I started this post sitting in a waiting room at the auto shop waiting for my car: No WiFi, pay-for coffee and snacks available. It had an outlet if my laptop battery didn’t hold out, comfortable seats and, if I was interested, a tv to make the experience a little more comfortable. But I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I am a fan of Alan November and I just downloaded, to my iTunes, his November Learning Podcast Series. With ear plugs in and a word doc open, (I would have preferred Google docs), I began listening to Alan November interview Dan Pink.

A little history here…
My first classroom blogging experience was inspired by an Alan November webcast that launched me into my web2.0 experiences… (My teaching2.0? What do you call this transformation?
…And a question on the side…
What do you call a digital ‘immigrant’ that is fully immersed in a digital world? I am an immigrant to Canada, but truly consider myself a Canadian, though I will never be a ‘native’. Perhaps I am a Digital Citizen, or more aptly a Digital Denizen!

den•i•zen noun formal or humorous an inhabitant or occupant of a particular place : denizens of field and forest. • Brit., historical a foreigner allowed certain rights in the adopted country.

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Here are the highlights of the interviews with my two-dimes worth added in!

Interview 1: With Dan Pink

Pink Re: Standardized Testing as a measure of a school. “What ultimately I care about is the individual kids, that’s what parents care about and obviously that what the kids themselves care about… if I had a magic wand I would do a very serious, very radical overhaul of the entire education system”.

We have to be willing to measure these: (From Wikipedia on Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind )

1. Design – Moving beyond function to engage the sense.
2. Story – Narrative added to products and services – not just argument.
3. Symphony – Adding invention and big picture thinking (not just detail focus).
4. Empathy – Going beyond logic and engaging emotion and intuition.
5. Play – Bringing humor and light-heartedness to business and products.
6. Meaning – Immaterial feelings and values of products.

As long as we measure schools and measure students with tests that do not appreciate and include measuring a student’s ability to express these senses, we are measuring the wrong things.

I have an idea: First we will measure a poem with a word count… Then we will measure compassion with a ruler… And finally we will measure the making of a work of art with a stop watch. Then we will add the numbers together and tell you how well your child is doing in school.

From a previous post , “there is a dichotomy here: Our ‘educational language’ around standardization and accountability juxtaposed with differentiation and flexibility… we seem to have two mutually exclusive camps, yet there seems to be a move to embrace both. To embrace both is to accomplish neither.”

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Interview 2: Dan Pink

School architects use a 35-year-old formula, with teachers left out of the conversation… “Appalling that a Starbucks is a more appealing place to be than a classroom.

It doesn’t have to be more expensive, just smarter. If you built cabinets and shelving units for picture-tube tv’s or carrying cases for Sony Walkman’s and you didn’t adapt your designs, where would you be now?

Pink: People are opting out of the public/formal education system… “Our education establishment, which we pay lip service to as the most important element of our society, are probably the most out of sync with the realities of 21 century life than any other institution in American society.

‘This is important! We need to change… pass the chalk’.

November: Emerging models – Schools… “should be much more embedded in the community, where kids are adding value and making a difference, much more action based.”

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Interview 3: Dan Pink
(The last podcast (#2) ended a discussion about Design: Creating things in context, ideally cross-curricular. This theme continued here.)

Pink: The two most important things in professional success & personal fulfillment are “intrinsic motivation & persistence.”

I wonder how much schools pay attention to these two things? Even when we praise, we don’t inspire intrinsic motivation, and although in some ways we promote persistence, we also give students a grade of ‘C’ and move on.

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Interview: Dr. Mitchel Resnick (MIT)
Topics: Creativity and Innovation to the Digital Divide
Research group name: Lifelong Kindergarten Group (kindergarten-like exploration and play)

Many of the best learning opportunities come when people are engaged in creating and designing things.

