It is not supposed to be melting here.  It is only the beginning of February!!!  This place, where we have snow by Halloween and the ice on the lake in front of my house does not leave until the middle – end of May, is having a day of + 7 degrees Celsius!  The 7 foot high snowbank across the street from my house looks a bit wilted, but the squirrels are out, the birds are singing and everyone is cheered up today.

The wonders of sunshine.

One of my favourite books is The Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer-Dixon. This book, which has absolutely nothing to do with education really threw me off when I first read it a couple of summers ago.

Basically, the book wonders if we will have enough ingenuity, enough creative ability and talent in our future to solve the problems we are creating.

I think about this as I wonder about our system of education.  Systems value control. Systems value high standards. We value……., what do we value?

In our present time where people with jobs that focus on the creation of knowledge and with innovative abilities are in incredibly high demand, I wonder about the purpose of schools.  Do we "create" the students who get to work in the lower paid service jobs and let elite private schools do the rest?  Does this kind of talent only get created and practiced outside of school when kids take an interest in something of their own? 

How do we structure classrooms that involve and motivate each and every one of our students? How do we drive them towards innovation and creativity while still striving for strong basic skills.

How do we encourage it, create it, value it, and share it with the world?

Yesterday morning my principal stopped by my classroom to ask if I would be interested in sitting on the committee which designs our division wide yearly standardized math test.

I hate standardized tests….. I’m not even that much of a math guy……

…. So of course I said yes.  I have worked on committees designing curricula and approving textbooks, but this I have never done before.  I alway hated math when I was a kid. I worked on the Western Canadian Protocol project choosing language arts resources for use in classrooms. I’ve worked on a Manitoba committee choosing new science resources, but I consoled myself by saying it wasn’t about science, it was about resources; books, films, websites.  But now the division has had me running computer camps for teachers and consultants over the last few years. And now they want me to help design a math test….?  I don’t get it….

So why agree? I guess to see the inside of the machine.  With the current political agenda in Canada continuing to lean to the conservative left, I don’t think these tests are going away anytime soon so I might as well try to design a fair test that is of some use. I want to see how it’s done.  It’s the only piece of the puzzle I haven’t seen yet.

Most people in my school will tell you that I am really into computers; but that’s not really true. I am really into information and how it is designed. I like computers for the access to the world that they give me. Besides a small museum locally and a museum with a two-headed calf over in the next town (it’s true!) I am 8 hours away from a cultural institution of any size. Computers for me are about bringing the world to my students (and myself) and about bringing ourselves to the world.

I wonder a lot about what it means to be literate in our society. What do electronic texts and spaces bring to the concept of literacy? How do we involve our students in this conception of literacy?  Or are they there naturally because they are the true "digital natives?"

I downloaded a podcast recently from itconversations.com that was an interview with William Gibson, one of my favourite authors.  It was interesting because one thing he talked about was the need for bohemias to exist.  Places where ideas could cultivate and mature before being exposed to the marketplace.

It got me thinking about education.  Are schools a bohemia?  Are schools places where ideas can grow, mature and cultivate?  Do we give kids time to think, to try on new ideas, to let them grow?

Units come and go, concepts flash past, assessments loom constantly in our rear view mirrors. 

Is this education or schooling?

I really wonder how a lot of people survive. When I read the blogs of teachers like Ms. Frizzle, hipteacher and others I wonder how they get up and march into the classroom every morning.

The community I live in has around 1,000 people total. Our school has around 220 kids from K – 12 and my grade 8 class has 24 of them; it’s the biggest class in the school. I go the grocery store and see my students. I fill up with gas and a few are sure to be hanging around. When I take my own kids to the beach I end up with a few of them hanging around.

So how do you face 100+ kids every day who you don’t know? Who you will never know? How do you deal with thugs in your building, with the dangers of going to work everyday?

Somedays I think it’s a wonder they learn anything at all.

I wonder how much we need into people’s heads…..

The Thought Project

…. and how much we need to see….

Random webcams

I know it’s been all over the web in the last few weeks or months, but I love podcasting. I latched onto it when it first appeared on Slashdot and have seen the directory of podcasts in my iPodder directory grow from several hundred to now over 3500!

I’m not sure of educational uses, but with all of these feeds available, there is a lot of content to work through.  I was shoveling snow yesterday and listened to a playlist of short podcasts I had created.  In the half hour or so I was outside, I listened to two environmental programmes, one by NASA, and one on bugs.

Makes shoveling snow a little less painful.

We head into exams this week. My grade eight students write exams in Language Arts, Science, Social Studies, and Math.

I always find exams very hard to make up, because I still haven’t decided what knowledge is.  What do I want my students to know when they leave my classroom in June. Facts?  Skills? Attitudes? A combination of all of these?

The Knowledge Society Network at the University of Toronto defines knowledge as a "conceptual artifact that can be improved on."  Interesting…..

Kids don’t often think of knowledge as something that can be improved on.  I think they would define knowledge more as a collection, of "stuff" in their heads. This definition of knowledge is easy to test. Either it is in your head or it isn’t.

But how do we assess knowledge as a conceptual artifact?

This blog is mostly going to be about education. I think education is a vital force in our disturbed world and that many people in Western societies don’t realize this. As teachers and educators we have a hard enough time even trying to say firmly, “schools are about X.” We don’t even know any more. We are teachers, social workers, counsellors, coaches, etc. An old arguement I know, but more true then ever.

If schools, the actual buildings and the systems are supposed to be about education and learning, then lets actually set the system up to do that. I know and fully understand that kids need to be fed to learn. They need to be warm and safe before they even care about the history of the Roman Empire.

But how can we set up the system to let classrooms focus on learning?

The world needs educated, involved citizens.