Empower Your Learning Journey

Late this Spring, I began doing PhD research for qualitative data and figuring out how to collect an indeterminate amount of subjective and objective results to make sure there is not a presupposition about our data or judgement by the students that the data is being collected by a robot on wheels instead of from a bright mind with enthusiasm and empathy about the inferential evidence to present on behalf of my first graders who get to participate in play based activities for a few days here and there instead of attending more lectures or working harder towards burnout or just more reading and listening.  The vision for cohesive group communication came out to include play that will include reading, but there is a lot to be learned about ourselves when we play with the kids friendly nerf golf darts game.  The debate about using digital video to get data from play based games is ridiculous to me.  Are we correcting their backswing?  Please turn the camera off and when I get to meet the parents and show them my data it will impress  upon them that I was actually learning something in school when I decided to start this  research project and here are the results. How about I proclaim during our parent-teacher conference that we, "Are able to turn the camera off and not act like it is the cultural norm to record every moment of the childrens' education into digital format."  The purpose of building the confidence to hit the bullseye is in the group activity of attempting it more than once and not having a digital reel of misses to lead the way for five year old children.  Is the researcher collecting data and maybe missing the point of learning lessons along the way about how to get along with each other during a round robin tournament and accepting when somebody else is recognized as a good sportsperson? Is rewarding excellence while we work to master things that started out as mistakes and corrections being bypassed?  The purpose of designing a double elimination format for the activity is to find the more skilled kids and to give all the others an opportunity compete for a reward on a less difficult apparatus of a kids activity.  This is building leadership circles amongst ourselves and breeds confidence in the group as a whole.  Everyone feels connected and  unashamed of the final results.  This is not a pass or fail test or an opportunity to raise your GPA in a classroom that brought on a PhD researcher to act robotically and  probably push his own agenda.  It is developing intangibles for leadership at a very early stage in school because that is the intent of my research.  Using play-based activity to infer from data an objective conscious about potential and early growth from non-classroom-based activity.  This isn’t a fieldtrip to a botany lab, yet, this is fervent to  prove itself as a better alternative to First Grade Field Day or at least a way to skill the kids ahead of their first competition and to be prepared for success and not failure while at the same time maintaining the dignity of a good sportsmanship to be awarded to a boy and girl from the elimination round and championship round.  If I wasn’t a teacher, I would probably still be uploading songs and trying to get on Bandcamp and Spotify as a musician.  What used to make me nervous was my lack of ability and relying on sheer hustle.  Those days are over you don’t have to sell out if you can play.  Getting the reverb out of my mic would help.  Then just stay in scale and you never really sound like crap.  Touring bands are either DIY cool cats or weird political forces, and it is not that I fall somewhere in the middle.  A better way to describe it would be, "Indie rocker buys van and finances tour of hookah houses across the tri-state area and into New Hampshire then down the river in Delaware and appreciate the lay of the land, but more expansively to build a fanbase au natural."  So, in the meantime, if I am supposed to come up with more play-based activities.  Do you like playing with play doh?  Wouldn’t it be cool if you could add lights?  Well kiddos, we will be using play doh that conducts electricity and we will be racing against the clock and ourselves for prizes!  Does the children’s right to have fun ring a bell?  If we conduct interviews and collect sound bites my first questions will be to take a vote of approval for the activity.  Did you like the electrical play doh challenge?  Was it easy or hard?  Are you excited to try it again with different parts?  What did you think about the prizes we gave away?  Kids can have rights and still go with the flow about “kids being kids” and not feel like they will lose their voice without a UNICEF project, but this is done by being brought along with respect and taught how to stand up to adversity by witnessing it and participating in an environment where nobody is scared to make mistakes and corrections  If you want to foster a means to hear children’s voices please try to be  careful about the timing.  Their voices can be listened to as we play and interact through the activities and not just go through the motions but be consciously aware and this will improve how we teach and instruct during the play-based activities.  When the students are ready to be at a podium and speak into a microphone this is when the liberation that some researchers are desperately trying to govern occurs.  Re-insert science and we are using an approach that can be labeled positivism.  Also, this is the opposite of phenomenology, if we are seeking objective science and rejecting metaphysical assumptions.  The curriculum is providing subjective data like a K-12 education provides because we track grade point average are sophisticated enough to elect class officials and seemingly when students graduate in 12th grade with goals met and objectives accomplished the voice is the one that comes after years of effort and communication that is put in to get there.  This is when we project who we are and who we are striving to become.  More importantly we are making conscious decisions based on the experience gained during the play-based activity such as picking books, choosing a course of study in library activities, or the choice to follow suit with something you saw during an activity. Students consciously pick it to study. or pick a botany book or a book about electricity, or an athlete’s autobiography about success. The data shows this is a as conscious move based on the offered curriculum and we can derive this in the objective data we see for the research.  Again, we are witnessing becoming leaders ourselves and stepping into the voice not being excluded. even if a student prepares for a future in this or something else. Data shows students can avoid the politics and pick environmental management as a major at college or go to work for themselves in any field of choice.  This is how I see liberty.  The objectives are met at the proper time with suitable, unprejudiced and extraordinary results.  If UNICEF wants to help, please ask them to donate an apparatus or two and we can get some soundbites like when we played with the play doh.  Also, what makes a text meaningful?  How is it interpreted, and does it hold cultural value?  Or are we taking this too far.!

See ya next semester!