"What wisdom would we impart to the world if it was our last chance?"

A professor at Carnegie Mellon shares his "last lecture."


You can view the article here.


My favorite part of this lecture is "Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things."

.... do learn

Thought Provoking!

This was brought to my attention by one of my a colleague. I've personally tried the cell phone challenge. After reading the editorial in the last post I'm re-inspired to infuse the outside world into my classroom.

Bringing School to the Information Age

The new reality is that the public-education system is no longer the only, or the paramount, place where we go to learn.

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by James Daly

For more than 150 years, the local public schools were our community's temple of knowledge. They dutifully gathered, assimilated, and dispensed the wisdom of thousands of years of insight and learning to the eager (and sometimes not-so-eager) ears and eyes of fidgeting youth. Once you left the school's care, however, as a young adult, you were pretty much on your own to track down the information and wisdom that would lead to a more enriched mind or pocketbook.

Then something dramatic happened. In 1989, researcher Tim Berners-Lee was noodling around in his Swiss lab, working on a way for his colleagues to share ideas electronically on different networks using an odd jumble of computers. He came up with an online knowledge-sharing device: the World Wide Web. By the mid-1990s, new Web browsers produced by companies such as Netscape and Microsoft made sailing through the sea of online information simple; Berners-Lee had inadvertently kicked open a door to the world's knowledge.

Then came the crackling summer of 1995. While a staggering heat wave scorched the country -- New York City had a record-setting streak of twenty-four consecutive days with no precipitation, while out in the Great Plains, a freight train derailed when the tracks warped in 112-degree heat -- Netscape planned something even hotter: It went public. When that offering happened on August 9, the company's stock and its fortunes skyrocketed. Where there is money to be made (and Netscape was making billions), inventiveness and ambition followed.

The rest of the story, writ in large neon letters, has been a redistribution of knowledge that has essentially turned our world upside down and inside out (or is it the other way around?). In the past decade, the easy access to nearly any piece of information imaginable has become an expected part of our daily life. We've been Googled and YouTubed and iPodded so completely that the names of these very companies have seared into our cerebral cortex, even becoming verbs ("Did you google it?") in our daily chatter.

What happened with our schools? Not much. They continued to plod on gamely, passing out paper-based textbook after paper-based textbook, keeping their rooms and halls nearly free of the technology saturating their students' lives. The public-education system was a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, dozing peacefully beneath its educational elm while the distance increased between the technology that schools provided and the daily reality of the world students live in.

Subtly, but inexorably, schools -- or, for that matter, libraries -- were no longer the key holders to the temple of knowledge. A millennia-old arrangement of information distribution disappeared in the time it took for a newborn to reach fifth grade.

The new reality is that the public-education system is no longer the only, or the paramount, place where we go to learn. Most likely, the average child did his or her first Google search on a home computer. For many kids, they probably first logged on to a network (most likely AOL or Yahoo!) remotely, using a portable PC a parent brought home from the office. Their first online chat was more likely to happen at home while the child was enjoying Club Penguin than it was in English class.

This shift represents a fundamental restructuring of what public education is all about. Schools must now jump into the river of information provided by business, international groups, and the media and step into a new role: assembler of the collective intellect. Educators must help students sort out the insightful from the ludicrous, assisting them in their new role as capable and critical thinkers. Schools should not shun the seemingly endless variety of outside information sources, but should instead see them as new sources of inspiration for their daily lessons.

In an age when the flow of information was limited and controlled, schools were worthy gatherers of knowledge. That world is gone. Public education has entered a new phase, and it's time for it to catch up to the students it's charged with teaching.

Editor in Chief
James Daly

This article was also published in Edutopia Magazine, July 2007

Reading in Bed?

SCIENCE!

After successfully eating a candle, our science department continues to surprise everyone. I personally was thrilled to see the freshmen physics teacher using the artifact of the 7 train the Summer Program created as an object of scrutiny in his physics class. The students from the Summer School Program have been coming up to me shocked that classes, and the occasional DEAR have used the train as a gathering place.


I would also like to thank Barkan for sharing the following hyper-linked quote from today's NYTimes.

