As any of us can attest who were folded, spindled and mutilated by the American educational system’s staid curricula and lackluster teaching methodologies, effective teachers who transcend convention are few and far between. Finding a diamond in New Jersey is easier than running across a teacher who grasps and leverages what compels and appeals to students’ curiosity. The preposterous pedagogical principles of many of today’s teachers, totally lacking in vision, are still shaped by legacies of 19th century Victorian thought.
As Deborah Meier has written in her essay, On Being Bold, “For a century of more, reformers have been fiddling with how to improve on a paradigm of school derived from another age and intended for a very different purpose.”
One fellow whose ideas we hope gain wider acceptance is Kevin Honeycutt (@kevinhoneycutt), a teacher, artist and tech integration specialist extraordinaire. His energetic, entertaining, project-based, student-driven approach to learning demonstrates that it does not follow that idealism is necessarily impractical or that unconventionality leads inevitably to failure. Honeycutt knows full well the demands of a rapidly-changing technological world, and with brio he sets a course directly into its roiling waters, reveling in the entertaining—indeed entrancing—aspects of technology that can be a powerful boon to education.
In his “tradigital” approach to education, Honeycutt manages to work at a grassroots level with school boards, legislators and parents while at the same time playing with new ideas as deftly as he does with new technologies.
At The State of NOW / 140conf12 event at the 92nd Street “Y” in New York City, held June 19–20, 2012, Honeycutt gave his presentation: “Our kids will spend the rest of their lives in the future. Are we getting them ready?”
Kevin Honeycutt: Okay, I’ll tell you who I am. I grew up in poverty and then I became a teacher. I went to school in 20 states around the country. Whenever my Dad broke the law, we moved. And that happened a lot.
I found out that intelligence is relative to where you live. Case in point: In Kansas I was on grade level, academically. I moved to Tennessee and I found myself two grade levels ahead. All I did was move. They called me ‘The Smart Yankee.’ They said, ‘Hey, Yankee sma-hart.’ Two syllables for smart. I don’t know how you can get a second syllable in there. Then I moved to Pennsylvania and I’m now two grade levels behind. So it all kind of depends on where you’re from, right?
So I end up in Kansas and I’m the art teacher in a small town. I’m all the art the kids will get, K-12. That’s it. I’m that. It’s a huge responsibility, by the way, you know? We broke into curriculum meetings—I met with myself. [Laughter.] There was only one art teacher. I was a ‘detached retina’ in education. [Laughter.] I had no one to talk to. The band teacher had the choir teacher to talk to.
But art is important. Right? In art, every kid is an artist. In band, they’re all musicians. In math, they’re all—dying of boredom. Why can they be? I had a 15-year-old in Oregon say this to me: ‘We’ll take your tests. We’ll do what you say. Please, God, just let it matter.’ It broke my freakin’ heart, man. ‘I just want to do something that matters.’
These kids, you know? They’re not bad kids. They don’t even know who they are yet. Well, those are my clients. They’re tough. I call them, ‘The ones who bite.’ You try to help them and grrr, they snarl. Did you ever treat the meanest kid in the room like the only one you trust? Boy, that’s a double-edged sword.
Take this one big old kid, Huge kid. He’s so big, he poops bigger than I am. I’ve heard all of the rumors about him. He slashed the Principal’s tires. He’s a terrible, terrible kid. But I go the other way. I take a different tact. I say, ‘Bill. That’s a tough class this year. You got my back?’ He says, ‘Come again?’ I say, ‘Ya got my back?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ And they act funny like, don’t you know me? Man, I just clean the slate for Bill, right? Bill, he’s got my back, but he’s got it really loud, you know? He’ll yell, ‘Everybody shut up! Honeycutt is trying to teach! It’s all you, Mister H.’ And I say, ‘Thank you Bill.’
So I spend my life looking for ways to connect to kids, the way to get them back in the boat when they’ve already fallen out. You know what I mean? Ways to ‘hook ‘em.’ If I can hook ‘em I can cook ‘em. But how do you do that?
Now I’ll tell you a story about me, okay. I was living in Pennsylvania when I got my first guitar. [Honeycutt picks up a guitar.] It wasn’t this guitar. This is a nice guitar. It was something my Dad got at a yard sale for one dollar with no strings attached—it literally had no strings attached. [Laughter.] So I played air guitar. I had a fantasy life where I sang, ‘I’m gonna play guitar someday. Da, da, dum.’ It took months to get strings! Finally, at Christmas, I got my first set of strings. I didn’t know how to tune it, but the old man next door, he tuned it for me. I traded him some chores for that.