Check out http://scratch.mit.edu/ (I’ve been here a few times, but need to explore the possibilities)

Sharing… building on other’s ideas… ‘borrowing’ not copying. Give proper credit and acknowledgement and then adapt and go further, and then putting your ideas out there for others to add to.

This reminds me of the Larry Lessig’s TED Video I recently watched on ‘(Re)-creativity’.

If you give credit, it isn’t ‘appropriates’ but rather ‘appropriate’!

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Reinforcing the thoughts of Resnick I recently found this post on the blog of none other than Dan Pink:

Re: a pop artists exhibit , “The show celebrates the fizzy remixing typical of Pop Art and is replete with “cut up magazines, copied comic books, . . trademarked cartoon characters like Minnie Mouse… But in a bizarre move, the curators have banned photographs — not to protect the physical integrity of the works, but to avoid infringing on the copyright of the creators.”

The irony is not lost on me.

Originally posted: November 20th, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: My italicized comments in this post are seeping with sarcasm… which I note and reflect on in my next post. In truth, I’m not a huge fan of podcasts, primarily because I am a very visual learner and also because I have not had a commute longer than 3.5km in the last 9 years. I’m either in the car with others or I’m in the car for 5-7 minutes. So, usually when I’m trying to listen to a podcast is when I have my computer in front of me, (in which case I tend to start reading something else and the podcast becomes background noise). Listening to these podcasts with a word document open for note-taking made them worthwhile to listen to since I could ‘see’ what I was learning from listening.

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From:David
Sent:May 10, 2004 9:55 PM
To: [Our Math Learning Team, my principal, and a few other people whose opions I value]
Subject: School Goal(s)

Hey,
I’ve been bouncing these ideas around and would like to get your slant.

The BIG IDEA
One overall school goal of”Articulate Thinking”

Building the skills necessary to develop articulate students who can express their thoughts in meaningful, articulate ways.

The Philosophical Bent
I don’t really care if my daughters, upon graduation, can identify the subordinate clause in a sentence or if they can tell me how to find the volume of a cone… I do care that they can express themselves in thoughtful, meaningful ways and demonstrate social responsibility in their decision making.

The GOAL(s)
1 main goal that we always focus on… especially with regards to our all-writes/ or our testing,
3 sub goals, but we only focus on one per year… across the curriculum!

Main Goal: Social Responsibility
Sub goals:
Year 1 – Structure of writing – Form, grammar, etc.
Year 2 – Verbal – speeches, presentations etc.
Year 3 – Visual/Spacial – charts, data, displaying information, etc.
(It could work that we divide this into terms and do all 3 per year, but I think 1 per year lets us keep it simple and focussed!)

The Buy In
So, how do we focus on one per year… across the curriculum? And how do we get ALL teachers involved?
In every class, we make a commitment to challenge students with a critical thinking challenge monthly or bimonthly. The topic of the challenge is course specific and preferably integrated with other subjects.
Examples
CAPP: Casa Guatemala, Multiculturalism, Bullying etc.
Social Studies: Current Issues, Religions etc.
Math: Problem Solving with real life application, Dream house, Planning a party, etc.
Science: E3 – Environment, Experiments, Ethics
Explorations: (examples)
Tech-Ed: Build a birdhouse that fits these minimum requirements… but these are the sizes of wood you are limited to…
Computers: Use [insert program here] to present the following information in a meaningful way
Home Ec.: These are the sizes of the individual pieces of material you will need for this sewing project…
place them on this 1m x 1m piece of material so that you waste the least amount of material.
*Key idea… focus on critical challenges that force students to express and justify their ideas.
We have the opportunity to build and sequence these during pro-d!

How the Sub Goals work
Year 1 – Structure of writing – All of the challenges above have a written component and EVERY teacher has a part of their marking rubric factor in Form/Convention/Grammar … Structure of writing.
Year 2 – Verbal – All of the challenges above have a presentation component and EVERY teacher has a part of their marking rubric factor in verbal communication of ideas.
Year 3 – Visual/Spacial – All of the challenges above contain data collection and/or graphing etc., and EVERY teacher has a part of their marking rubric factor in visual representation of the information/ material.

