Bummer, my plan of keeping track of each day's progress in my Pre-Algebra classes was lost to good things such as:
1) Attending the MACUL conference in Detroit
2) Parent Teacher Conferences
3) Report Cards
4) Starting Future Prep
5) Spring Break!
6) M-Step testing the week after spring break...
The best part of a good vacation is getting a new perspective on the world and how this affects what is going on in our own lives. My family and I were fortunate enough to spend a week on Eleuthera, an out island in the Bahamas. We stayed in a house in a small settlement, There was no running water for the first three days of our trip. We immediately noticed neighbors drawing together to help each other out:
1) Attending the MACUL conference in Detroit
2) Parent Teacher Conferences
3) Report Cards
4) Starting Future Prep
5) Spring Break!
6) M-Step testing the week after spring break...
The best part of a good vacation is getting a new perspective on the world and how this affects what is going on in our own lives. My family and I were fortunate enough to spend a week on Eleuthera, an out island in the Bahamas. We stayed in a house in a small settlement, There was no running water for the first three days of our trip. We immediately noticed neighbors drawing together to help each other out:
Out our kitchen window:
| A neighbor shares water from his cistern.  | Girls bottle rainwater collected overnight. |
The house we rented was on a cove, directly across from the town school, left empty after a hurricane left costly holes in the roof. The picture below shows a picture that still hangs outside the main entrance. Students now attend classes in a temporary location.
These images stuck with me and got me thinking. In this day and age, with the free schooling available on-line, everything should be available for anyone who is willing to learn. Of course, in developing regions, there is a need for a stable infrastructure and working technology, but these expenses are not expensive when considering the return on investment.
This thinking also lead to me to realize that NO ONE should be lecturing to a class in this day and age. Excellent lectures from very reputable sources are available to anyone with access to the internet. Students then have the ability to rewind and repeat any necessary topics as well as do this on their own time.
We should be spending our valuable time with students helping them to be critical problem solvers, and building skills for them to learn the power of working with other people. They can learn first hand the power of "the smartest person in the room IS the room." - George Couros.
We should be inspiring them to pursue studies that that is interesting and relevant to their lives. We need to be asking them what problems they want to solve, not what they want to be when they grow up.
I was fortunate to spend time at the end of my spring break going on a walk with my niece, Katherine Good, a recent PhD graduate at Northwestern school of Media, Technology and Society, who was recently hired by Miami of Ohio. I love her fresh perspective on youth culture, combined with trends in education. We were talking about some of my thoughts posted above and she asked if I had heard about hackschools. I had not, but when watching the Ted talk she recommended, it all came back. THIS is what we should be doing:
This thinking also lead to me to realize that NO ONE should be lecturing to a class in this day and age. Excellent lectures from very reputable sources are available to anyone with access to the internet. Students then have the ability to rewind and repeat any necessary topics as well as do this on their own time.
We should be spending our valuable time with students helping them to be critical problem solvers, and building skills for them to learn the power of working with other people. They can learn first hand the power of "the smartest person in the room IS the room." - George Couros.
We should be inspiring them to pursue studies that that is interesting and relevant to their lives. We need to be asking them what problems they want to solve, not what they want to be when they grow up.
I was fortunate to spend time at the end of my spring break going on a walk with my niece, Katherine Good, a recent PhD graduate at Northwestern school of Media, Technology and Society, who was recently hired by Miami of Ohio. I love her fresh perspective on youth culture, combined with trends in education. We were talking about some of my thoughts posted above and she asked if I had heard about hackschools. I had not, but when watching the Ted talk she recommended, it all came back. THIS is what we should be doing:
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