Category: Philosophy

…decide anything about education?

I mean, in my state, if you’re an educator, that means you have both a BA or BS, as well as a MS/MA. That means that we have advanced graduate degrees in the field of education. That would make us experts.

But we allow non-educators, laypeople, politicians and the like to tell us how/what we need to being doing.

I don’t tell particle physicists how to run experiments.

I don’t tell my doctor how to treat my illness.

I don’t tell an architect how to design a building.

So why would someone else tell me how to teach?

Everything can be replaced.

Given the software market dynamics, there is always competition for market share. That means choices.

If you think you can’t live/work/function without a specific piece of software, you’re likely wrong.

There’s nothing more intimidating than a blank page and a blinking cursor.

And sometimes you just need to start typing, and worry about what it says later.

 

Sometimes starting is the most important part.

So we had a visitor last week. Doesn’t matter who.

And while talking about our new digital student portfolio initiative, there was some concern about the public/private nature of putting young students’ work online. Understandably. It was something we’d been grappling with for a bit already, but mister visitor was quick with a response:

Just make it public.

The argument, I suppose, being that it makes things easy on the administration end. That it creates an environment/culture of “openness.” And so on.

But I’m not convinced. Not everything in the “real world” is open. In fact, we stress the ability to keep much of what we do private- from social networks to banking to forums, we cherish the ability to keep things isolated to a specific community.

So why would we take that ability from students?

So Google went and got me all excited about the new Course Builder project they’ve got going.

It looks pretty neat.

And then-

Requires some knowledge of Python. And JavaScript. And HTML.

So I’m lucky enough to have one of those under my belt. And, as an ELA teacher, that’s pretty unusual. I even know a teeny-tiny bit of JavaScript. And I know what Python is.

But to expect a classroom educator to either know- or have time to learn- all three of those things in order make a course means that this was designed for people with heavy web-based development. That might be reasonable at the college level and within the realm of technical studies, but not at the k-12 level. And not with traditional classroom teachers.

So once again, some tech/engineer types have failed on two accounts:

1. They have assumed everyone is just like them, and

2. They haven’t brought in any educators to look at what they’ve made.

I expected more, folks.

 

I just did this math:

I’ve been involved in the direct distribution of 1515 (+/- 10) iPads. I’m involved in the readying of another 900 right now. That will be 2414 total within the year.

And all of it doesn’t matter if the culture of the school (teachers, students, admin, and parents) isn’t ready and willing to accept that putting devices in students hands fundamentally changes the way you need to be teaching.

One of my favorite authors has a famous quote:

The street finds it’s own use for things.

-William Gibson

Some of the tech that’s released ends up getting used in ways the creators never imagined. The two classic examples are pagers and text messages, but there are many more.

It’s something to keep in mind when you’re being bombarded with new tech being marketed at education. In fact, most of the best tech I’ve found hasn’t been made for education at all. Even worse, the stuff marketed at educators is often the worst of a breed I’ve seen.

Look outside the box a bit, and don’t be afraid to turn a product on it’s head if it’ll do what you need.

 

I found this on Kevin Kelly’s Technium:

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality states that, “the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.” In other words, if you try to build a simple thing such as a public bike shed, there will be endless town hall discussions wherein people argue over trivial details such as the color of the door. But if you want to build a nuclear power plant — a project so vast and complicated that most people can’t understand it — people will defer to expert opinion. — C. Northcote Parkinson, 1957, Parkinson’s Law.

I’m not saying public education is a nuclear power plant; it’s just that everyone seems to have an opinion.

 

Why don’t High Schools have cafe’s as separate areas, with their own bathrooms (and so on)?

Then students wouldn’t have to leave for lunch period, and the rest of the building could be isolated from the commotion of hundreds of students being fed and socializing.

When my car recently broke, I took it to my local butcher. He offered several reasons it might not be running. And then he went back to work cutting steaks. He also has no background whatsoever as a mechanic.

My actions above make about as much sense as allowing career politicians to make decisions about education.