Mr. Smith hired Charlie's wallpapering company to do the first floor of his house. They offered a good price, and seemed reputable. But when the workman showed up to start, Mr. Smith was astonished to see that the man had no arms. Not wanting to be inconsiderate, Mr. Smith let him in, and allowed him to set to work. 'Perhaps he will have amazing abilities that my ignorant mind just can't imagine!' Mr. Smith thought. So he left the man to his work and hoped for the best.
However, when he got home, his house was a mess. Not one piece of wallpaper was hung, and tools and wallpaper paste were strewn all over the floor.
Mr. Smith was furious, and called Charlie's Wallpaper Service to complain. However, when he got Charlie on the phone, he was disappointed with the reply.
"If you got a problem with one of my guys, take it up with him. It's not my problem." Charlie said, his gruff voice thick with cigar smoke.
"But he's your employee," Mr. Smith replied, "I'm paying your company for a service, and you've sent me someone who clearly isn't capable of doing the job."
"Yeah? So?" Charlie replied, obviously implacable. "You got a problem, you deal with it. Company Policy"
Mr. Smith let the phone drop into the cradle, stunned at what he had just heard.
"What have I gotten myself into?" Mr. Smith said to himself, surveying the ruins of his house.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Sunday, October 23, 2011
"Solutionaries"
Zoe Wiel's idea is an interesting one. It seems as though she's proposing an inversion of how we approach school in general, and I like that. Put the Big Ideas out at the forefront, and give the students something real to work toward. Let the skills that you'd need to accomplish your goal be taught as needed, and have the students learn what they need to learn by putting those skills to use toward some useful end. It reminds me a lot of what Alan November had to say in his Tedx talk (here). Instead of endless drilling of basics in the classic style of 'Empty Vessel' insertion of knowledge, put the kids to the test and let them learn by doing.
What occurs to me in this discussion is something that I have observed in my years of working with young people, and that is this: kids can smell contrived material a mile away, and nobody, however young or old they may be, likes to be talked to like they're some stupid kid. In fact, this also reminds me of a quote from the student's comment about the New Tech high school:
"I like doing projects in the New Tech High School, but for some projects I feel as if they are making up pointless projects where I really don't learn anything." - Chris Lehman, responding to this article.
Chris's comment really hits home, I think. We don't want to drum up contrived, useless things to hand off to these kids and tell them that it's "MEANINGFUL." (heavy emphasis on the air quotes) We do, however, want to present an opportunity to give students real things to work on, real problems to solve, and real chances to build experience. After all, if everything they do up til 12th grade is completely encased in the strange, safe little bubble that is the microverse of High School, every student who graduates will have a gaping deficit when it comes to real world experience the minute they hit college.
What this all reminds me of is a strange thought that popped into my head earlier this week. I'll try to keep the life-history part of things brief, but bear with me, it's going somewhere.
I graduated High School at the tender young age of 17 (I was a late August birthday) and promptly packed it up and moved to Chicago to go to school. Having a heavy design element to my degree, all the freshmen were required to do a standard figure drawing class their first semester. So that meant that I was sitting in a room, for credit, looking at a naked person very carefully, and trying to reproduce all of their various bits via pencil and paper. And I'm still 17 for at least the first few days of school. So I'm in an art studio, I'm with a bunch of other generally overwhelmed and bewildered 18 year olds, and we're sitting there looking at a naked person, listening to a cranky prof who swears like a sailor.
The contrast that seems most remarkable to me is what life had been like only 3 months earlier. I was in an institution where there were heavy penalties for bad language, inappropriate behavior, or lewdness. Teachers were Mr. or Mrs., classes were rigidly structured by automated bells, and there was definitely not some poor starving art student coming in every afternoon to pose in front of the class buck-nekkid. I think you could get the dreaded 'In-School Suspension' if you even drew a penis, let alone a whole person attached to one. You would probably have been hauled off to the magistrate for a sex crime if you went and did a few nude studies of someone who was perfectly willing to pose for you and some administrator got wind of it.
So I guess what I wonder is, why in the world are we NOT doing exactly the sort of 'Grand Inversion' that both Alan November and Zoe Weil are talking about here? Why are we keeping these young people in this weird little bubble, pretending that there is no coarse language, that there are no legitimate classes out there where you are actually required to draw penises or other naughty bits (and the people attached to them), and where every minute of every day is run by a system of automated bells? Sure, we need structure, we need respect, we need to give students guidance, but by removing every last vestige of personal responsibility from every kid in every grade, aren't we just training year after year of people who have been systematically instructed to believe that they were incapable of even moving from room to room at the right time?
