We were all welcomed into a huge sky scraper with floors upon floors of... puzzles. And these were not your average crossword puzzles. These were serious, theatrical brain teasers. On one floor, Google employees would stand near giant animatronic props and tell stories that ended in a mystery participants had to solve, while the mechanicals behind them acted out the action. One story was about a ship that had disappeared at sea and we got to watch the rising waves and the imperiled ship as it disappeared from view. Another floor was just a massive library where participants were fiendishly looking up reference materials. Other floors had other kinds of puzzles, music puzzles, engineering puzzles, word puzzles... it was very involved and everywhere Google reps were observing and marking down points.
I am going to say right now that in my dream I was terrible at all these puzzles. I mean REALLY terrible. Half the time I couldn't even figure out what the Question they were asking was much less the answer. My dream self was starting to get pretty anxious too, because expectations were high and lots of students had competed to get into this Puzzle Building to show their intellectual chops. I felt almost immediately like I didn't belong there, and I began to withdraw. I started just wandering around the building trying to find a puzzle I could do,.. and ended up watching other players finding their own puzzles....sort of hoping it would help me figure something out so I wouldn't be a complete disgrace.
But slowly, my watching other players became Watching other players, really Looking at them. I couldn't solve any of Google's fancy challenges, but I could read all those Freshmen college students like a book. I saw the nervous ones, and the ones who were good with numbers and the ones with a keen eye for detail. And quite naturally, I stopped trying to solve any puzzles at all and just started organizing players to solve them for me. I started building teams of people, put problems in front of them and waited for the results. (The ship sinks into the floor through a trap door triggered by the storyteller in the storm scene and the rising waves hid the view of the ship until the floor sealed up again!) And this approach was wildly successful for everyone involved. Players stopped competing with each other and started getting excited about working together to solve whatever mysteries Google handed them. And I was in my element, building communities throughout the building like some crazy community building fairy.
The dream ended with me watching a young girl in a pretty dress shyly kicking a ball around like a soccer ball. She clearly had skills, and just as clearly wasn't sure if she was allowed to use them. I turned to her as I sped by on my latest mission, pointed at her with both hands and said with total conviction, "When we find the soccer puzzle, you're on My team!"
This is what teaching is to me. I'm not the best at history. There are gaps in my knowledge that I have to make up before I try to teach that lesson on Thursday. I didn't translate Aristotle from the original Greek for my students to preserve the meaning. Students ask me questions I don't know the answers to all the time and I have to say, "Hey, lets look that up, I have no idea." (Pro Tip: Honesty counts more than bluffing with your average teen).
But what I am good at, what I probably better at that all my other teaching skills is reading my students. I can read them like a book. That face means "I'm tired, but I'm with you." That one, "I'm stressed." Those eyes are telling me that student isn't sure they are getting it, but is afraid to ask. Those shoulders show eagerness to answer. Those hands show boredom and the need for something more challenging. Those knees tell me they can't wait to turn to their partner to get started. And once I know where my students are, then I can guide them to the lesson, and the skills practice and the mastery of whatever challenge I (or Google for that matter) can put before them. I know that if I can make them a Community of learners, every one of them will do better in school, and maybe in life. This is what teachers are. We facilitate learning. We don't disseminate it.
We don't teach English and Math, History and Art.
We teach Students.
And when our students learn how to learn, how to work together with me and with each other, they end up learning English and math, history and art and all the Google puzzles of the world on top of that.
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