The five things I have learned from this course

Source Summary

Another school year is ending. June is an intense month for teachers, many things need to be finalized and we carry accumulated fatigue. Irritable students, final recoveries, tutoring reports, university entrance exams and a lot of heat. These are days for making memories and putting into writing everything we have experienced. I look back and I am left with five things that have happened this school year: We have returned to writing by hand. My colleague Cristian Olivé said it in an Instagram post: “AI has become the most dangerous tool in classrooms”. In order to avoid it and prevent it from completely killing creativity, I have had to dedicate entire classes to writing in the classroom and request assignments that can be started and finished in an hour. I have avoided assigning digital work and have insisted that everything be submitted handwritten because calligraphy helps to fix ideas. I myself prefer to make handwritten lists of pending tasks rather than on my phone, because when I transfer it to paper everything looks clearer and less burdensome. Talk, talk, and talk. The AI tsunami in education has made oral presentations fundamental for evaluating a topic. I'm at a point where I no longer even ask for digital support (like Canva), because it ended up becoming a reading of what ChatGPT had created. You know that teenagers save words more and more and avoid phone calls, and I've noticed a decline in communicative ability. That's why I'm also a big advocate for not cutting off conversations that arise in the classroom and for letting them express themselves even if it's not strictly about the lesson. The questions or interests that arise spontaneously are unrepeatable and make that class unique. Maybe I'm romanticizing the Socratic method, but I believe there's nothing more powerful than a good conversation. Reading in the time of screens. I have noticed a growth in the number of student readers. I believe we can now dismiss the old saying that young people don't read, because I increasingly see adolescents reading between classes and even during recess. At first, I found it unprecedented and rubbed my eyes as if it were a miracle; now I've gotten used to it. I've also seen another change in the use of mobile phones in secondary school. At my school, every morning students must leave their phones in a drawer, and we return them at the end of the day. All the years I was a tutor in 1st year of ESO, the drawer was quite full, but for a couple of courses now, the issue has declined significantly, and this year I've only stored eight phones in the drawer. I believe we are all educating more consciously and responsibly about the proper use of screens. Graduations have gotten out of hand. Here I open a can of worms that might be worth a whole article, but I find the topic of graduations very exaggerated. I'm not saying they shouldn't be celebrated, mind you? It's an important milestone, especially in the second year of high school, but all these identical, brightly colored dresses designed for normative bodies make me reflect a lot on aesthetic pressure (which falls on them) and on the Americanization of this event. The dining hall as an educational tool. Graduations have gotten out of hand.Many times they ask me if I don't get tired of explaining the same thing, but as you can see, each course is different, and new challenges always arise that make it a changing and chameleonic job. Teachers, it has been an especially intense course, and from here I send you infinite gratitude for the commitment and vocation you have. You can already see the light at the end of the tunnel. Rest a lot.