Thread by @Sisyphus38

I just read a long thread about cold calling. It started with this tweet. Ended with others telling him how great he is. Again, why doesn’t anyone acknowledge that many of the people in the seats would choose not to be there if they had the choice? /1

How do people so easily dismiss that part? “Cold call the simpletons to force them to get on board lest they be embarrassed in front of the group.” Here is a strategy that attempts to take all choice away from the people sequestered in school desks. /2

“You can force me to be in this room but you can’t make me pay attention.”
“Oh yes I can. I’m going to call on you and ask you a question in front of the group. If you aren’t paying attention others will snicker and you will feel low key shame.” /3

They will defend this because then kids will participate. Then perhaps kids will become “engaged” in the topic. Then test scores will go up. Boom! Cold calling is validated. One must believe that the content is more important than the person. /4

One must believe the young person is by nature: lazy, an empty vessel, doesn’t know what is good for them, less human than the all knowing older person.
Then to top it off the author of the thread gets circle jerked. Again, for the life of me I don’t understand why /5

no one seems to acknowledge that the people sitting in the desks are a captive audience. They can’t leave. They were not asked if they want to be there. They were fed a horror story of what happens to people that don’t “school well” or drop out. /6

These young people confined to desks had labels slapped on them by the older people. Labels that are solely designed to validate what the older people are doing. Students, scholars, learners…that’s what you are because we are teachers and what is a teacher without a student? /7

So who can sum up my thread? YOU, in the back looking out the window. Can you tell your fellow learners what I was just tweeting about? You can’t? Maybe pay attention instead of looking out the window eh? Who would like to tell him what we were talking about? #school