Are you going to start teaching us again?” a student asked me yesterday.

I think the student asked this questions because I am spending a lot of time creating high quality screencasts for my students to watch in class (alongside more traditional instruction).

I am also having students work collaboratively with me to create outlines and other study tools using collaborative writing tools like piratepad. You can watch my students writing in real time here. I am starting to find with tools like this that the traditional role of the teacher as the upfront lecturer lessening more and more each day.

“When are you going to start teaching us again?”

The question sticks with me because I don’t want my students to think I am abandoning them. I don’t want them to think that I am leaving them to figure out for themselves all the deep recesses of the curriculum for themselves.

I do think, however, that the role of the teacher as the torch bearer of all knowledge is, for better or worse, gone. The internet has become a place for all sorts of fires, whether they be big or small, to flare up in the most unlikely places.

I want to answer the student, but I am not sure how to explain it.

I want to tell him to light his own fire or to at least talk about why many of the fires in traditional education aren’t all that interesting or relevant to most students (and, furthermore, why high school is such a crazy place in the United States). We want to create a place of equity, but seemed to have instead created a place where everyone gets as mediocre education unless they are super motivated to do a lot of their own research on their own time.

And I’m not saying there is any easy answer. I am saying, however, that we need to think about possible solutions to these problems.