This is not done for every project, but in each class, one of these assignments is expected every 2-3 months.

Back to the BIG GOAL
***The sub goals allow us to micro-teach the necessary skills needed to improve how we express ideas in written form, in our verbal communication and our ability to visually display information… skills that allow us to express our thoughts in articulate ways.
The main goal… Social Responsibility.. is where we collect our data to see how we are progressing… to give us feedback on how well students are doing, (and for that matter how well we are doing at teaching them these skills across the curriculum).
Once a term, or twice a year, we test kids using a critical question based on Social Responsibility topics. These would still be taught in CAPP and Advisory, and hopefully also taught in other areas… looking at the environment in Science, waste reduction in Tech Ed and Home Ec. etc.

How students are expected to respond to the critical question would depend on what year/sub goal we are focusing on:
Year 1 – Structure of writing – Essays
Example: Moral dilemmas
Year 2 – Verbal – speeches, presentations, etc.
Example: Speech on Bullying; Develop an Anti-smoking ad campaign… You must ‘sell’ this idea to your class.
Year 3 – Visual/Spacial – charts, data, displaying information, etc.
Example: Develop a 10 question survey on peer pressure and display your findings in a meaningful way.

Well there you go!
I’d like to hear what you think,

Dave

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Gary wrote:

Ahh, what do you want me to say? It sounds like it could be a unifying concept that the school could rally around. Kind of like Joey’s old EBS, but with an academic slant.

I might argue that these goals are already taught by your Language Art teachers, so the main benefit is that everyone is working towards the same outcome. To that point, the LA teachers touch on those skills every year. The main problem, as I see it, isn’t that we aren’t doing a good job teaching these skills, it is that we have 5 – 20 % of the kids who don’t get it. These are the kids that we need to focus our goals on – these are the ones where academic interventions are required. If we add more teachers teaching a concept, the real question is to what extent are we going to improve the ability of the 5 – 20 %ers? If we aren’t going to improve their skills, then don’t set the goals.

In saying that, perhaps all of our students need to be more articulate thinkers? If so, than this is a well thought out plan!

Good luck,
Gary

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David wrote:

It often comes down to that 5-20% doesn’t it?
I wonder what we are doing now that isn’t working with that group? Is there some school somewhere that handles this group well?
I’m not sure I challenge this group in a way that gets the most out of them, but then I spend too much time on giving them info (not a lot of time on the 3 higher levels of blooms taxonomy). If we challenged kids to think about ‘no right answer’ kinds of questions in every class, maybe we would be challenging and hopefully exciting some of these kids… maybe this is wishful thinking.

I can’t help but wonder what is wrong with the structure of education that limits us from connecting with these kids???? If you built your own school what would be different?

Maybe a good discussion for our book club… not ‘perfect world’ education, but given the resources we have, what would we do differently if we had the budget of a current school and carte blanche permission to make the school look and operate any way we felt?

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Gary wrote:

Well Dave…

One must first challenge some age old assumptions. Our system is built on the belief that “every kid can learn.” Second, we believe that every teacher can teach every child. Thirdly, we assume that every child should be “with their appropriate age grouping.”

If we want to unlock the potential of our students, these assumptions must be examined.

Can every child learn? Developmental psychologist will answer by saying “maybe.” Developmentally, many of our students, especially at the middle level, are stunted in their thinking. They lack the ability to “integrate” the sensory world. They lack the ability to temper dual thoughts. They even lack the adaptive process that we assume all people possess. So their answer to that question is “maybe.” For students to learn, Gordon Neufeld says they must be ready.

Can every teacher teach every child? Come on, we all know that we can’t be all things to everyone. Even good teachers will eventually meet their match.

