Sketchnoting is new cave painting
Forget about teaching kids reading and writing, it will never work anyway. For a century hordes of teachers tried and failed. Some say it happened — and still happens — because they use the discredited whole language method. Bollocks, it is the damned kids, they simply cannot learn. They are glued to the screens of their smartphones just like their parents were glued to the screens of their TVs. In two generations humans forgot how to use the weird characters that the boomers called letters.
Well, if the 21st century “digital citizens” think in images, they must be taught in images, figured Rayna Freedman, a learner, a ditchbooker, a brainpopper and a flipgrid level 3, whatever all that soup means. In a glowing profile on KQED News, Ms. Freedman shares her educator’s wisdom. In particular, every month she asks her fifth-graders to present their so called “genius hour” projects, in which the kids “get to explore anything that interests them and present what they’ve learned to the class in whatever way they want.” She requires other kids to make notes about the presentations.
She noticed that not all of her fifth-graders could make sensible notes. If she were a traditional elementary school teacher, she would be gobsmacked by the kids’ poor literacy skills and would immediately devise some sort of remediation. But she is not an ordinary teacher, she is a brainpop CBE (again, no idea what it is, but sounds imposing), so she decided to teach her students to use symbols, you know, like horses and elephants and people and arrows and burned villages and slit throats… maybe not slit throats. After all, one cannot make a mistake with a drawing. Pictures have no letters, no rules, no grammar, no syntax. Whatever one draws, it is an instant A, and no auditor will tell you it is a B or a C. Scores are up, the district is happy, the bonuses are in, the school is not closed. Brilliant!
Well, to tell the truth, she did not come up with this K-grade idea by herself. She saw a student who was “doodling what his classmate was talking about.” Like any industrious educator who daydreams about leaving the dreaded work as a teacher and become a writer or a consultant, she realized that she found a goldmine.
From this point on the poor children could not doodle whatever they wanted, they would use the system that the devious Ms. Freedman devised for them. As the article says, now she “dedicates about five minutes a day for a month to sketchnote practice.” Poor bastards now have to learn both alphabet and doodling. Or maybe she figured out that if they are incapable to learn how to write coherent sentences by fifth grade, there is no point trying anymore.
“I did have students complain about it.”
She “has come to see sketchnoting as a bridge between early elementary, when students necessarily think visually because they are still learning to read, and middle school, where suddenly all visual thinking seems to stop.” What? Five-grade kids cannot think in terms of complete sentences? Six-grade kids cannot draw pictures? Where does she pull these ideas? I bet from the same simpleton machine from which most education “innovators” pull from.
But kids cannot be trusted. Who knows what they might draw. You may think it’s a duck, but it is in fact a dick. This cannot be allowed in school. Therefore, Freedman uses sketchnoting resources from the website of Sylvia Duckworth, a former teacher, Google Certified Innovator, Apple Teacher, Apple Distinguished Educator and author who “has become a sketchnoting celebrity.” No doubt Ms. Duckworth ran away from her teaching job the moment she realized she could earn more with more creative and less stressful means. She paved the way, and Ms. Freedman is eager to follow.
Based on Duckworth’s doodle elements (understandably, she does not call them letters, but neither she calls them glyphs) Freedman helps her students “organize their thinking.” But one cannot “innovate” by simply reusing other’s stuff, so Ms. Freedman went further. She co-opted her students into creating a podcast, for which the students “sketchnote their segments on notecards.” This is such a novel idea, having separate cards for every scene… um, for every segment of a podcast. She should patent it and sell it to Hollywood directors, so that they would use separate cards for their storyboarding, because they would not be able to storyboard a movie “if it were on paper. They just don’t see it that way.”
Her students’ doodling made her realize that
“the students didn’t understand what theme was because, when she asked them to sketchnote the story’s theme, they would draw characters and setting.”
Stupid five-graders. They doodled doodlable objects: people, trees, houses, dragons. You are wrong, children, here is something more abstract for you: draw a theme, this is a job worthy of a fifth-grader.
Of course, the inability of the students to draw a theme was “an immediate sign to Freedman she needed to reteach the idea of theme , something she might not have known from the cryptic sentences her students used to write in response to the same kinds of questions.”
She did not stop to think that the reason her students write “cryptic sentences” is because instead of being taught the language, grammar, semantics, style and everything else kids should learn in fifth grade to comprehend written word and write legible and sensible five-paragraph essays, they were learning how to doode, something they were doing for fun until she barged in, appropriated it, bureaucratized it, and ultimately ruined the little fun her students had.
Here, have a read yourself, I could only reach a half of it: Why Teachers Are So Excited About the Power Of Sketchnoting by Katrina Schwartz
The image for the article uses portions from Carrie Baughcum’s sketchnote.
