Unstructured play!

From time to time, I like to add here random musings about the pedagogy of teaching scripting to kids, fresh now to me more than ever, having just completed some professional development training at work that's re-acquainted me with "learning in a cage". Those of you who know me, know I'm a huge fan of "unstructured" learning, meaning giving a long leash to button mashing and steep learning curves, encouraging kids to plunge in exposed to a new platform, to click around and make a lot of early mistakes to take advantage of "self-teaching" to customize how they best learn from their own mistakes and come up with their own best questions. This blog post about narcissism from "Elephant Journal" also struck a chord:

The latest research indicates that narcissism is on the rise in modern culture due to the rise of reality television, social media, and the ever-increasing focus on achievement—even in preschool and elementary school, which is coupled with the general reduction of children’s freedom to play with their peers in an unstructured way.

Whenever you are forced into a box about what and how to learn, it will kill the love of learning. I often have well meaning teaching assistants that, with my permission, want to practice classroom management (which my loud classroom is ripe to offer their intervention!). I give it, though I don't personally support it, because it always reminds me of the damage teaching from a social control perspective does to kids. And each and every time, I see the looks on kids faces; they recognize the drill, so there's that comfort (if you want to call it that), but after a couple of unstructured play sessions with me, I see the spark leave during the exercise, kids rotely following what they are told (you can hide it in all the sneaky games you want, they KNOW what comes next...). Ultimately, it is fleeting (whew). The recipient myself over the past 2 weeks being taught a locked down, proprietary platform, it reminds me how sad it makes you to have to learn under these conditions. And worse, the assessment (that is evaluated with a mandatory pass %) will be my only "unstructured play" I get, and must be performed, alone, even though in real life, we work in teams and often, not very well (everyone learns "the lesson" from training, right?). A good reminder of why even though unstructured play can seem chaotic, it's the only way to go to keep that spark real, alive, and meaningful.