Finally, should every child be with their appropriate age? I’m of the opinion that the greatest thing in our kids lives is their peers. So much so, that peer pressure is ruining their lives. Students don’t come to school to learn, they come to school to meet their friends. A true cart before the horse analogy. Again, Neufeld would suggest that this very notion of peer influence is what is causing some kids to be unable to learn. He believes peers stunt our growth and block us from learning.

So, the solution?

I will put a computer in every students hand. I would keep students in “similar age groupings”, but I wouldn’t guarantee their same age grouping. I would differentiate all learning, but I would try to cluster learning objectives so that teachers can continue to play a crucial role in learning and still be the main facilitator for learning. The computer, in its ideal form, is the tool that allows us to individualize student work. It will allow us to communicate in real time, learn in real time, and assess in real time. It will be the lever to better learning. Teachers, however, will need to be better than ever before. They will be the fuel for the flame.

My middle school would thus have grade 6 – 8 classes. Some students would remain in the class for only a year before going on to grade 9. Others might stay for four years. Teams of teachers would still work together to deliver the curriculum, but the interaction and model would be much different than today. Some genius will lay out the curriculum into standards and objectives that are clear and easy to follow. Teachers will bring the objectives to life, and technology will allow students to demonstrate their learning in ways unimaginable only a few short years ago. Problem based learning and rich task learning will be for the masses. For our 5 – 20 %, reading recovery, math recovery, writing recovery will be their focus. We won’t be ashamed to actually help people progress.

Finally, students will come to school to learn.

Is it possible?

G

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My thoughts on this conversation:

It was great to re-read this and see where my thinking was 3 years ago… it was before I saw the value of technology in education, and yet it wasn’t very long ago!

I thought this was pretty insightful of Gary, “Teachers will bring the objectives to life, and technology will allow students to demonstrate their learning in ways unimaginable only a few short years ago. Problem based learning and rich task learning will be for the masses.”

This idea of many students not fitting into school, or rather schools not fitting many students, has been a something I have considered a lot… especially in my Square Peg, Round Hole post. The concept of being socially responsible applies equally if not more so in this technological age, (note: my Blogging Rules).

“One overall school goal of ‘Articulate Thinking’. Building the skills necessary to develop articulate students who can express their thoughts in meaningful, articulate ways.” This might have been a lofty goal three years ago, but after reading Thomas Friedman’s (original version of) The World Is Flat 3.0 and watching David Warlick, maybe it is time that education focussed on, as Gary suggests ‘differentiating all learning’. It is the side trips of learning that students enjoy. Maybe when we are better at meeting students needs, they will have the motivation to meaningfully participate… and therefore be more compelled to be the ‘Articulate Thinkers’ they need to be in the 21st Century!

Originally posted: January 29th, 2007 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: As you can see, when I originally posted this -almost-three-year-old- correspondence, I already reflected on it. So now I’ll put the question out there: ‘Given the resources we have, what would we do differently if we had the budget of a current school and carte blanche permission to make the school look and operate any way we felt?’

In a comment I posted on Wesley’s blog, I pay this compliment, “A great summary that SYNTHESIZES and ADDS MEANING.” Then I suggest, “I would add those two to your sentence: “It’s not just about SEARCHING, it’s about FINDING and VALIDATING.”
…and that is exactly what Wesley has done with his post, he synthesizes what the article says, but he goes further… he draws from other sources, and new meaning is added. For example, Wesley disagrees (as do I) with the article’s suggestion of greater rigor and standardized testing. He links us to his podcast #79 titled, ‘Reject Rigor: Embrace Differentiation, Flexibility, and High Expectations’.

But there is a dichotomy here: Our ‘educational language’ around standardization and accountability juxtaposed with differentiation and flexibility… we seem to have two mutually exclusive camps, yet there seems to be a move to embrace both. To embrace both is to accomplish neither.

