Have Hedgehogs Really Evolved?

 

I read a blog post today about hedgehogs (All the slow hedgehogs are dead) by Seth Godin.  According to him, hedgehog road kill was a common site in the UK 50 years ago and now it is something seen far less often.  His reasoning is that the slow hedgehogs, aka the road kill, were removed from the gene pool.  That left the faster, more street-savvy hedgehogs to repopulate the countryside with faster, more street-savvy offspring producing a faster breed of beast.

Hmmm...that poses some intriguing questions: 

• Did the UK hedgehog road-kill crisis solve itself with natural selection?

• Is our generation witness to the evolution of a new car-dodging, super-hedgehog?

To be fair, Seth also throws in a shout out to suburbanization and the inferred habitat loss, which itself infers a smaller population of either fast or slow hedgehogs.  And to be really fair, he asks us to draw our own organizational analogies from this example.

If we focus on that last thought about drawing our own organizational analogies, what “hedgehogs” have we adapted, evolved or changed as a result of a new technology (i.e. the car causing the road kill) or simply from any significant—environmental or otherwise—change resulting from the introduction of something radically new (i.e. the road plowed through the countryside for said cars to cause road kill concerns)?  What are the things that we do now, those commonplace things that seemed so challenging to us when they were introduced? 

We now:

• Manage attendance and student records electronically
• Frantically scramble to piece together a Plan C, when the Internet goes down or our server crashes
• Have an over-reliance on the instant gratification of cell phones and social media.  Seriously, do you actually know someone who can unplug for more than part of a day?  I have multiple friends who forced analog family time on their kids this summer, but still maintained use of their own cell phones and electronic devices for “work” purposes (aka. Email,  Facebook, Twitter, Instant Messaging, Bejeweled Blitz—I saw your score posted online JP—etc.) 

We have become so reliant on technology at work that a brief interruption in service translates to great hardship for us.  At my school, we are currently struggling with the idea of maintaining an analog calendar—yes, you heard it...,on paper—for a short period of time as we transition from one communication platform to another.  When the server crashes, we have to remind ourselves that there are actual student files stored in the front office.  We have to remind ourselves that telephone books work just as well as digital address books.

In a very positive way, I am seeing some very positive hedgehog adaptations evolving every day.  Worksheets are being replaced by problem-solving models.  One-size-fits-all lesson plans are being replaced by individualized instruction.  Learning is becoming more and more differentiated not only between individual students but for individual students.  Data is being collected to inform practice and to improve it. 

Choice replaced script.

I worked as a teacher in an online learning environment long before it was en vogue anywhere else (Florida was doing some innovative things then, but not much was happening elsewhere).  The first bit of time brought some interest and a lot of misunderstanding, and then the rhetoric started that online learning was here to replace teachers, to raise class sizes and to generate more money.  If anything, learning and blended instruction have proven that quality teachers are needed more than ever in the learning process, albeit with their roles changing from vessels of knowledge to facilitators of learning.

Do I see hedgehogs?

 I see them every day at my school.

(...and I see far more fast, car-dodging ones than I do road kill!)