Monday, October 10, 2011
American society's schedule is largely influenced by the schedule of the School System.
American schools run on a schedule based around Summer Break.
Summer Break is stupid.
Therefore American Society is stupid.
Ok, so that's an inflammatory and completely unfair logical progression. Just bear with me here, and please don't read that last sentence and start some sort of hyper-reactive proto-patriot rant before you get to my larger point. I'm going somewhere here.
Like so much in our education system, 'The American School Year' is obsolete. Time to chuck it in the bin and start with something that makes sense. Our schools have been carrying on age-old traditions and conventions for hundreds of years, and thankfully we are just now starting to realize that the "we-do-it-this-way-because-we've-always-done-it-this-way" mentality just doesn't cut it anymore. Give us many-decades-long research studies, based on scientific study and hard facts about how children develop; give us creative approaches that take advantage of the social nature of school, rather than squelching it at every turn; give us highly-trained, respected, passionate people running the show, not just some burned-out tenure slave, punching a time clock while kids in their classroom grow sullen and resentful.
Why don't we start with the School Year?
We're running a system that is based on an agricultural society, and designed to allow for time off that virtually no one needs any more. Well guess what! Nobody I know is taking the summer off to help Pa run the combine so this year's harvest will bring in enough at the market! The modern farm is a guy in Iowa driving a tractor the size of Rhode Island over fields of petroleum-byproduct-fertilized crops. That farmer has more in common with executives from BP than a family farmer 100 years ago who actually needed his 12 sons to quit their "book learnin'" for three months so they can get the crops in on the back 40. It made sense for young people back then to have the Summer months off. But we've moved on, and continuing to format our schools the way we do makes about as much sense as trying to hook up an old-fashioned Royal typewriter to a telegraph line and call it the Internet.
We start the school year in August, but we start the regular year in January. How confusing is that? Doing it this way means that every bloody calendar that every school makes has to have two years awkwardly crammed onto the top of it, and it just trickles on down into every piece of paperwork everyone sees, like confusing, irritating rain. This year is something like "2011-12" or perhaps "2011-2012." Imagine how pleasing to the eye and the brain if all we had on there was "2011." Four little digits - clear, concise, unhyphenated: beautiful. But that's just a little, tiny fringe benefit. Imagine the big stuff.
Let's say we chuck the school calendar in the bin, and decide to start new grades as of the start of 2012. The current system runs roughly August - May, yes? About 9 months. Fine. Let's aim to keep that. But let's shift the start of the year waaaaay over to get a little closer to the calendar year. So how about January? No way. January is screwed up for the first few days by New Years, and the remnants of all that December holiday crap. Nobody's in school then anyway, and January is fraught with things like delays, closings, snow, and maybe 2 hours of daylight tops. Screw January. And while we're at it, screw February too. So leave everyone to stay home, make hot chocolate and snowmen, and sleep through the lousy Winter months. So let's say we start in March. Sweet. By March things are starting to thaw out, everyone's restless to get started, and Spring is on the way. Perfect time to start new things!
Nine months out from March takes us straight through to November. Nice! We skate through a whole school year without major interruption, we have a few long weekends with the summer holidays, and let's say that maybe we have a longer break sometime in the middle, maybe around the 4th of July. God Bless America. Then we rock right on through to the Fall holidays, which are lightweight, don't require massive time off, and we finish up with a big school party right before Thanksgiving. Fantastic. Then guess what?? WE'RE DONE!!
Everyone gets the Winter months off, which we wind up doing already for the non-stop barrage of Holidays from Thanksgiving to New Years. We're able to spend some much-deserved down time resting, sled-riding, and sleeping good, solid Winter-hibernation-type sleep. And school work doesn't suffer due to being off for a whole month over Christmas break anyway, and closings and delays due to snow and Winter weather are kept to a minimum.
And just imagine the calendars: One year, 4 little digits, proudly displayed at the top of the calendar: '2012'
More later. I haven't talked about that other ridiculous institution - Summer Camp. Stay tuned.
American schools run on a schedule based around Summer Break.
Summer Break is stupid.
Therefore American Society is stupid.
Ok, so that's an inflammatory and completely unfair logical progression. Just bear with me here, and please don't read that last sentence and start some sort of hyper-reactive proto-patriot rant before you get to my larger point. I'm going somewhere here.