"students should be given the chance to do real research — to experience framing a question, deciding what kind of evidence is relevant and figuring out how to collect it. "I'm not saying there's not drudgery in science," she said, "but when you get to the point where all the data are sitting in front of you and you start seeing patterns and nature begins to speak — that's a kick."

Pirates, Fire, and Socialization

In most schools events like the one we had last Wednesday would probably only occur in late June. Honoring student achievement is often a closing ceremony of any school. We have created a tradition of something different in Montessori. We have shared and celebrated the achievement of our students past year upon their return to school. The new freshmen get to share in our school culture right from the get go.

We almost got it right. We did have some miscommunication as to “who gets honors” (not running list from the Gardener Community was disheartening and painful when recognized) and we did have some slight glitches as to “how” the ceremony should transpire, but on the whole we as a community started the year with a truly special event.

FIRE—yes we might very well be the only school in the NYC BOE that distributes fire to 450 kids at the start of the school year. This displays an amazing amount of trust, and inspiring sense of unity, and possibly an insane risk factor. (Although to date we have never had an incident) As I looked around through the auditorium at the faces of the new students and peered into the eyes of those about to embark on the conclusion of their time here at QHST, I was truly re-inspired to dedicate myself to our community of learners. We have and amazing selection of staff and students of diverse interests and backgrounds.

The BBQ event after the candle ceremony went off rather smoothly. Students who can often be withdrawn in a classroom setting, began to open up in the lower risk social setting. The student government made their way through the crowds encouraging participation. We were even visited by several students whom graduated last year. Everyone seemed to have a smile on their face.

Upon return to the classroom on Thursday, I could already feel a sense of community with a freshmen class that I have only just met. One student asked me if “...We do these sort of events often?” My reply was, ”Not enough and never with as much fire.”

The photos in the third floor common area say it all.

PS> As for the Pirates…… it was after all September 19^th! What do you expect?

What’s Good for Children

Here is a reprint of an opinion article published in the NYTimes and the letters responding to it:


Editorial September 12, 2007

America’s business community was an early advocate of reform and a prime mover in the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, which required the states to improve public schooling for all students. With Congress gearing up to reauthorize the act, business leaders are rightly raising their voices in an attempt to prevent the teachers’ unions and their political allies from weakening this important law.

Corporate leaders have complained for years about job applicants who don’t read, write or think well enough. Faced with poorly educated workers at home — especially in science — American companies are increasingly looking abroad, not just for lower-paid workers, but for workers with the training and skills to compete in a globalized economy.

With those concerns in mind, the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives from the nation’s largest companies, spoke out forcefully this week. At a House hearing, the Roundtable’s president, John Castellani, cited troubling provisions in a draft reauthorization bill that would allow schools to mask failure in teaching crucial subjects like reading and math by giving them credit for student performance in other subjects or on alternate measures of performance.



Mr. Castellani voiced strong support for the accountability principles underlying the original law and warned that the draft would allow too many schools to “game the system” by hiding the records of underachieving students. The provisions, he warned, would weaken the process by which schools are identified as in need of improvement and would replace a “transparent accountability system” with a tortured and confusing one. As such, the new system could cover up deficits that the current law has clearly exposed.

The draft, the work of the House Education Committee chairman, George Miller of California, contains some good reforms as well. But those ideas would be wasted if states, schools and teachers were not held accountable for the quality of the education they provide. Not only do America’s businesses need better-educated workers, the country needs better-educated citizens as well. And America’s children all deserve a sound education.

Why is Jonathan Kozol Fasting?

This morning, I am entering the 67th day of a partial fast that I began early in the summer as my personal act of protest at the vicious damage being done to inner-city children by the federal education law No Child Left Behind, a racially punitive piece of legislation that Congress will either renew, abolish, or, as thousands of teachers pray, radically revise in the weeks immediately ahead. The poisonous essence of this law lies in the mania of obsessive testing it has forced upon our nation's schools and, in the case of underfunded, overcrowded inner-city schools, the miserable drill-and-kill curriculum of robotic "teaching to the test" it has imposed on teachers, the best of whom are fleeing from these schools because they know that this debased curriculum would never have been tolerated in the good suburban schools that they, themselves, attended.

Continued here

They ate a candle!

Check out Montessori Physics from Barkan's Freshmen Class and Montessori Sophomores joint effort at Web design.