One of the best times that I had a ISTE this year was facilitating one of the ISTE Excellence Cafes.  They took place on Sunday, and each cafe was devoted to a conversation about one of the ISTE NET-S and what excellence looks like in that context.  Weeks before, I’d missed the initial conference call for facilitators, and when I was finally able to connect, there were only two NET-S standards left to choose from.  This was good.  I chose Technology Operations and Concepts, which is the standard that I am least interested in.  I chose it for two reasons.  One, I was more likely to keep my own mouth shut, making it easier to facilitate the conversation.  Secondly, I felt that I might learn more by leading a conversation about something, to which I do not pay a lot of attention.

Technology Operation & Concepts Students demonstrate a sound understanding of technology concepts, systems, and operations. Students: understand and use technology systems. select and use applications effectively and productively. troubleshoot systems and applications. transfer current knowledge to learning of new technologies.

ISTE was about conversations

I was worried when the conversation was about to start.  It seemed that Tech and Concepts were not terribly interesting to anyone, except for an enthusiastic educator from Vietnam, and two venders — both of which shared valuable perspectives, but not broad enough to even begin the conversation.  But, when the time finally came, folks started coming in, and we had wonderful input from teachers, administrators, technology educators and directors, international educators and vendors — and it was one of the most exhilarating conversations, of which I have been a part.

We had almost no guidance on where we should steer the conversations except for the goal of excellence.  We wanted the cafes to take the discussions in their own directions.  It was my job to keep it productive.

We looked at each of the goals of the Technology Operations and Concepts standard, and our conversations broke down into what does the learning of the items look like, and what kind of teacher/learning environment would nurture that learning.  There was an enormous amount of overlap.

Here is my own condensing of the ideas down to an almost manageable list of teaching/learning characteristics that I think extends way beyond technology operation and concepts.

Minor additional editing July 23, 2010

So why am I posting so many reflections on this year’s ISTE in Denver. The best answer I can come up with is my iPad. That’s not entirely true. It probably has much more to do with how I was taking notes on my iPad, using mind mapping software (see Taking Nots on the iPad).  I started with SimpleMind, but migrated over to MindPad because I was constantly having to rearrange the nodes into a layout that made sense.  This was not necessarily a bad thing, because it gave me something to do during lulls in the presentation.  But I ended out using MindPad.

Since the conference, I’ve taken another look at iThoughtsHD and although its interface is a little less smooth, it has more functionality and exports to a slew of other applications and in a number of ways, including WiFi.

The practical affect for me is that I have a set of distinct notes organized logically, that take me back to the presentation rooms rooms and in front of the speakers.  This is preferable to the hodgepodge of notes written down on a note pad, either analog or digital, requiring careful interpretation later on.  To the right are my notes for Doug Johnson’s presentation, exported to my MacBook Pro via WiFi and imported into XMind.

Of course ISTE (formerly known as NECC) is a place where smart people go to learn.  But it is also the place were we go to care about their own ideas.  There are proclamations, exaltations, disagreements, confusion, support for some approaches and recrimination of others.  People are made to feel good and made to feel bad because of what they think and sometimes because of how they’ve spent their money.  Interactive White Boards are an obvious current example, as many (myself included) are weary of the technology because of its evident support and potential perpetuation of teacher-centered classrooms.

And then comes Doug Johnson’s Change from the Radical Center.  Author of the Blue Skunk Blog (one of my favorites) and a range of books for teachers and librarians, Doug brings a practical and mature approach to modernizing our schools, classrooms, and libraries.  In his online handouts, Johnson writes…

While polarized views of reading methodologies, filtering, DRM, Open Source, copyright/copyleft, constructivism, e- books, computer labs, fixed schedules, Mac/PC/Linux, and the One Laptop Per Child project all make for entertaining reading and a raised blood pressure, radical stances rarely create educational change or impact educational institutions enough to change kids’ chances of success.

