We are addressing what jobs used to look for. Today, companies (like Google) are looking for much more in potential employees. Identified by Laszlo Bock (the senior vice president of people operations for Google) in Friedman's "How to Get a Job at Google" (Fiedman, 2014), "there are five hiring attributes" Google looks for during the hiring process. These attributes are learning ability, humility, collaboration, adaptability, and emergent leadership. The first and last of these I would like to focus on here. While Bock is careful to asterisk this statement by stating that "traditional metrics" are still a concrete measure of a person's hire-ability and projected success, he makes one thing clear: "the world only cares about - and pays off on - what you can do with what you know ." While I feel that schools succeed in promoting student development in all of these areas, I feel that we as educators serve these students poorly in the area of learning ability. Anyone who has taught a subject they enjoy has come across a student who states "I hate this subject." Whether it be Chemistry, Math, English, or whatever, someone hates it. I encourage teachers to not take offense to these students' comments. Instead, I encourage teachers to respond with "that's fine, as long as you still love to learn." In school, we spend little to no time differentiating between the two. Students are good at some subjects and bad at others. This may be a fact of life. Nevertheless, one thing is for everyone. Everyone is good at learning. For us teachers at the high school level, our challenge lies in the fact that most of our students have forgotten that they love learning. Don't believe me? Go to an elementary school and try to bore them. I am not making assertions as to why our school systems suppress the learning ability of our students. I'm simply stating that we are not properly supporting and developing the learning capacity of our students through our current educational philosophies. I agree with the ideas of Google's senior vice president of people operations: the only way to prepare students for jobs that do not exist yet is to instill in them a capacity to learn. Read the interview with Bock yourself here. Fiedman, Thomas L. "How to Get a Job at Google." The New York Times 22 Feb. 2014: n. pag. Web. Retrieved on 6 Nov. 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-get-a-job-at-google.html?_r=2
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Teaching Teachers TechnologyContentThere is a disparity between what students need to know technologically and what teachers can provide. The goal of this blog is to bridge that gap by providing short tutorials on useful technology for teachers! AuthorDonald Buckley Archives
April 2017
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