You Can't Replace a Teacher #edchat

I couldn't have said it better than David Brooks did when he recently wrote about The Campus Tsunami of online learning in The New York Times:

“The most important and paradoxical fact shaping the future of online learning is this: A brain is not a computer. We are not blank hard drives waiting to be filled with data. People learn from people they love and remember the things that arouse emotion. If you think about how learning actually happens, you can discern many different processes. There is absorbing information. There is reflecting upon information as you reread it and think about it. There is scrambling information as you test it in discussion or try to mesh it with contradictory information. Finally there is synthesis, as you try to organize what you have learned into an argument or a paper.” 

On this National Teacher Appreciation Day, be thankful you have had wonderful opportunities to learn from real flesh and blood throughout the years. I don't remember a thing about my first game of Pong (or subsequent games for that matter) or what I might have learned by playing it, but I do remember every one of my teachers and that says a lot about the impact they had on my life.