October 13th, 2009It’s not about failure
‘A quarter unable to read properly’, ‘150,000 children unable to read and write at 11’ – these were some of this year’s education headlines in the UK. These were simplified summaries – these school children are not necessarily unable to read; they are ‘functionally illiterate’. In other words, they can read, but they are not judged to do so well enough to deal with the everyday requirements of life.
My children bring comprehension passages home from school: extracts from tv guides, bus timetables and the like. And, yes, like many adults, they find it difficult to make sense of these. But these aren’t part of their world. They can text for bus information, and find anything they want to watch on BBC iplayer or YouTube.
Why not test yourself on their terms? Here’s an extract from the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card game official rulebook:
“Continuous Effect
“You use this type of effect just by declaring its activation during
your Main Phase. (See Turn Structure, page 26) There are some
Ignition Effects that have a cost to activate, like discarding
cards from your hand, Tributing a monster, or paying Life
Points. Because you can choose when to activate this type of
effect, it’s easy to create combos with them.”
Did you understand that? Now that you have read it: could you use continuous effect within a game? What would be the advantages of using it? Could you explain why anyone would tribute a monster, given that there is a cost to this? Or do you find that you are functionally illiterate when you try to operate in a ten-year-old’s world?
At this year’s Handheld Learning conference, John Paul Gee argued that children in the UK and the US who have been graded functionally illiterate can and do read high-level texts comparable to those read by doctoral students. They can do this if they are passionate about the subject – and if the reading relates to their experience. Give a child a manual in isolation and they will ignore it. Give a child a set of Yu-gi-oh! cards and they’ll play the game. Later they may choose to find the manual and make sense of it. No one fails Yu-gi-oh!
And the relevance for social learn? This is how social learning can – and should – be. It starts with, and is driven by, a passion, an interest, an experience. It is informed and guided by others, it takes place in a social setting, and it is a process of growth and development – not a scramble away from failure.
October 14th, 2009 at 11:23 am
No one fails Yu-gi-oh!
Really. Any evidence?
This sounds like tosh to me.
January 2nd, 2010 at 12:53 pm
When my son was ten (he’s 14 now), we used to play the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game every day. He understood all the rules in the book and they read like gobbledygook to me. He did explain them to me over time though, but by the time he moved on to other interests, I had a record of something like half a dozen wins and over a hundred losses. I didn’t feel like a failure, I was playing for the fun of it, so maybe failure and constantly getting your butt kicked are two different things. 🙂
January 12th, 2010 at 8:29 pm
Hi Martin – I was distinguishing between failing in the sense of failing an exam, and a feeling of failure. I think the reason we know that no one fails ‘Yu-gi-oh’ is that no one takes an exam in it. Learning in this case is assessed by the player and by their peers on the basis of performance.