I’m wondering if anyone wants to take a shot at drawing the lines between these three things:

Exhibit 1

toothpastefordinner.com

Exhibit 2

gapingvoid.com

Exhibit 3

“Let me try to explain how it feels to see again and again material you should once have learned but didn’t.

You are given a problem. It requires you to simplify algebraic fractions or to multiply expressions containing square roots. You know this is pretty basic material because you’ve seen it for years. Once a teacher took some time with you, and you learned how to carry out these operations. Simple versions, anyway. But that was a year or two or more in the past, and these are more complex versions, and now you’re not sure. And this, you keep telling yourself, is ninth- or even eighth-grade stuff.

Next it’s a word problem. This is also old hat. The basic elements are as familiar as story characters: trains speeding so many miles per hour or shadows of buildings angling so many degrees. Maybe you know enough, have sat through enough explanations, to be able to begin setting up the problem: “If one train is going this fast . . .” or “This shadow is really one line of a triangle . . . .” Then: “Let’s see . . .” “How did the Jones do this?” “Hmmmm.” “No.” “No, that won’t work.” Your attention wavers. You wonder about other things: a football game, a dance, that cute new checker at the market. You try to focus on the problem again. You scribble on paper for a while, but th tensions wins out and your attention flits elsewhere. You crumple the paper and begin daydreaming to ease the frustration.

The particulars will vary, but in essence this is what a number of students go through, especially those in so-called remedial classes. They open their textbooks and see once again the familiar and impenetrable formulas and diagrams and terms that have stumped them for years. There is no excitement here. No excitement. Regardless of what the teacher says, this is not a new challenge. There is, rather, embarrassment and frustration and, not surprisingly, some anger in being reminded once again of longstanding inadequacies. No wonder so many students finally attribute their difficulties to something inborn, organic: “That part of my brain just doesn’t work.” Given the troubling histories many of these students have, it’s miraculous that any of them can lift the shroud of hopelessness sufficiently to make deliverance from these classes possible. ”
-Mike Rose in Lives on the Boundary

I know that I should be fired up about NECC. I’m fired up about ISTE and the new NETS for teachers and EduBloggerCon (especially EduBloggerCon), but I’m still having a tough time committing to going.

I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why.

I think it would be good for my soul to get together with the people from my network and people who are in the same fight that I’m in. Actually I know that it would be good.

Then why can’t I just decide to go?

Is it Texas? Is it the number of people? Is it the meat-market of the vendor floors? Is it Texas?

Can anyone out there give me a good push?

Technorati Tags: necc, texas, if I go I’ll have a reason to use the blog post title “death and texas”, why can’t necc be in austin. that’s almost like not being in texas

Not that anyone noticed, but I took a couple weeks off. I actually thought to myself that the last three weeks of school would go smoothly. Along with this my son’s going through some heavy stuff. Here’s what I missed while I was away.

Apparently a whole movement started while I decided to stop writing. Behold, EduPunk.

Here’s the basic tenets as I understand them:

1. Course management systems suck and teachers can do it better on their own.
2. D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) creates better stuff for students than canned courses or templates

Not sure that I agree, or care, about either one of these.

Here’s what’s missing:

• doing everything that you can for kids and teaching them to do something revolutionary… think for themselves
• and something not so simple: realizing the stacked odds our students face and doing everything in your power to reset the balance in their favor. Everything.
• Finally, subverting the traditional power-structure of teacher/student, administrator/teacher, school/society.

I was punk, once.

And a fun band said “You’re only punk once. So you better do it right. Before you become the system we’ve all sworn to fight.”

Here’s to my second chance. Not to mention The List.

Technorati Tags: edupunk

During the next week I have the opportunity to make a few SlideCasts. Here’s the first in a series of three:

| View | Upload your own

I’m not in love with this presentation. I hate presenting about things that I don’t feel like I know inside and out. I don’t know this advisory thing as well as I wish I did, but I do know that the concept of it is something that would be great for building community at our school.

Also it was a bit embarrassing that my math skills fell apart (listen to the last five minutes), but that’s about par for the course. I thought to myself about one-hundred times, “I should have someone else eyeball this” and then I looked up and it was time for the presentation.