With his Minnesota humor (and no mention of Ollie), Doug compellingly suggests ten principals to follow to cut through the passions of heart-felt beliefs to approaches that may succeed in affecting positive change in our classrooms and libraries.  You can read them all here.  I’m going to comment on just a few.

I had to reach all the way back to NECC 2007 to find this picture of Doug

One of the first cut through much of the controversial proclamations made in the presentation rooms and during hall and lounge conversations that I witnessed and participated in.  He suggests that we “Adopt an ‘and’ not ‘or’ mindset.”  I feel pretty strongly that every student should be walking into their classrooms with computers under their arms.  I’m increasingly convinced of the power of focused backchanneling during presentations (lectures) and conversations.  But this does not mean that students should have their laptops out every minute of the school day, chatting with each other about what the teacher or a classmate is saying.  There is room for laptops open and for laptops closed.  There is room for lower end Netbooks for the lion’s share of the learning work, and a garden of high-end work stations in the media center for video productions and data visualization.

Johnson also advocated that we look for the truth and value in all of our perspectives and practices.  Because someone says or promotes something that appears objectionable to me our you, doesn’t mean that it is all worthy of objection.  Find the value and work with that.

Another one that resonated with me was being comfortable saying, “I don’t know.”  I think this is important, because it embraces the fact that we are all learning.  When I give myself permission to say, “I don’t know,” then I’m give those around me comfort with what they do not yet know — but will learn.

The one that I continue to struggle with was, “Understand that the elephant can only be eaten one bite at a time.”  First of all, I’m not to keen on eating elephant.  It probably does not taste like chicken.  But I fear that the luxury of “small steps” is more than we can afford.  I don’t know if our children have the time for their educators to take their time in adopting more contemporary approaches to teaching.  How many more years are we going to excuse ourselves as immigrants?

How many more students are going to graduate, perfectly prepared for the 1950s?

Washington Post blogger, Valerie Strauss, has invited faculty members of Columbia University Teachers College to guest blog about President Obama’s Blueprint for rewriting the No Child Left Behind law. Yesterday’s contributor was Ellen Meier, professor of computing and education and co-director of the college’s Center for Technology and School Change.

In here piece, Obama’s mistake with technology in ed reform, Dr. Meier opposes the apparent devaluing of technology as a catalyst for change.  She hones in on the document’s relegation of technology to a position of support mechanism and an element of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) theme.  She writes,

The blueprint effectively consigns technology to a subordinate role in reform, rather than recognizing it as a fundamental requirement for new millennium teaching and learning. By consolidating technology funding, it effectively silences the voices of innovative educators interested in using technology to leverage effective, imaginative approaches to schooling.

I agree with Meier’s statements and I get the same impressions from the document, which seems to address tech from a “business as usual” perspective. However, this is all part of an ongoing struggle in the ed-tech community between treating information and communication technologies (ICT) as a separate element in the endeavor of education or infusing it into the framework of teaching and learning — integrating the technology and therefore, making it invisible.

A while back, I wrote about a conversation I was part of in Austin about the prospects of the state’s elimination of a required technology class (What Difference Might One “S” Make?). With the dedicated and state-mandated class, tech gains importance and prestige — not to mention funding. But technology instruction, which carries specific accountability measures, becomes too strictly defined and separated from the rest of the school. Without the technology class, schools become more free to specialize, adapt, innovate, and truly integrate, but they lose the authority and funding to do so.

I do not believe that Dr. Meier is advocating either position to the exclusion of the other. None of us are. We are simply finding the language that describes ICT as a critical component of the education formula in a way that empowers success, provokes innovation, and is relevant to the contexts of teaching and learning in the 21st century.

Meier makes an especially compelling argument about the need for assured technology expertise in our schools and districts, people who are following trends, aware of emerging tech, and qualified to innovate by utilizing appropriate new technologies.  I was especially excited by her statement that the Blueprint’s approach…

..is more likely to result in “technologizing” the status quo —integrating technology into existing practices – rather than using technology to create engaging new learning environments.