As this post quickly becomes a tribute to Wesley Fryer, (the newest addition to my Netvibes feed-reader), I think I will quote him one more time. From: ‘Apprenticeship learning and critical thinking‘

“Learners are not in school so they can take tests, be tested, and be translated metaphorically into statistics that are aggregated into charts and graphs used by politicians to secure their elective offices. Learners are in school to LEARN, and the confusion which abounds regarding the proper role of assessments today is a key part of educational reforms our nation desperately needs.”

“We do NOT need more testing, more rigorous testing, and/or more end-of-course examinations in our schools. Testing has never “saved” and will never “save us” from the challenges which face us in the educational environment. Only high quality, professional, caring, passionate teachers can provide what our students deserve and in many cases desperately need: A differentiated, challenging environment of customized learning that involves regular dialog and authentic assessment…”

The challenge now is recognizing that this fundamentally changes a teacher’s practice… we are on a new road, but I don’t see a roadmap being developed. I think we lack the perspective to make the map. Current assessment strategies limit our vision. Current subject-disciplines also limit possibilities and compartmentalize assessment using a different paradigm than is needed.

We need to be adept at creating flexible, differentiated learning environments

We need to be computer literate, and also be able to teach a new kind of literacy. (Warlick)

We need to challenge students by asking questions, guiding their learning, and helping them to develop their own personal learning environments.

We need to teach students to synthesize information and add new meaning.

We must change what we do. (And we need visionary leaders to lead the way!)

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Having said what we need to do… I am contemplating ‘What we are” (as teachers). I think my next post will be a tribute to teachers, but not the kind you would expect after a post like this…

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I’m back, not even an hour after posting this! Several times I came across the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, first here and here on Wesley’s blog, then back on Netvibes where I picked up Cool Cat Teacher‘s del.icio.us post… which led me to an article by none other than Wesley Fryer once again!

Well, third time’s a charm. It clicked that my use of ‘Add new Meaning’ in this post was an attempt to describe the CREATION of new knowledge as seen on the revised taxonomy above. I am wondering what happened to Synthesis? Is this part of Evaluation?

In a final dedication to Wesley Fryer, I will end with this quote from the TechLearning article:

“We need visionary educational leadership that understands and effectively communicates the importance of emphasizing student CREATIVITY and the creation of original (and remixed) knowledge products.”

Thanks Wesley!

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Sunday March 11th, 2007

This is great: Cognitive Taxonomy Circle

I found this at Jeff Utecht’s U Tech Tips, his source is this American Psychological Association blog post.

Originally posted: December 26th, 2006 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: I’ve added the comments on my original post into the first comment below. This introduction to the *new* Blooms Taxonomy was sort of a re-awakening for me. A reminder of what really matters in teaching and learning. It was around this time that I started to take a much more constructivist approach to teaching. I was already developing this in Math, but wasn’t really aware that I was doing so. If you scroll down on the first page of my SciencAlive wiki, you can see that I based the project on students’ ability to demonstrate higher order thinking. I have very recently been thinking that the *old* Blooms Taxonomy is better, with ‘Create’ being the ‘task’ or ‘demonstration’ of learning, but keeping Synthesis and Evaluation as the ‘skills’.

A composition of other people’s thoughts and ideas… with a theme.

How to Bring our Schools Out of the 20th Century by Claudia Wallis, Sonja Steptoe, Time Magazine cover story Dec. 18, 2006

“For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the “achievement gap” between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation. This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get “left behind” but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can’t think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.”

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An Alien in an Alien World by David Warlick,

“I wonder how many natural mathematicians, engineers, artists, composers, story tellers and innovators we are wasting, when we measure our schools almost exclusively on their ability to produce good test takers.

How many natural born leaders are we squandering as we teach them to listen, watch, follow direction, regurgitate facts, to sit down and shut up. How many leaders are we losing when we teach them to be taught — in stead of teaching them to teach.

How alien are our classrooms?”

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Do schools today kill creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it.

“Truthfully what happens is that, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waste up. And then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side…”

“My contention is that all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.”

