I have learned a lot from by daughter. One of the most important things that I learned is that she doesn't think like me.
When she was in high school, I worried how she we do academically. You see, my son was a great "traditional" student. A teacher would tell him to learn something and he would. A compliant learner.
Caitlin, on the other hand, would ask "why"? For her, if she didn't know the reason she had to learn something, she wouldn't. She would dig in her heals. It drove me crazy.
I knew that by the time she would get to high school this behavior would get her into trouble. Especially when she started taking more difficult classes.
And then there was AP Chem - not to fool around with. The textbook was big and heavy. And each chapter needed to be read multiple times to be understood.
But then, day after day, I would see her book go unopened. I worried, seeing a train wreck coming. When I would ask her how she was preparing for her tests, she would just blithly respond that she was just Googling the answers she needed.
Clearly she lacked academic discipline, but it got me to ask deeper questions. Why was it so difficult for her to read and comprehend these chapters? Was she destined, as a child of the digital age, to suffer a form of a learning disability?
I began to watch her closely. Could she learn? If so, how did she learn? And was the way that she was learning more common than not for her generation of digital natives?
I noticed that while my mind had been trained to go step by step through a serial collection of knowledge, such as a textbook, her mind would dart from place to place in a seemingly scattered way.
But then I began to noticed something quite remarkable. I would ask her questions, and after a typical deadpan look, she would go to phone and click away, seemingly distracted. Then, after a few minutes, she would turn to me and give me an answer that was surprising in its expertise.
What just happened there? How could she go from knowing nothing to knowing much, so fast?
I began to watch her movements on her phone more carefully and then later, ask her to explain what she was doing.
Turns out that she would search, quickly jump through several related sites and then, then synthesize the information until a reasonable approximation of a truth, all in the matter of a few minutes.
I could barely keep up with her fingers on the screen.
So, while I might have a more disciplined mind for a slow linear learning path, her's was much faster in a path of rapid triangulation.
Turns out, my daughter was not that unusual.
Many teachers I have talked to have complained that their students don't learn the same why they did, and they are struggling to engage them in the classroom.
These kids are not dumb. But most are not interested in being taught. However, given a reason to learn, they are astonishingly fast learners.
They think differently from previous generations. They have digital minds.