A Word Tree (Click image to enlarge or click here to launch the visualization)

Taking a closer and more quantitative look at the document I used IBM’s Many Eyes tool-set to visualize the place the tech plays in the Blueprint. I started, of course, with a word cloud, in which technology just barely shows up out of the top 150 re-occuring words in the document.  But this, in and of itself means almost nothing.  As the Many Eyes site says, “It (the tool) was designed to give pleasure, and not to provide reliable analytic insight.”

However, we get a clearer look by running a Word Tree (see left) revealing that technology is used 14 times in the document.

• Five times it is listed along with STEM subjects.  Two of the listings are presented in a way that, to me, imply a continuum subjects, placing history, civics, foreign languages, the arts, financial literacy, and “other subjects” at the less important end — or at least separating STEM out from other subjects.
• Nine times it is listed as a way to improve instruction, address student learning challenges, and accomplish the goals of the grant.

But even its poor showing in the word race shouldn’t, alone, be cause for concern.  After all, “technology should be invisible,” RIGHT? (”technology should be invisible” shows up in 2,700 Google-indexed web pages).

There are three objections that I have to where the blue print is taking us.

1. The One size fits all approach the our promotion of the STEM subjects seems to ignore completely that even though we do need more youngsters pursuing a science, technology, or mathematics field, not everyone needs to, and we will continue to need smart and creative people pursuing the “other subjects.”  When people are complaining about TV, they are not usually complaining about the picture size or quality.  What they want is better stories.  Engineering is easy.  Telling a better and more compelling story is hard.
2. In the first paragraph, Ellen Meier describes technology as “a catalyst for all educational reform efforts for the 21st century.”  On my first reading, I thought that this statement was a bit over-reaching.  But now that I think about it, she is right.  Globalization, economic transition, brand new industries and industries in decline… all of these bellwethers of change owe themselves to advances in information and communication technologies.  In addition, because of technology, information has changed in:
   • What it looks like,
   • What we look at to view it,
   • Where we go to find it,
   • How we find it,
   • What we can do with it, and
   • How we communicate it

Because information is now networked, digital, and abundant, what it means to be literate has changed and so too has the meaning and method of lifelong learning.

Technology should be invisible.  It is the pencil and paper of our time.  But until every learner and teacher-learner has sufficient and equitable access to appropriate information and communication technologies, we should enthusiastically continue to make the “T” word an explicit and high-volumn part of all of our planning.

I took this picture, walking out to the car last night.

I know that some keynote speakers do not do this as a general rule, because it is “work,” and I understand this position, but one of the best parts of my job is getting invited to dinner by local district ed tech leaders or conference organizers the evening before the event.  Granted, I’m not always excited about it, when I’ve been traveling all day and I’m tired.  But I’m always (ALWAYS) energized and I’m always going back to my room with something I didn’t know before.

Last night it was with four folks of the Thompson School District, in Loveland (love´-lund), Colorado, just south of Fort Collins.  Diana (sorry if I get the names wrong) is experiencing her first Colorado winter, a former eMints coach from Missouri.  She shared a lot about the structured eMints approach, and the adaptability that is enabled by their constant collaborations.  Jenny comes from the media side and is with redefining the school library and asking all the right questions.  Monica Monika is one of the most innovative and open educators I’ve met — and courageous.  In a district that has things fairly locked down (like most), she’s convinced the PTB to open her classroom and ask her students to bring their computers to class and integrate (students are asked to integrate the tech).  And then Kellie Bashor, the district technology integration coordinator, did what good leaders do — she listened.

I think that the high point for me was when Diana was asked what she would be presenting tomorrow (today) at the district’s staff development event.  She said, “It’s Not the Same Thing it was Going to be a Few Minutes Ago.”  That is the perfect title for a conference presentation, and I got her permission to use it.

One of the stats I’ll be including in my keynote this morning is that only a few years ago, the world was doubling technical knowledge every two years.  At some point, during 2010, knowledge will be doubling every 72 hours.  The the test answers are going to be changing.  We need to get rid of the high-stakes tests.  They are irrelevant, counter-productive, and harmful to our children and their future.