Before I left on Friday, I sent the SlideCast to my staff. Sunday evening as I write this it’s been viewed 100 times and downloaded 7:

I wish that Google presentations was as social.

Later this week: a presentation that I am giving for NACOL with Cory Plough and a presentation on social software that I’m giving to the teacher computer specialists for my encompassing school district. If either of those things are your thing, check it out.

Technorati Tags: advisory, administration, slidecast

Yesterday I talked about something I learned from Howard Zinn that I use in the classroom, everyday. It’s not being neutral. Neutrality is the worst thing that you can do to a curriculum, but it’s also the easiest thing you can do. Being neutral is comfortable. Being neutral is nice. Being neutral is also as boring as this season’s episodes of The Simpsons.

How to be a non-neutral teacher?

Being a non-neutral teacher means that you’ve got to do a few things. First, you have to build trust with your kids. Lots and lots of trust. If you’re a neutral teacher it takes nothing to say “my opinion doesn’t matter” or “I don’t want to talk about that”. That’s easy. And it sucks. Second, you have to encourage dissent. If you’re non-neutral, and you’re going to express your opinions then you’re going to have to build an atmosphere were students can express theirs and that they know if their opinion is different from yours that it’s okay. That it’s safe. More than that. That it’s expected. Finally, bring yourself to your class. You know, that human part. That’s going to help a lot with that whole “not being neutral” thing.

Why be a non-neutral teacher?

Neutrality is a false pretense and your kids know this. You’re not neutral. You know you’re not neutral and acting like you don’t have an opinion will only lead to one thing, your students actually not having an opinion. If nothing else, I want my kids to walk away from my class knowing how they feel about whatever it is we discussed. I want them to know how I feel. I’m not doing this because I’m all touchy-feely and I care about that crap. I’m doing it because if you have an opinion about something you’re going to spend some time thinking about it and that’s what I’m really after. Getting my kids to think about what they believe about the world around them. I can’t imagine anyway to get students to do this with out modeling it.

My wife said that someone else said:

It’s not hatred that kills people, it’s indifference.Take That, Proper Citations

Thank you, Howard.

In Other News

Is there any way, any way at all, that this applies to being an administrator?

Technorati Tags: Howard Zinn, administration, neutrality

I’m going to start here: I’m an advocate for school choice.

• Charter Schools: Dig ‘em. Work for one. Played a small, small, part in the largest revisions of charter school laws in our state back when I thought I wanted to grow up to be a lobbyist. In general, a huge fan of charters started by parents and teachers, but if companies can figure out how to turn a buck out of the education beast and still do right by kids; more power to ‘em
• Vouchers: I like those too. Hey, if private and parochial schools are crazy enough to take on all of the strings that come with public dollars then more power to those folks too.
• Home-Schooling: I’m alright by this as well. May have to do it for my son. Don’t really care about the money, but if you want to throw $5k my way to provide for an education in the home, well, I wouldn’t send the check back.

All of this is true and then things start getting sticky. One of my colleague’s school is converting from a traditional public school to a public charter school. I’m not sure why this would happen, I know it’s something that NCLB threatens to do if you don’t meet your testing results, but I don’t think that 1) That’s the case here or 2) Has ever happened. We were having a conversation about the conversion, and I was all happy in my little world of school-choice, when our conversation went somewhere that’s made me uncomfortable. Okay, maybe not uncomfortable, but it got me thinking.

Part of why I dig charter schools, and school choice in general, is that it gives people options. My father is fond of saying

The government’s only ever run two programs right. The building of national highways and GI Bill after WWII.The Old Man

With that being my frame of reference, and seeing as schools are not roads or the GI Bill, the government isn’t going to do a great job of running public schools.