Like so much in our education system, 'The American School Year' is obsolete. Time to chuck it in the bin and start with something that makes sense. Our schools have been carrying on age-old traditions and conventions for hundreds of years, and thankfully we are just now starting to realize that the "we-do-it-this-way-because-we've-always-done-it-this-way" mentality just doesn't cut it anymore. Give us many-decades-long research studies, based on scientific study and hard facts about how children develop; give us creative approaches that take advantage of the social nature of school, rather than squelching it at every turn; give us highly-trained, respected, passionate people running the show, not just some burned-out tenure slave, punching a time clock while kids in their classroom grow sullen and resentful.
Why don't we start with the School Year?
We're running a system that is based on an agricultural society, and designed to allow for time off that virtually no one needs any more. Well guess what! Nobody I know is taking the summer off to help Pa run the combine so this year's harvest will bring in enough at the market! The modern farm is a guy in Iowa driving a tractor the size of Rhode Island over fields of petroleum-byproduct-fertilized crops. That farmer has more in common with executives from BP than a family farmer 100 years ago who actually needed his 12 sons to quit their "book learnin'" for three months so they can get the crops in on the back 40. It made sense for young people back then to have the Summer months off. But we've moved on, and continuing to format our schools the way we do makes about as much sense as trying to hook up an old-fashioned Royal typewriter to a telegraph line and call it the Internet.
We start the school year in August, but we start the regular year in January. How confusing is that? Doing it this way means that every bloody calendar that every school makes has to have two years awkwardly crammed onto the top of it, and it just trickles on down into every piece of paperwork everyone sees, like confusing, irritating rain. This year is something like "2011-12" or perhaps "2011-2012." Imagine how pleasing to the eye and the brain if all we had on there was "2011." Four little digits - clear, concise, unhyphenated: beautiful. But that's just a little, tiny fringe benefit. Imagine the big stuff.
Let's say we chuck the school calendar in the bin, and decide to start new grades as of the start of 2012. The current system runs roughly August - May, yes? About 9 months. Fine. Let's aim to keep that. But let's shift the start of the year waaaaay over to get a little closer to the calendar year. So how about January? No way. January is screwed up for the first few days by New Years, and the remnants of all that December holiday crap. Nobody's in school then anyway, and January is fraught with things like delays, closings, snow, and maybe 2 hours of daylight tops. Screw January. And while we're at it, screw February too. So leave everyone to stay home, make hot chocolate and snowmen, and sleep through the lousy Winter months. So let's say we start in March. Sweet. By March things are starting to thaw out, everyone's restless to get started, and Spring is on the way. Perfect time to start new things!
Nine months out from March takes us straight through to November. Nice! We skate through a whole school year without major interruption, we have a few long weekends with the summer holidays, and let's say that maybe we have a longer break sometime in the middle, maybe around the 4th of July. God Bless America. Then we rock right on through to the Fall holidays, which are lightweight, don't require massive time off, and we finish up with a big school party right before Thanksgiving. Fantastic. Then guess what?? WE'RE DONE!!
Everyone gets the Winter months off, which we wind up doing already for the non-stop barrage of Holidays from Thanksgiving to New Years. We're able to spend some much-deserved down time resting, sled-riding, and sleeping good, solid Winter-hibernation-type sleep. And school work doesn't suffer due to being off for a whole month over Christmas break anyway, and closings and delays due to snow and Winter weather are kept to a minimum.
And just imagine the calendars: One year, 4 little digits, proudly displayed at the top of the calendar: '2012'
More later. I haven't talked about that other ridiculous institution - Summer Camp. Stay tuned.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Now with multiple medias!
...er media, that is.
So I made a brief little tutorial on using Audacity and a free sound effects site to make a radio commercial. I think it turned out pretty well:
And if you're interested in hearing my finished radio spot for 'Rocket Coffee,' sadly, you will have to be patient, as I can't seem to figure out how to embed an audio file on this site. I'll update here as soon as I figure it out.
Ridiculous.
So I made a brief little tutorial on using Audacity and a free sound effects site to make a radio commercial. I think it turned out pretty well:
And if you're interested in hearing my finished radio spot for 'Rocket Coffee,' sadly, you will have to be patient, as I can't seem to figure out how to embed an audio file on this site. I'll update here as soon as I figure it out.
Ridiculous.
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