In a time of change, we should not be asking, “Did you learn this?”

Instead we should be saying, every day,

“Show me what you’ve learned!  … and surprise me!”

I think it’s going to be a good day.

Powered by ScribeFire.

This is Gopher, one incarnation of what the Internet looked like before the World Wide Web ((”Types of Internet Protocols.” Online Library Learning Center. The board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, Web. 2 Jan 2010. .))

In Internet is to WWW as Education is to…, Willy Kjellstrom reflects on his recent reading of Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas — and how he (Willy) discovered that there is a difference between Internet and World Wide Web. We often use the terms interchangeably, without loss of meaning. They are, at this time, practically synonymous.

From January 1 Blog Post (click to enlarge)

Then, at the end of his article, Willy questions my January 1 resolutions post, where I resolve to avoid using certain terms, including education, preferring to emphasize learning.

Now I recognize the futility of complying fully with ones post-New Year’s Eve promises to one’s self. But I would like to draw on two distinctions between my perspective and that of Kjellstrom.

Number one, Willy appears to be younger than I am — “Harvard Alum ‘05,” according to his Facebook page. Of course, that could be graduate school, which he, like me, may have attended over a decade after general college. But for the sake of my objective, I’m going to assume that Kjellstrom is decades younger than I am.

You see, I have always known the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web, because I knew an Internet before WWW. I remember when you navigated the network of networks using Telnet and FTP — when, if you wanted to look up the meaning of Telnet, you had to know the IP number of a server that housed a file with definitions. I remember the rise of Gopher and the slower but formidable rise of the World Wide Web. I recognized these as protocols for shaping how information logically connected, so that we could navigate the network of ideas. Yet, I grant that in most contexts, I can exchange the terms in my conversations without losing meaning.

Also, being 34 years out of college and 16 years out of graduate school, and especially because of the shifts we have seen during the most recent decades, I understand that learning is an integral part of life, not just something that you do in school — a realization that I know Kjellstrom and you readers understand as well.

But, and this is my second point, in this time when so much is shifting (industrial to post-industrial, machine age to knowledge age, whatever you want to call it), learning has become a critical life skill.

I can remember, standing in line, at my high school graduation, and two graduates behind me claiming that they would never read another book. At that moment in history, and at that moment so close to our formal education, it was a perfectly plausible proclamation. They were, no doubt, getting jobs in one of the town’s mills and expecting to work the same job tasks for the next 35 years. We had been prepared for the next 35 years. What none of us knew, was that in less than 15 years those mills would all be gone, and my classmates would have to, as Toffler predicted, “learn, unlearn, and relearn” as a way of life.

Education is still characterized as a place you go, to get taught — where we teach and our students learn how to be taught. Yet, in the real world, learning is not something that is done to you, but something that you do yourself, in your own way, with your resources and sense of resourcefulness. I am not saying that every student moment in school is spent in passive receipt or that teaching should never happen. But “being taught” is still the character of the beast, and it is getting in the way of helping people learn to teach themselves.

If our global connectivity and sharing of ideas — our network of networks — was in desperate need of reform and the World Wide Web was getting in the way of that reform, then the distinction between Internet and WWW would be much more important.

Thanks, Willy, for continuing this conversation.

From a July 2008 blog post on petitinvention about visual information search in the future.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die. ((Fancher, Hampton, and David Webb Peoples, Script. Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott.” Perf. Hauer, Rutger. 1982, Film.))

Blade Runner, 1982

Some times I feel like Roy, the dying replicant (robot), lamenting the loss of one soul’s experiences — what sites he’s seen. We’ve been witness to some pretty amazing sites in just the last few years, and they have been both tumultuous and exhilarating.

We have been a part of a dizzying array of advances — and yet, change has been just slow enough that we do not see it nor do we think that much about it — amongst our every day endeavors. Of course, this paradox shouldn’t surprise us considering that as my country works hard to overhaul its healthcare system, and the world grapples in Copenhagen, to rein in global warming, what holds our attention is the infidelities of a professional golfer.

