Engage Me or Enrage Me: What Today's Learners Demand

In this article Marc Prensky discusses three types of students that teachers encounter:
1. The students who are truly self motivated
2. The students who go through the motions
3. The students who tune us out

He goes on to say that while our school system is designed reasonably well to deal with the first two, the third group is a real problem and fast growing. Children today expect to be engaged by everything they do and when school is not as engaging as video games or the internet they cannot stand to be there.

While reading this article I realized just how different todays youth are from when I was a child. It has only been 12 years or so, but technology has really improved. I grew up on old mackintosh computers and super Nintendo systems, yes we had a TV, but we did not even have cable. Computers were not yet a household item and I don't think we even had internet access in school yet. Today technology is surrounding children. They constantly have access to all sorts of entertainment that I did not have. Growing up I enjoyed school, but I suppose I didn't have any of these surreal entertainment systems to compare it to.

I think a big problem is that with so much information that is available to them online they may begin to question the need for school at all. I suppose that our job as teachers is changing, and that it is not necessarily our job anymore to teach our students everything, but rather teach them how to find information for themselves and how to know which sources are reliable.

I also think it is very important for us as educators to keep up with the excitement of today's entertainment. Why can't we make real life just as exciting as video games or include games, and adventure into our classroom setting? I think Prensky had it right when he said "Maybe if, when learning the “old” stuff, our students could be continuously challenged at the edge of their capabilities, and could make important decisions every half-second, and could have multiple streams of data coming in, and could be given goals that they want to reach but wonder if they actually can, and could beat a really tough game and pass the course—maybe then they wouldn’t have to, as one kid puts it, “power down” every time they go to class." The question is: How do we do this? Prensky answers by saying "As with games, we need to fund, experiment, and iterate. Can we afford it? Yes, because ironically, creating engagement is not about those fancy, expensive graphics but rather about ideas."