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The eternal question… Why? by Kris, a 15 year old I had the pleasure of teaching.

Here it is from a student who will be a lifelong learner, dare I say… despite her schooling. She is the one that sent me the time article above, which got me thinking about compiling this post.

“To the adult readers out there: this is how public education is contributing to your child’s success. We list the qualities we have in one column, the qualities we don’t in another, and write about how the qualities we have will make us nice, successful white collar workers someday, coupled with a post-secondary education and a Graduation Portfolio with bureacratically-documented evidence (signed in triplicate) of us kissing the toes of their shiny black shoes.

Of course, like every student who hopes of one day becoming a successful, white collar worker, the answer I intend to put down is a lot less sarcastic and a lot more Ministry-friendly. There is satisfaction in lashing out at public education on a blog, and there is self-preservation in doing exactly what they tell you on the work you hand in. I have a hunch the Ministry won’t like it, but I still wonder, as I hope others will: “Why?”

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Adopt and Adept by Marc Prensky

“…technology adoption… It’s typically a four-step process:

1. Dabbling.
2. Doing old things in old ways.
3. Doing old things in new ways.
4. Doing new things in new ways.

…Some people will no doubt worry that, with all this experimentation, our children’s education will be hurt. “When will we have time for the curriculum,” they will ask, “and for all the standardized testing being mandated?” If we really offered our children some great future-oriented content (such as, for example, that they could learn about nanotechnology, bioethics, genetic medicine, and neuroscience in neat interactive ways from real experts), and they could develop their skills in programming, knowledge filtering, using their connectivity, and maximizing their hardware, and that they could do so with cutting-edge, powerful, miniaturized, customizable, and one-to-one technology, I bet they would complete the “standard” curriculum in half the time it now takes, with high test scores all around. To get everyone to the good stuff, the faster kids would work with and pull up the ones who were behind.

In other words, if we truly offer our kids an Edutopia worth having, I believe our students will work as hard as they can to get there.

So, let’s not just adopt technology into our schools. Let’s adapt it, push it, pull it, iterate with it, experiment with it, test it, and redo it, until we reach the point where we and our kids truly feel we’ve done our very best. Then, let’s push it and pull it some more. And let’s do it quickly, so the twenty-second century doesn’t catch us by surprise with too much of our work undone.

A big effort? Absolutely. But our kids deserve no less.”

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Animal School- by R.Z. Greenwald… Curriculum: Running, Flying, Climbing, and Swimming

(Click this button in the link provided to view this movie/slideshow)

Schools do not make accommodations for individual talents and learning styles. A slide show of a story I read a long time ago… still priceless!

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Creativity Killer: Discouraging creativity in children, © Leslie Owen Wilson, 1997, 2004

“It is perhaps ironic that within our culture we insist that we place such value on creativity and then blatantly try to steal it away from children in the contexts of their educational experiences and their upbringing. As a culture we need to finally decide what we really want for our children and then carefully design and monitor experiences which provide those things we value.”

This has links to 3 versions of The Little Boy by Helen Buckley.

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Why does engineering/math/science education in the US suck? by Kathy Sierra

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Where do we go from here? We can keep looking at Kathy Sierra for the answer!

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I started this blog with a post titled, The purpose of a system is what it does, and I started this post with a ‘Time’ (or perhaps ‘Timeless’) article that states in the second paragraph,

“American schools aren’t exactly frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel like throwbacks. Kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did: sitting in rows, listening to teachers lecture, scribbling notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed. A yawning chasm (with an emphasis on yawning) separates the world inside the schoolhouse from the world outside.”

Incremental changes will not take us where we need to be. Standardized testing, outdated curriculum and unwired classrooms won’t get us there. Teachers using a white Smart Board to simply replace the green chalk board, which replaced the blackboard, won’t get us there.

What profound change is needed? I don’t think one teacher at a time can do it. What is going to get us over the Big Frickin’ Wall?