That said, I feel it is important that we, during this holiday season, be reminded that in the year 2000

• You were probably still running Windows 98 on your PC, or OS 8 or 9 on your Mac — on which you were still using Hypercard.
• If you used a laptop, you had to plug it into the Internet — and often through a telephone.
• E-mail was still THE killer app because there was no MySpace.
• To twitter was “to make high-pitched sounds, as of birds.”
• There was no Firefox, no Flickr, and no Facebook.
• The hottest thing going was Napster and the hottest MP3 player was the RIO, from Diamond Multimedia, with 32Mb of audio storage to brag about.  (that’s 1/2000 that of today’s iPod Touch)
• Some of what’s happened since 2000 has not been that noticeable, such as genetically engineered corn and applications of nanotechnology.
• Some of it, we should have noticed more, such as our exploration of the Saturnian system, and skid marks left on the surface of Mars — and most of our textbooks still call Pluto a planet.
• The software that you used came in a box with a paper manual — and you most likely paid for it.
• PDAs had a stylus.
• No one had a Blackberry or iPhone, and
• If you owned a mobile phone — it was just a phone.
• You weren’t blogging and if you maintained a web page, it was with Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage.
• ISTE was NECC and NECC was in Atlanta, and we don’t know what was hot, because we weren’t blogging it.
• We were not worried about China and India, and we’d just gotten through Y2K with hardly a hitch — thanks to people from China and India.
• Yahoo! looked like this

  

• CNN.com looked like this

  

• My web site looked like this

  

• ..and Google pretty much looked the same that it does now.
• Wireless Internet, iPhones, and traffic-displaying GPS would, to many, have seemed “indistinguishable from magic.”

  What, that we would call astounding (magical) today, may we take for granted ten years from now — and how prepared will the students attending our classrooms today be for that future?

• If you were teaching in 2000, then you remember a sense of professional pride, which has been stripped away for political gain.

  In 2000, society’s most critical endeavor, education, had not yet been usurped by amateurs in Washington, and driven decades in the wrong direction by people who saw no further than the industry-modeled classrooms they’d attended decades ago.

What will 2010 bring? In the next few days, I’ll tell you…

I saw and enjoyed Amelie dispite the fact that Audrey Tautou’s eyes in this movie poster really creeped me out.

I don’t enjoy watching foreign films with subtitles.  I’m almost always glad that I did, but it’s work for me — and I usually go to the movies to relax.  There is also, I’m sure, some discomfort associated with my not being a successful foreign language student when I was in school, doing only slightly better in Latin than in French and Spanish classes.  ..and references to my fairly severe hearing difficulties probably provide more consolation to me than a real excuse for my academic failures.  Never really had to listen to Latin.

But I remember a conversation at one of the foreign language teachers conferences I’ve spoken at about how immigrants are developing their English language skills by switching on the closed caption feature of their TVs — and that’s the memory that surfaced when I learned about AnySubs.  It’s a collaborative archive of files that provide subtitles for movies, operating along side the movie file.  Here’s how it works.

1. You go to AnySubs, and type the title, or a string from the title of the movie you wish to read along with.  I happened to have an MP4 of Mary Poppins in an external hard drive.  With the proper number of Ps, I find an entry for the 1964 movie and learn that it got a 7.6 user rating from IMDb.
2. Clicking the entry, I learn that there are two English subtitle files and one in Finish.  One of the English files might be used by students with hearing deficiencies, but pretending I’m teaching Finish to my high schoolers, I click that entry and then click Download.
3. The subtitle downloads are compressed.  One I ran across last night was zipped (.zip), but this one is compressed in Roshal ARchive, or RAR (.rar) format.  Fortunately, Stuffit Expander handles it flawlessly. Although there are others, the subtitle decompressed files I’ve downloaded were in SubRip format (.srt).
4. After that, the process is simple, though I had to do some research to learn it — as the AnySubs site seems to be fairly Windows-centric.
5. The movie file (most formats seem to be workable) and the subtitles file must be in the same folder or directory, and they must have the same filename — except for the extension.  Several movie players seem to support subtitles, but not QuickTime, at least from my experiments.  So I re-acquired VLC, a cross-platform open source media player that handles a wide array of video and audio formats.  Opening the movie file with VLC, the Finnish subtitles automatically appear, as I watch one of my children’s favorite childhood movies.

