PBL and The Matrix

"Let me tell you why you are here. You have come because you know something. What you know you can't explain but you feel it. You've felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world. You don't know what, but it's there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?" While speaking to Neo, Morpheus obliquely describes the feeling Neo has had through the first quarter of the 1999 film, The Matrix, and the one I had for years as a teacher.  

For the longest time I was unsatisfied with the way school was being run.  Something wasn't right, but I wasn't exactly sure what it was or how to fix it. It would wake up at night only to catch a fleeting glimpse of the idea disappearing the more awake I became.  In 2010 or so, I read Daniel Pink's (@DanielPink) book Drive (which I highly recommend) and followed its ideas to see where they went. As I combined Drive with Seth Godin's (@thisissethsblog)  Stop Stealing Dreams, suddenly it all became so clear. It was as if Daniel Pink and Seth Godin had spoken collectively to me with the sentiment expressed by Morpheus. It was too late for me to turn back, I had taken the red pill.

And I began my journey down the rabbit hole of Project Based Learning. I then knew it is the true path for education. Everything else in education I had seen is a fake world created by an oppressive force which has been in place for over a century. The whole time the solution was so close, but I was not able to see it.  I am far from being "The One," but it sure felt like I was when I first recognized the truth of what education and learning should be.

Education was so contrived.  "Mary has a red dress. If she is walking 2 miles per hour and Agent Smith starts .5 miles behind her and walks 3 miles per hour, when will he catch her?" It is obvious that the teacher has come up with the problem of the lady in the red dress and can easily find the answer, which doesn't matter anyway. 

Whether it was math, science, social studies or any other subject, concepts did not transfer between them. Even though a student may have learned about reading a line graph in Math class and then immediately walked 40 feet down the hall to the next class classroom and used line graphs in Social Studies, students either replied, "This isn't math class," or "How am I supposed to do this?" Obviously students weren't learning.  To me, once one "learns" something, it means they know it and can call upon it when necessary. That wasn't happening. 

Fortunately, the rabbit hole has led Lynn Heyn, Tara Meinke, Suzy Weisgerber, Emily Bennett and I to found the Arete PBL Academy at Neenah High School (@nhsarete).   Our  two years of experiences have shown that real learning is happening now.  By combining English, Math, Science and Social Studies in a regular public high school, Arete PBL  allows students to participate in a meaningful, authentic experience which drives their learning everyday and not solely in our four classes. One of the most surprising revelations from our students is that they take the interconnected way of thinking we teach everyday in our classes and even connect their learning to their non-PBL classes.  Our students are now so passionate about their learning, they are looking to rescue as many students as possible from the Matrix of regular education. They figuratively hold the two pills, and say, "This is your last chance (at our school). After this, there is no going back. Youtake the blue pill and the storyends. You wake in your bed andyou believe whatever you want tobelieve. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you howdeep the rabbit-hole goes."