What My Students Taught Me About the Future
Photo thanks to School Strike 4 Climate
Words by Roz Bellamy
Photos thanks to School Strike 4 Climate
This story was originally published in Issue 4
Do we have more to learn from the next generation than we have to offer them? Roz Bellamy writes from the classroom.
I dropped the folder of science-fiction short stories onto my desk and sighed. The spine was thick, assembled by an English teacher who clearly loved sci-fi. “The kids always love this unit,” she’d said after passing the folder on to me.
The topic sounded fun, but my sci-fi knowledge was lacking. I had some holiday reading to do. Other than appreciating the eccentricity of Douglas Adams and scaring myself with Margaret Atwood not long after puberty, I had mostly engaged with sci-fi and speculative fiction through school reading lists. When I was a teenager we had grim blocks of lessons on George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Our English teachers knew we were studying the Russian Revolution, the world wars and the Cold War in modern history and used the books to drill morals into us, warning us of what could happen in a society that ignores its past.
I put off looking at the folder of stories for most of the summer holidays, instead planning my lessons and assessment tasks, until I couldn’t delay it any longer. I flipped through the folder and found myself chuckling, gasping and enjoying stories by Ray Bradbury, Ursula K Le Guin, and authors whose names I didn’t recognise. The stories made me question why I had stopped reading sci-fi at the end of my teenage years. Was it after studying writing at university? Literary snobbery towards genre fiction is pervasive, and would certainly have influenced my reading as I took tentative steps to establish myself as a writer. Another part of my hesitation towards the genre may have been a lack of confidence in my scientific knowledge and skills.
As a child, I was delighted to receive a children’s chemistry set from my parents. The set felt thrilling and dangerous – a weapon in my hands. I knew it was more of a toy for boys; the packaging depicted a boy wearing a white lab coat and goggles, his eyes wide with awe as he held a test tube aloft. In those days, science was about play. You couldn’t make a mistake, other than causing an explosion.
But during Year 11 biology, I reached the conclusion that science wasn’t for me. I knew that science was largely dominated by men, and so to carve a space in it would require a lot of passion. I didn’t have that passion – it was reserved for Taylor Hanson, books and writing – so I dropped the subject. I knew I was different to those in my year who loved studying science. I could see it in the way they drew the laboratory equipment with such precision, while I sat there rueing the fact that experiments involved the dullest form of sketching imaginable. I’d gone from associating science with curiosity, wonder, hypotheses and discoveries to believing that science was best left to the experts.
At university, I felt urged to decide between the arts and sciences, and farewelled the latter without a second glance. While studying towards a master of teaching, we were often sorted into our teaching areas. Future English and humanities teachers were mostly kept separate from the science and maths teachers, with the occasional exception of a teacher whose specialties straddled the divide between English and maths. It seemed like they thought it wouldn’t be safe to mix us.
It wasn’t until I went to China on a teaching placement that I interacted with teachers from outside my subject areas. We observed each other’s classes, and I realised just how rudimentary my scientific knowledge was. Once I started working as a high school teacher, I wondered whether that divide made sense. I read about schools in Scandinavia that were phasing out individual subjects and shifting towards project-based, interdisciplinary learning. There didn’t seem to be a consensus on whether that was something to emulate.
A week into the unit on science fiction, we started discussing a short story in which teachers are replaced by robots.
Several students raised their hands. The first student to speak said: “I read an article that said, in a decade or two, teachers really will be replaced with robots.”
“I read that they won’t be,” another student replied.
“Well, what about self-checkouts at the supermarket?” the first student countered. “They’re taking away jobs from human beings. And it won’t be hard to do the same in other areas – like teaching. I mean, we all use the internet for learning anyway, and there are now options to do distance education that is completely online. They just need to take it up a few notches and throw in artificial intelligence.”
I had to remind myself that these students were in their early teens. Their responses to the story led to a fascinating and emotional discussion around fears and uncertainties about the future, including climate change and the changing nature of the workforce. At a certain point, I realised that my contribution to the discussion wasn’t needed. I could reframe the conversation when it shifted off-topic, ensure that everyone had the opportunity to speak and connect the conversation to the texts we were studying, but my students had everything they needed for a nuanced discussion and, eventually, debate.
It was clear that my students were worried about the future.
“I read that we don’t even know yet what the future jobs will be,” a quiet student spoke up. “A huge percentage haven’t been invented yet; they’re too high-tech for us to know about now.”
“What does that mean for your education?” I asked them. “Is it relevant to you? Can we prepare you for a world that we can’t predict?”
“No, and no,” a student answered. “I mean, we have to do it anyway. It’s school. Getting into university will be more important than ever. But it’s probably all irrelevant. We’re already allowed to use calculators in maths, and the internet when we’re doing assessment tasks.”
“We need to know how to read and write,” another student added. “But otherwise, we can find it all out online much quicker.”
He was interrupted by another student. “I mean, why don’t we get to study coding? Even basic coding? It just seems like a bad idea not to be equipping students with that knowledge when we’re definitely going to need it.”
After the lesson I thought about my students’ determination to gain the skills and knowledge they believed were needed in order to keep up with the rapidly changing fields of science and technology. Unlike the divide I had encountered between STEM and the humanities at university, these students didn’t see a reason to separate the disciplines. The scientific components, literary techniques and themes, and philosophical implications of speculative fiction were all connected.
At some point I stopped wondering whether my tertiary training and life experience had equipped me for the role of high school teaching. Whether or not we are all going to become obsolete and replaced with robots, complete with built-in software that automatically marks our students’ work, is irrelevant. These days, we have more to learn from our students than we have to offer them.
I’d gone from associating science with curiosity, wonder, hypotheses and discoveries to believing that science was best left to the experts.
These days, we have more to learn from our students than we have to offer them.
In the middle of the sci-fi unit, we analysed Rad Bradbury’s short story All Summer in a Day, set on the planet Venus in the future, when the sun only comes out once every seven years.
We had discussed what may have caused the situation on the planet, and students referred to environmental catastrophe and nuclear war almost immediately. I had to stop them from going down a Donald Trump rabbit hole – a topic they could talk about for hours.
“What do you see as the most important message in the story?” I asked the class. There were a few different responses, touching on bullying, jealousy, selfishness and being different.
Later in the lesson I walked around the classroom while the students answered some written questions. I stopped at a student’s desk, noticing that he looked pensive.
“How are you going?”
“I’m okay,” he replied. “I was just thinking about how sad the story is. And how unfair. You said it was written in the fifties?” I nodded.
“That’s really interesting to me. It’s weird how it is still so relevant.” He glanced out the classroom window. “I guess that’s why we continue to read and study dystopian literature!”
It’s not all bad news. There was a general sentiment of ‘we’ll cope, whatever the new normal brings’ among my students. This brave, head-out-of-the-sand approach to the things that keep us awake at night is what is needed to navigate an uncertain future. This requires a new approach to education by educators, whether we look to other countries – like the interdisciplinary approach in some schools in Scandinavia – or find our own.
My students made me aware that we need to reconsider the current schooling system, and I am hopeful that this change will be student-led and student-centred. Perhaps adults are the ones with the most to learn, and the younger generation should be doing the teaching.