Now I can imagine developing my skills in this language (after mastering the vowels) by watching familiar movies and TV shows and making myself read the captions — or finding a Finnish film and applying English subtitles.  But I suspect that language teachers can come up with some creative ways to use this.

What do you think?

Powered by ScribeFire.

This continues to be an amazing trip — if only because I left home last Friday and have yet to get on an airplane.  I love it.  Yesterday, I was lucky enough to catch the Acela high speed train back from Boston to NYC, arriving at 8:00.  The hotel is on a fairly shady street, so I stuck to my room last night, forgetting to e-mail my brother with a breakfast restaurant suggestion.  A little surprised that a New Yorker would ask a North Carolinian for restaurant suggestions in NYC.  I’d caught sight of a dinner on my walk up from Penn Station, but couldn’t remember the name this morning.

The Tick Tock Dinner, as seen from Google Street View.

So, and this is a first for me, I pulled up Google Maps, found Penn Station.  Then I switched to “Street View,” retracing my walk, and there it was/is the Tick Tock Dinner, just beneath the Hotel New Yorker.  It’s OK.  I’m not ashamed of being old enough that this stuff still AMAZES me.

It was an excellent day at Nobles and Greenough School yesterday for their Emerging Technologies Conference.  I was a little intimidated by the fact that their last two keynotes were Alan November and Will Richardson.  But the day went off well, made new friends, and was very pleased to witness Liz Davis’ first large audience presentation/keynote, which she did with Tom Daccord — obviously seasoned at this sort of thing.  She was at ease, funny, highly expressive (which is important on a stage), and passionate.  She did GREAT. 

However — and the point of this blog — during my afternoon session about on-demand, in-time, on-going, and casual professional development, a young man, from the predominantly private school audience, politely interrupted to ask,

“In our efforts to improve the community’s image of teaching as a profession, does it benefit us to openly utilize this social information environment, which is not formally published, is un-vetted, in unrespected in some communities.” (a liberal paraphrasing of the question)

There was a lot that I could spout from the Web20 koolaid.  But what’s tricky is that we all have our own vision of the profession and makes it a profession — and it isn’t right for me to intrude on his vision with my own.

So what does this messy new information landscape that I’m suggesting we make significant use of, do to the profession?  Please comment!

But here’s a paraphrasing my answer — or what I was trying to convey.

“I believe that the professional educator, today, must engage in this open and global conversation.  We should blog (or whatever), reflecting on our experiences and our profession. We should actively and generously share what we’re learning, contribute to the conversation and the the growing body of knowledge, and we should invite other stakeholders into the conversation where appropriate.  Our professional and personal image should become dependent on the quality of our communications, the logic and validity of our ideas, the threads of connection with the ideas of others, and our knowledge built from success and failure.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan

This is one of those posts where I might have gotten a bit carried away.  But that title about jail comes from one of the comments I got when I posted some quotes from Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, on Twitter and Facebook yesterday.  The national education leader visited two Denver schools on Tuesday, and to an apparently unsympathetic room of about 400 middle and high school students,

Duncan said American schools should be open six days a week, at least 11 months a year, to improve student performance. (Gandy)

According to the 9News.com a story, entitled “Education Secretary says kids need more school,” Duncan said to the teenagers,

You’re competing for jobs with kids from India and China. I think schools should be open six, seven days a week; 11, 12 months a year.

I do not know enough about the school (Bruce Randolph) that Duncan seems to be holding up as a model for the nation, for an opinion.  But the two statements, attributed to the education leader, not only make my blood boil — but they are simply “Dead Wrong!”