Before you go all nuts on me and start lining me up with all sorts of right-wing crazies, I just want to say, they’re not wrong. Now you can line me up. With-that-said, I don’t like them. But they’re not wrong. I don’t like exercise either, but I don’t argue about it being good for me. Doesn’t mean I’m going to do any exercise either. Governments don’t run public education well, for a simple reason: governments can’t do anything well. It’s the nature of the beast. And let’s be honest, if I had to pick a government I’d rather have an ineffective one that leaves me alone most of time than an effective one that’s in my business or worse yet, I totally disagree with.

What’s that got to do with school choice?

The only way the school institution is going to budge is if people have choices. Now, they can all be government run schools if that makes you more comfortable, but until families can start making decisions about which schools their children attend not much is going to change.

And therein lies the problem.

For all of the talk I hear from schools around the nation about parents not being involved, the simple fact is that if the kid’s at a charter school the parents are involved at some level. The parents wouldn’t have made the choice to withdraw their kid from a traditional public school and then enroll them elsewhere if they weren’t involved. In many cases these “non-involved” parents provide transportation for their students as well. The fact is, there’s a level of parental involvement with these students which is higher than the kids I’m most worried about.

With traditional public schools turning into charter schools, and more and more educational options being offered to all students, what happens to the students who’s parents are totally uninvolved in their education? I’m not bagging parents here. You’ll never hear me do that for a simple reason: short of abuse situations there’s very little we can do about a kid’s parents and all too often schools take that out on the kid. If you get nothing else from this post, please remember the students did not pick their parents. It’s not their fault. Not even a little. But enough about the parents.

Back to the kids.

In a world of educational options what happens to the kids who’s parents aren’t involved in their educational experience? While the kids who’s parents are hyper-involved are getting their students into the “best” schools of choice (if they haven’t already yanked them into private schools) who’s standing up for the students who are left-behind? Who’s their voice? Who’s saying Hey, I know your parents aren’t real involved in this process. They’re not bad people. They’re just used to taking you to the school they’re told to go to. Let me give you a hand getting into a great public school.

Is it you? Is it me? Is it the school-choice advocates?

Other Questions

Is anyone doing this?

Do schools of choice make the situation worse?

Technorati Tags: posts with “left behind” that have nothing to do with the books of the same title

Around Christmas time I got into the G1G1 project that OLPC did and picked up an XO “for my daughter”. We did the whole Christmas thing with it and it took her all of about twenty minutes to rip the “k” key off. I packed the XO up for a little bit and thought to myself “we’ll give that a shot later” and then thought to myself “how my times and different ways can you use quotes in one post”. In fairness the daughter was just barely three at the time and ripping of keys, I’m sure, seemed like a natural thing to do.

About a month ago I got my daughter playing a few games on the PC. Just the ones that you can play online. You know the ones that are for kids. Good wholesome games, for example Defend Your Castle, Trogdor and of course The Impossible Quiz. Seriously we started at Nickjr. The daughter would use the space bar and I’d do the rest. Shortly she was clicking the mouse and about two weeks ago mom taught her to click and drag. From there it was game over.

Me: You want some help playing that game
Her: Nope, I got it

About two days later I walked into the computer room and she was in a chat room fending off predators and looking at porn. I mean as soon as I came it she was all alt-tabing and closing windows. It was really cute.

That never happened. But this did:

I walked into the room and she was playing a game a Nickjr that we hadn’t played together before. It was game that I hadn’t shown her. It was a game that involved selecting the correct puzzle pieces and clicking and dragging them to the correct part of the screen to create a robot that would do something. When I first walked in I just stood back and watched her. The puzzles had about 15 pieces, some large, some small, and she was just clicking and dragging and hitting the right spots and using deduction to find the right spots.

It was pretty amazing. I want to stress again that

1. she found this game on her own
2. she learned how to play this game on her own
3. she’s three

In fact it’s the game that she’s playing in this video:

Now I’ve just spent a lot of time setting this post up and I realize there’s very little chance that anyone’s made it this far. If you have here’s the point I’m trying to make:

I set that game up so she could play it on her own computer. Which she did, for about five minutes. A few minutes later she remembered taking pictures with the XO at Christmas-time before the “k” key debacle and wanted to do that again. So I showed her where that app was, showed her how to click the little circle to start the recording and away she went. Seriously.