Note my “Articulate Thinkers” post, Jan. 29/07, based on an e-mail ‘conversation’ I had almost three years ago…

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Dec. 18. It has been a while since I looked at Christopher D. Sessums’ Weblog. He just added me to his friends list here on eduspaces and I visited his blog again. I found his post with this apple commercial… which pays tribute to the misfits/the crazies/ the ‘Round Pegs in the Square Holes’.

It reminded me of the main reason I wrote this post, which I alluded to, but didn’t really mention. Many of the Square/Round Peg Students (that don’t fit into our other-shaped schools) are the future thinkers/dreamers/innovators that are going to meaningfully change our world. We need to recognize their future value… We have an obligation to nurture them, and to develop their enthusiasm for learning. It isn’t just about not stifling creativity or not making schools so alien… it is about creating an environment where every child can thrive… Not making the misfits fit, but rather helping them create a space that fits them. [I think that the technology is now available to make this easier!]

Jan. 8th. Kris directs me to this Story from the Front-Lines. (A teacher’s frustration with pegs and holes.)

And I’m demoralized, as I’m now having to tell kids, “A paragraph is an idea – unless your teacher tells you it’s five to seven sentences, and then that’s what it is.”

Jan. 16th. I found this in the inaugural post of madamespider, yet another example of a student’s frustration…

“Let me just say this: I hate school with a passion. You’ll never find someone who loves education more than I do, don’t get me wrong, but as far as I’m concerned, school is not education. I believe one should learn because they want to and understand the value of knowledge, not have it shoved down their throats by the school board or government or whoever.”

…and here again, in reaction to this post, is madamespider,

“Looking back on the talks and ’specialists’ they tried to send me to within the school, I now realize that they were treating me as if I had a behavior problem or learning disability. Like I needed their support to do better. That’s not what I needed. I needed something to make it matter to me. That’s what I still need.”

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Feb. 3rd, 07 Here is a quote from Bruce Springsteen,

“I wasn’t quite suited for the educational system. One problem with the way the educational system is set up is that it only recognizes a certain type of intelligence, and it’s incredibly restrictive — very, very restrictive. There’s so many types of intelligence, and people who would be at their best outside of that structure [get lost]. Most of the schools, they’re aiming to build you up and get you into the machine.”

I found this on ‘The Genius in All of Us‘ blog by David Shenk… this is an interesting blog to explore further!

Originally posted: December 10th, 2006 Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting: Here are a couple of the comments from the original post: I really appreciate the feedback, and I’ve responded to all this on my blog. It’s rather lengthy, but it’s basically my perspective on the whole matter of my schooling. Hopefully it will yield something worth thinking about, though it’s rather disorganized. I’ll certainly revisit the subject, I’ve got a lot to say =) madamespider on Wednesday, 17 January 2007, 02:21 Great work Dave. It’s going to take me a week to get through all these links! Maybe you could wiki this for those of us who only have snippets of time to look at things. Awesome dude (quote from a 15 year old as we watched a student video creation. Thought that line was dead!) Kelly Christopherson on Friday, 25 May 2007, 08:23 - – - This post was very instrumental to my thinking and it was inspired by a former student, Kris. Later, I helped inspire one of her posts and it got a little bit of attention: How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci was a finalist in the 2007 Edublog Awards in the Most Influential category. Now I am helping her by hosting her blog, and she is helping me with some tech support… the teacher/student lines are blurred. It is no longer about established roles, but rather it is about learners helping each other… hubs in a learning network. Many times I thought I would create a sequel to this post, or take Kelly’s advice and start a wiki. However now it seems so obviously pessimistic to do so. This post says it all… I don’t need to wallow in yet more examples of how schools don’t fit students. As I said above, “it is about creating an environment where every child can thrive.” For that to happen we need differentiated instruction, we need a flexible curriculum, and we need teachers that are the same life-long learners we hope our students become.