Arnie Duncan was nominated to the Secretary of Education post by President Barack Obama in mid-December last year, and smarter men than me immediately called foul (See Gary Stager’s “What Do Arne Duncan & Paul Bremer Have in Common?).  I wanted to give Duncan the benefit of the doubt, but all doubt’s gone now.  We’ve gotten no where and we’re going nowwhere, especially if we are going to extend the sentencing of our children.

One commenter of my Facebook posts said,

..the competition we have vs. India and China (2 Million …  Read MoreMinutes) is an impossible task to overcome. Those are the best of the best compared to our better kids.

I would extend this mismatch to suggest that it isn’t simply that we’re comparing their best apples to our better apples.  First of all, you’re not going to win the blue ribbon at the county fair by leaving your apple pie in the oven longer.  And secondly, why not grow oranges instead.  Doesn’t a global market place need diversity of talents and skills — not everyone trying to best each other on the same narrow array of standards.

Isn’t this what we’re doing to our children?

But we’re not talking about fruit are we?  We’re talking about our children. ..and let’s face it, we’re talking about nothing less than institutionalizing “child labor” to satisfy a failed belief that higher standardized test scores will reliably lead to a stronger economy, more prosperous citizens, and a vibrant democracy.  What it leads to is boredom, ca lapsing morale among our best teachers, children without passion, children dropping out, and a growing and prospering testing industry.

I was so incredibly lucky to have gone to school when I did.  Even though I did poorly on tests, was not conscientious about homework, blah blah blah (we didn’t diagnose leaning disabilities (diversities) back then). I had wise teachers who said, “He’s bright and he can learn anything he wants to learn.”  My parents didn’t worry.

My son, who’s not A.D.D., still performed poorly, because he was bored.  He didn’t care.  He wasn’t drinking the kool aid.  He spent his time and attention with his music.  I remember when a middle school math teacher refused to sign off on his enrolling in more advanced math classes in high school.  She urged us to keep him out of math.  The cynic in me is convinced that continued poor math performance wouldn’t have been good for the school.

We put him in Math and he performed poorly — until he approached his senior year and realized that his grades would prevent him from earning that music scholarship he need for his music school of choice.  So during his senior year, he out-performed, in calculus, classmates who’d already been accepted at MIT.

Now if you think that the moral of this story is “making kids want to do well in Math will result in better performance,” then you’re wrong.  The moral of the story is that if my son finally wants a job, where he needs to know Calculus — then he’ll learn calculus.  You see,

Anyone who can master something that he or she is passionate about,

Bring passion back into education — and kick out the standards!

..and while you’re at it, kick the amateurs out too!

Gandy. Sara. “Education Secretary says kids need more school ,” 9News.Com 8 Apr 2009. 9 Apr 2009 <http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=113300>.

Powered by ScribeFire.

At this moment, I’m sitting at the Burlington Airport, having a burger in the restaurant filling time before my 7:00 PM flight to Washington.  Then is a short wait for the final leg to Raleigh and a full Saturday at home.

It was an excellent day in Burlington, working with educators from the Northwest region of the state.  Vermont is an interesting place with very interesting people, and the workshop ended out being a lot of conversation and sharing of ideas. It was one of those days I wish somebody had recorded — everything.

One of the best stories I heard was told by a school librarian, Kathy Gallagher.  Her daughter is a senior in high school and is currently shopping for colleges.  Kathy said that all of the schools her daughter is considering have their own Facebook groups — except for one, a fairly small liberal arts school.  …So her daughter set up the the group for the school.  She said, “In just a couple of days, the group grew to over 300.”

This was very impressive — to all of us.  But hoping to learn more, I asked, “So why did she set up the group?” 

Gallagher looked at me, as if I had completely missed the point.  I had completely missed the point.  She said that her daughter was visiting the Facebook groups to get answers to questions about student life at the schools from the perspective of students.  She wanted to ask the same questions about the small liberal arts school, so she created the community for the school, grew the community, and then had over 300 sources for answers to her questions.

This was, hands down, one of the most interesting and resourceful strategies for finding information on the Internet that I have ever heard.  It has as muct to do with working the environment as it does with using Google.