Now, I got a tin guitar. I’ve got a ‘loaded weapon.’ But I don’t know how to use it. So I just sit in my room and I practice putting my fingers on the guitar. [He begins to play some chords.] I found that, and I thought it was cool, so I slid that. [Demonstrates by playing a bit more.] I was so proud of that, I entered a talent show. [Laughter.] Seventeen hundred kids in the audience and I walk out on stage with my ‘song.’ I thought I was going to win, I really did! I started in [he plays the recurring notes]. And the kids are cool at first. They’re like, ‘Oh, nice start.’ And they don’t know that’s all I have. A minute and a half later, they’re throwing things at the stage. I’m destroyed. I’m destroyed. I thought I was good.
I went home and threw the guitar in the closet and said, ‘Never again! Never! I’ll never play guitar again.’
But I couldn’t give it up. I was meant to play guitar, I know it. I was just born in the wrong trailer. [Laughter.] Mobile homes aren’t mobile once tires go flat—unless there’s a tornado. [Laughter.] Think about how you’d feel about living in a dwelling that ranks third in safety to a ditch or a low-lying area, right? Not a lot of security.
But I went to the music store and fantasized about songs I would play someday. And, well, ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ you know, I’m from the trailer park—you have to learn that song. So I look at the sheet music, but I can’t read the sheet music. It might as well be Sanskrit. But I see above the music there are these little boxes kinda like this [pointing to frets on the guitar] and I figured out it was the frets. And there are these circles that say, one, two, three. Those are your fingers. I cracked the code! [Laughter.]
But I couldn’t buy the music. I couldn’t afford it. So I brought my guitar and I set it in the alley between the music store and the hardware store, and I’d go in and look at one chord at a time. So I looked at the first chord and ran out to the alley. [He plays the chord.] Ran back in, saw the second chord, ran back to the alley and played it. [He adds the chord to what he’s playing.] Third chord, back to the alley. [The music is becoming more full-bodied.] Fourth chord….
And suddenly a guy yells, ‘Freeze! Get out of here!’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘You’re stealing our music!’ he said.
‘No, I’m not.’
“Yes, you are—you’re memorizing!’ I was kicked out for ‘thought-lifting.’ [Laughter.]
That was it. I went home and taught myself guitar. It took years. I’m not good, but I won my wife with my guitar. If all that ever happens, that’s enough, right?
But I teach kids. I teach kids guitar. And I’m not great but I can get your kids started. You see, I won’t teach your kid a bunch of theory, I’ll teach him or her three chords. And we’ll start some Blues. I’ll teach her E, A and B7 and she’ll be able to do a thousand songs. Then she’ll tell me when she wants extra stuff.
You see, if I make it too hard, if I give her 10,000 scales to start, she’s going to go away. So how can I hook her? Here’s the problem Most kids, they get a guitar at some point in their life, but most of them quit. Most kids quit, and you know why? Blisters. Most kids get blisters. They quit when it starts to hurt, right? Think about that. I’m a guitar teacher. I can see blisters. I know when you got them and I can soften things up.
Are there ‘cognitive blisters’ between kids and understanding? Kids and math? Kids and language acquisition, that we can’t see? Are there some ways to soften the blisters? Yeah, I can set the action low and try to make it a little bit easier, but what can you do with all of this stuff, this stuff that we have? I make my kid pay rent on his devices. I call it the ‘use-lease agreement.’ I didn’t buy them for his infotainment. What can you do with the most powerful tools in human history? You see, Web, Web 2.0 and networks and devices, they prepare a buffet of learning choices for our kids and, largely, they’re eating the napkins. What could they be doing?
Raise your hand if you made a mistake in puberty. [Laughter.] I love New York. Could you raise your hand? Yeah! Claim it! Can I Google those mistakes you made back then? Some of them maybe, huh? Most of them are not Googleable, right? We lived in a different world. You could make mistakes. It look like a week to ruin your life. [Laughter.] You had to work at it.
Now, raise your hand if you think with one click one person can alter the course of their life? Of course, that’s what were here about, right? If we’re good or bad, right? I expect my kid to pee in the pool. He’s going to do it. I blew it, he’s going to blow it. I just want to make sure I’m there beside him, not throwing him out there to a world I don’t even understand. And educators can’t do that.