She told 15 second stories about her blanket. Took the XO outside and made another one about her soccer ball. Tried to get her brother and cats into the act (both are about as easy to get to do what you want). And screamed and laughed, a lot. She did all of this on her own. She even unplugged and plugged in the mouse as she went from place to place in the house.

A short time later she had opened the paint program and after showing her where the pencil tool and the colors were she went after that too. Again, you know what I’m going to say here, but it was on her own. No prompting, very little showing, just her doing and creating.

She’s already asking about the little turtle, and I can’t wait to learn logo and turtle math again with her. Before long I’m sure she’ll be asking about the other things too and what she can do with this machine. This children’s machine. Her machine.

Here’s where this gets important (and I’m sorry it took me so long to get here): because of the design of the computer and the design of the Linux OS, Sugar, it’s created an environment where my daughter wants to create things, not just sit there and do things that have been created for her. She now wants to create her own things more than play the pre-built games at nickjr.

To the folks that bought an Asus or are going to buy the other alternatives out there, you’re missing the boat and missing the point. PCs have been created with some idea of what we’re supposed to do with these machines. Those machines, just like our PCs, tell us what to do with with them. The XO is built for kids to imagine what to do with it and then make that happen.

That’s the part of the discussion that’s been missing. Until I got a chance to watch a kid use one, I didn’t quite get it. Now it couldn’t be more clear.

Technorati Tags: olpc, xo, asus, intel, papert

Instead of doing an open house at my school we hold an annual Parent Symposium. The idea is that our staff comes in and gives presentations to our parents about whats going on at the school. All in all it’s a pretty neat way to get in-touch with our parents. Next year I think I’d like to get some students involved in the presentations, but I digress.

One of the presentations that I put on was about using social software with our students to help foster collaboration and complete projects. As it turns out one of the parents runs a company that has workers around the world which is making a pretty neat LED product. While he was watching my presentation about what we’re doing with kids he began thinking “holy crap, my company needs to be using these tools”. Shortly after the symposium he sent me an email asking if I would come down and talk to his people. A short five months later we got together.

On Monday I met with all of the heavies from this company. More-or-less what I did a needs assessment. His company needs a quick way for people to work together on word-processor documents and spreadsheets. Let’s see. Hmm. Which tool would totally take care of what they need? How about:

As I began to show them the functionality in Google Docs and Spreadsheets questions started to come up. How much space do we get? (that one I could answer, 25GB per user) How much does it cost? (got that too, $50 annual per) Can our employees have our url as their email address? (on it, yep) Can we work offline? (well, they the just announced Google Gears for Apps. Like today. Pretty cool, huh?). Do the spread sheets have functions like Excel? (I don’t know, let’s check it out. As it turns out, yes) How secure is it? (I don’t want to speak to that too much, but there are several Fortune 500 companies using it. See what they have to say.)

So, they’ve asked me to come in and do some professional development. Hints were made about full-time employment opportunities (which I don’t want), pay (how about a stake in the company instead of cash?), and how often (probably once a week for an hour).

If nothing else this should be an adventure, but to spin this back to kids; if I can get some people in the private sector using these tools, and using them successfully, perhaps they will start to demand that schools use the tools. Maybe. Possibly. Could be in some way good for kids.

Graphic Credit: SaaS and Office 2.0 evolving towards Enterprise 2.0? no suing, please.

Technorati Tags: work 2.0, private sector, consulting

Mark Prensky recently wrote an article for ASCD that talked about ten principles for principals. I’m still spending some time processing these principles, but there are two that I am going to go after, right now:

1. Make it your business to eliminate boredom from your school—make 100 percent engagement the goal. Poll students as to which of their teachers and classes are engaging and which are boring and why. Investigate and take action.
2. Talk with 2–4 students each day for at least one-half hour about their learning. If you feel you can’t spare that time to engage with kids, you may need to rethink your priorities.

Even if my old man did give me the business about my last post, I believe that #1 is the best way to change scores, and more importantly learning, across the board and that #2 is the best way to get there.

Technorati Tags: administration, school 2.0, school reform, teaching