second impressed with the willingness to let the students explore themselves and their understanding of the world and life.  The second treated the students like people who had their own thoughts, while the first treated them more like blank pages which needed to receive “knowledge” from the teacher. 

One of my favorite quotes on education says, “A teacher’s purpose is not to create students in his own image, but to develop students who can create their own image.”  As I watched the students sharing their reflections and personalizing the content covered to their own lives, I realized I had just witnessed image creation.  They took the “stuff” of the lesson and applied it to their own lives.  They had not been “filled up” with knowledge; instead they had been allowed to be involved, creating and applying meaning relevant to themselves. 

When I was growing up I loved building computers.  At home I tinkered with our old 386 tower and ended up repairing, building, and maintaining computers for the local school district when I was 14.  I learned how to write code and none of it had anything to do with my classes at school.  I played with computers because I enjoyed playing.  I bet if I were to ask the folks at Microsoft and Facebook, they might say the same things about their work and their gaming: they do it because they love it.  And this is what makes me tremble for our country when I consider our dialogue on education:  the majority is not talking about our students like they are people.  Few are treating students like they have loves and passions and things which interest and challenge and attract them.  They are statistics on tests, which in turn make up our global education ranking, which in turn makes people fret for their future stock portfolios.  This should not be.

What if we re-centered our education debate around the idea of training children to think soundly and discover their loves, the things which give them joy?  What if we gave them the opportunities to fall in love with great things (literature, languages, science, art, music, math) rather than telling them everything they had to know to pass the next life-defining test?  And what if it was this very process which actually allowed them to become the next great generation of engineers, scientists, innovators, and doctors, rather than a process which has children, especially young boys, running away from school as fast as they can?

I’ve never met Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook and could-be posterboy for the science and technology movement.  However, I’ve read that while attending prep school he absolutely loved learning Latin and Greek.  I’ve even heard that while at Harvard he was known for quoting the ancient Latin poet Vergil at will.  So, in the spirit of Vergil, I’d like to propose that perhaps amor omnia vincit- love conquers all, very possibly even those very pesky problems in education.