Here’s the problem: Kids some to us with devices. By the way, this is my little case. [He picks up a booklet- sized case.] I can get away with texting on the phone a little bit longer on an airplane, because they think I’m reading a little Bible. [Laughter.]
So I have to pay attention to what my kid does. I’ve got to be where he is. I can’t amputate his digital limbs when he comes to school.
Raise your hand if it’s true that if you lost your device or mobile phone you would lose, utterly, important information. [Hands go up in the audience.] Raise your hand if it made you nervous to thinking about it. [Laughter.] Then your brain has done an interesting thing. Your neocortex used to warehouse everything you knew. How many phone numbers do you know now? We have ‘outsourced’ the warehousing of data to devices and networks in the cloud.
So we can’t amputate kids’ digital limbs. They’re going to spend the rest of their lives either succeeding or failing by their use of these things. We can’t take them at the door. And there are brave schools all over the world with ‘Bring Your Own Device’ policies. They are doing things right now. But they are suspect, because they are trying it first. The leading edge is a bleeding edge. I love those crazy pioneers. Thank God for the educational pioneers.
You know, when Americans went West, the scouts went first. They went over the next hill and they looked for dangers and opportunities. They came back and they told the wagon train. So we need ‘scouts.’ We need educational scouts. And you’ve got those crazy teachers—they are usually in trouble, right? I love those crazy teachers. Those are the ones I really connected with, like the three-fingered shop teacher talking about band saw safety. [Laughter.] He knows from whence he speaks. I always run into one of those guys whenever I’m talking about this stuff.
I have a group of ladies who I talk with twice a year, called The Digital Grannies. They originally called me. They said, ‘We want to learn Twitter and Facebook.’ I asked why. They replied, ‘We want to mentor our grandkids without embarrassing them.’ Isn’t that sweet? They’re going this for free. I do this for free. The room smells like… Learning! Excitement! Anticipation and Ben-Gay! [Laughter.]
So, I’m looking at my phone and I’m talking to my kid, and I’m saying, ‘Son, I want you to show me something that you can do with the phone.’ I looked at the phone the way I looked at the guitar when I first got the guitar. I looked at apps on the iPhone when it first came out, so see if any of them were actually anything real, or if they were just kind of fun things to play around with.
One of the first apps I found that I really like was called ‘Pocket Guitar.’ Pocket Guitar is cool because it turns your phone into the fret board of a guitar, but you have to know chords. You can’t cheat. Raise your hand if you play with Guitar Hero? Raise your hands if your kids do that. [Hands in the audience go up.] Yeah. I love it, because it’s getting our kids to like the hairbands of the ‘eighties, and that’s cool.
But if your daughter is great at Guitar Hero and I handed her a real guitar—can she play it? It’s not quite there, right? There’s got to be a bridge in between. To me, Pocket Guitar was the first app I saw that looked like a real guitar. In fact… [he strums his phone and a genuine guitar sound is heard] you sort of strum it, and you have to know chords. [He starts playing and singing the song, ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn.’ He swings the phone back and forth and gets a long vibrato effect, much to the delight of the audience.] The accelerometer is a whammy bar—are you kidding me!? The worst part is that I can’t feel the strings and the best part—is that I can’t feel the strings. Oh my gosh, no blisters. It’s maybe a little different way to think.
I want to show you one more app on here. By the way, I collect these apps and I share with people the ones that I like. This app is called Harmonica. Yes, it’s a harmonica for $1.99. It turns my phone into a harmonica. [He brings his phone up to his lips and begins to play it like a harmonica.] Don’t let just anyone do this to your device. [Laughter.]
Oh my gosh, I’ve got to show you this one. This one so rocks. It’s called the IShred which works with the iPad, the iPod and the iPhone. Basically it’s just chords. [He strums his phone and we hear what sounds like a steel guitar.] Wow, there’s steel in that sound. Teaching kids this, right? If your daughter has never played guitar or she gave up and I teach her she’s going to go: A, A, A. D, D, G. One, two, three. [And he begins to play his phone brilliantly using the iShred app.] Ha! You get the idea, right?
Okay, so the screen is too small for a guy like me. I’m getting old here. So I go and buy the iPad, because I need a bigger screen. But it doesn’t feel like Rock and Roll. So I go and buy a Paper Jamz guitar from Wallmart. Velcro, velco. [Honeycutt shows how he sticks the iPad to the paper guitar with Velcro.] Nerds get to rock! Whew!
