From ‘yes, but’ to ‘how can we?’ and ‘why not?’
Great issue in Sunday’s New York Times magazine on innovation:
When we ignore how innovation actually works, we make it hard to see what’s happening right in front of us today. If you don’t know that the incandescent light was a failure before it was a success, it’s easy to write off some modern energy innovations — like solar panels — because they haven’t hit the big time fast enough.
Worse, the fairy-tale view of history implies that innovation has an end. It doesn’t. What we want and what we need keeps changing. The incandescent light was a 19th-century failure and a 20th- century success. Now it’s a failure again, edged out by new technologies, like LEDs, that were, themselves, failures for many years.
So much of that can be applied to education reform …
Noam Chomsky on Democracy and Education in the 21st Century and Beyond
“But the more you can get the graduate students, temporary workers, two-tier payment, the more people you have under control – and all of that’s been going on. And now it’s institutionalized with No Child Left Behind/Race to the Top; teach to the test – worst possible way of teaching. But it is a disciplinary technique. Schools are designed to teach the test. You don’t have to worry about students thinking for themselves, challenging, raising questions. And you see it down to the lowest level of detail. I give a lot of talks in communities and places where people are concerned about education and I’ve had teachers come up to me and say afterwards, you know, I teach sixth grade. A little girl came up after class and said she was interested in something that came up in class, and wanted to know how to look into it. And I tell her, you can’t do it; you got to study for the test. Your future depends on it; my salary depends on it.
And that’s happening all over. And it has the obvious technique of dumbing down the population, and also controlling them. And it’s bipartisan. The Obama administration is pushing it. Also, an effort to kill the schools – the charter school movement vouchers, all this kind of stuff is nothing but an effort to destroy the public education system. It claims that it gives the parents choices, but that’s ridiculous.
Fascinating interview with Linda Stone on maintaining focus in a maddeningly distractive world. An excerpt related to schools:
I interviewed a handful of Nobel laureates about their childhood play patterns. They talked about how they expressed their curiosity through experimentation. They enthusiastically described things they built, and how one play experience naturally led into another. In most cases, by the end of the interview, the scientist would say, “This is exactly what I do in my lab today! I’m still playing!”
An unintended and tragic consequence of our metrics for schools is that what we measure causes us to remove self-directed play from the school day. Children’s lives are completely programmed, filled with homework, lessons, and other activities. There is less and less space for the kind of self-directed play that can be a fantastically fertile way for us to develop resilience and a broad set of attention strategies, not to mention a sense of who we are, and what questions captivate us. We have narrowed ourselves in service to the gods of productivity, a type of productivity that is about output and not about results.
In Oregon:
A man brought a pressure cooker he claimed was a bomb into the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission office and told employees he tried to blow up their sign because it was misspelled on Wednesday morning.
“He walked quite confidently into our office as though he had a mission, and I think that was what alarmed me right off the bat,” Executive Director Vickie Chamberlain said.
The man, dressed in a button-up winter coat and stocking cap, placed the pressure cooker with wires sticking out on the counter in front of the receptionist around 9 a.m.
Leonard Burdek, 50, of Salem, told Chamberlain and the receptionist that he tried to blow up the agency’s outside sign, but the bomb didn’t work.
The sign spells out the agency’s name in blue letters and sits at the end of its parking lot at 250 Division Street NE. One side is missing the letter “D” in the word “and” so it reads: “Teacher Standards an Practices Commission.”
She didn’t know what happened to the sign, but Chamberlain said it’s possible that someone scraped the letter off or it wore off over time.
After discussing his failed attempt to detonate his bomb, the man complained that the instructions he downloaded to make the bomb also had misspellings.
Burdek implied that Chamberlain and her employees should be concerned about the level of education children receive given that his instructions were rife with errors.