Okay, so I’m still teaching. I don’t want to fake it. I’m going to teach you chords. [He strums a chord on the iPad.] So with the Garage Band app, $4.99. It’s got pianos, it’s got drums, it’s got all this stuff. [He strums another chord on the iPad.] I’m still teaching basic stuff. I’m from Kansas. I’m going to do Garth Brooks–you’re going to have to forgive me.
[Honeycutt starts playing his iPad/paper guitar.] What do you think? Kind of cool? Sort of cool? [Applause.]
Purists get mad. ‘It’s not a guitar!’ they yell. ‘It’s an aberration!’ Purists got mad when the electric guitar when the electric guitar was invented. Jimi Hendrix came along and sort of made them look foolish, right? [Honeycutt holds up the iPad/paper guitar.] This is the instrument of our time. Are our kids going to play with it? I we going to challenge them to do amazing things with it?
I want to show you one more thing. [He makes some adjustments.] I’m going to jump over to the sound of a hard rock guitar. [He plays some massive chords.] Now I’m going to flip this thing over, and go to a song that is prerecorded. This is Kid Rock, by the way, and he’s doing a song called ‘All Summer Long.’ [It plays out of the iPad.] Basically stole ‘Werewolves of London’ and ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’ Right? Okay, I’m going to do a little chord progression here. So I’ll teach your daughter that anything within these two lines is safe. [Indicates an area on the iPad. He starts strumming there.] Now play here. [He plays in a lower register. He ‘wails’ the iPad. Applause.]
Alrighty. So I go into Apple places. A guy says it costs $499. Well I don’t know, I’m a school board member, second term, and we just went one-to-one with our iPads, this year. We’re a small school. Imagine, $499 versus the $799 of the PCs we used to buy. I suspect that’s actually cheaper. We’re doing our textbooks on these. We’re doing language acquisition apps. You know, there’s a new app born every minute, and every one of them changes everything.
What an exciting time to be in education! Almost anything is possible. I don’t have to tell kids, that they ‘can’t,’ you know. And yeah, they seem expensive, but $499, really. And they break once in a while. People gather around them like a unicorn. [Laughter.] It’s a thing. They break. Get ready for it. They break. What I care about is what we can do because we have these things.
[Honeycutt strips off the iPad from the paper guitar background.] Let’s say your daughter can’t play anything. She can’t even carry a tune. She’s a sweetheart but doesn’t have a lot of talents going for her here. But at least, well, okay, she’s not tone deaf, so I can actually take her voice and turn it into an instrument with and app called Voice Band. If she’s on pitch, she can hum her song. [He holds the iPad against his throat and hums, and loud guitar chords can be heard.] Wow! [Applause.]
I was from the trailer park. All I ever wanted was a chance. I don’t want you to give me anything. I just want an equal chance. You know what I mean? If I’m going to be a songwriter, give me a way to write a song. If I’m an artist, give me a way to be an artist. Well, it’s here now. The world is flat now, with all of this. And what will be do about that?
I want to see if I can get Geo Geller (@geogeller) to come out here. Is he around? Give him a round of applause and get him to come up here! [Applause.] My man!
I soon as I met Geo I loved him. He’s one of those guys you just love on sight. I knew I wanted to bring him up as a volunteer.
I go into communities and I try to show them what we could be doing, what we should be doing, by making this fun. Is it okay that learning is fun? Is that okay? Shouldn’t it be? [By now Geo Geller is on stage.] Give it up for Geo! [Geller starts playing the iPad ‘drums’ and Honeycutt plays his guitar.]
Geo, how many times have you played drums on the iPad on stage?
Geo Geller: I’ve never played drums off the iPad!
Kevin Honeycutt: I’m going to do a Blues riff in E. Watch me for the changes and try to keep up. Here we go.
[Honeycutt and Geller have an amazing jam session with their respective devices.]
And here’s the idea. All of this stuff is possible. It doesn’t have to be hard. We can make it fun. We mix old and new together. Thanks boys and girls! Thank you so much.
[And with that, Honeycutt shook hands with Geller and they left the stage.]
Editor’s Note: As Kevin Honeycutt is fond of saying, he’s “out to change the world… one classroom at a time.” His website, http://kevinhoneycutt.org/ is a treasure trove of ideas concerning, education, social media, case histories, mobile apps, and what-not. As is emblazoned on the site’s home page: “I want to help every educator inspire every student to discover what it is that they are so passionate about that they become remarkable at it.”
Given the current state of American education, Honeycutt certainly has his work cut out for him!
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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.