We Can Haz YouTube:

YouTube - SpartanburgDaySchool's Channel

Not bad at all... Can't wait to show this at our first teacher's meeting this Fall :)

I'm terribly excited to head to the local bookstore to pick up Sam Kean's new book on the periodic table today. For some strange reason, I find the periodic table a fascinating symbol of humanity in our continuing attempts to understand the universe around us. There is much more than just chemistry wrapped up in its columns and rows. Maybe I've read too much Oliver Sacks. Nevertheless, I try to convey that sense of awe to my students. You can read more about Kean's book on this NPR segment about The Disappearing Spoon. Good stuff.

This is certainly a catchy opening paragraph that makes you want to see what these crazy Harvard Profs are up to...

The Answer Sheet - Harvard profs dropping final exams: "Final exams are probably not anybody’s primary concern at the moment, but it is worth noting that the July-August edition of Harvard Magazine reports that many Harvard professors will no longer routinely require final exams."

However, it's not really that uncommon to forego a final exam in lieu of a major paper (or project) at the end of a semester in college. I especially found this to be the case at Yale while at grad school. Even while an undergrad at Wofford College, this was the case in many challenging and critical-thinking heavy courses. It always seemed to me that if a class was especially thought-heavy, there would be a paper at the end of the course rather than a cumulative final exam. After four years of undergrad and five years of graduate school, I can safely say that it is/was always more challenging to end a year of study with a paper than with a test. It made me reflect and look back in a much more critical fashion than if I were rehashing facts on a test. That's not to say that I don't value final exams in some circumstances. However, these types of articles really aren't pointing to a crazy new educational trend coming out of Harvard. The question becomes if we need to start looking beyond final exams in Middle or Upper/High School settings. That's a can of worms that I'm still trying to grok.

I just listened to the NPR Science Friday episode entitled Where Are The 'Hackers' Now? featuring the great Steven Levy. Ira Flatow picks Levy's always-impressive brain about his re-released Hackers book and how he sees the computer industry today being shaped by the individuals he profiled back in the 80's (Bill Gates, Richard Stallman, Woz, etc). The piece is an entertaining listen in itself (especially his comments about Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg), but what particularly caught my interest was a call-in question. A lady named Judy asks Levy if he thinks the term "hackers" has negatively impacted the "flow of consumerism" on the web:

JUDY: Well, the question that I have is just do you think or does your guest believe that hackers have contributed to a sense of unease for those of us who aren't when we're navigating the Internet? You know, we're always being warned about where to go, what information to parcel out, how easily information is captured. And do you think that that has maybe reduced the flow of, I don't know, consumerism would be my first guess because I'm an avid consumer, you know, that hackers and those warnings would have slowed down some progress that might have been made?

"Hopefully!" I would have answered in my best AdBusters reading voice of righteous indignation about the rapid deification of cultural consumerism had I been in Levy's shoes. However, I don't think Judy is equating the web itself with consumerism. Yet, it is fascinating to ponder how much the web has come to mean ecommerce rather than the spread of independent or quality information. Levy tries to answer Judy by explaining what he meant by Hackers instead of the common parlance today that shapes so much of the Good Morning Today America morning shows that profile hackers as greasy malevolents bent on destroying our local bank's encryption and shapes our educational policies. It also illuminates the brilliance of Apple's strategy of providing a suburbia of "safe" apps on its mobile devices that are free from these hack0rz out to steal our passwords. There are more hackers out there than ever, of course. Most of them are doing incredibly beneficial things for the rest of the web (and humanity). It's a shame that the word has come to be a synonym of evil intent. Blessed are the tinkerers and hackers indeed. We need more of them in our schools (as parents, teachers, admins, staff and students).

Fantastic article on cultivating creativity in Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html

"Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions."

Amen. Made me tear up when I read that portion as I reflect on my incredibly inquisitive preschool daughter and her 1,000 questions-a-day rate compared to the resistance many of my 8th Grade students have to asking questions. I hope she never changes. Ever. Nullius in verba and all that. However, out of the ruins that have become our nationalized education system at large, I see tiny daisies of local promise sprouting up. We're on the verge of a major educational reform that will occur from the ground up. It won't be an overnight process, but my childrens' children will grow up with a very different system of education that is based on creativity, critical thinking and sustainability. Viva la revolution and here's to the crazy ones.

I'm working on our GriffinScience Text(s)book for next "year" (not sure why we call them school years...) and it's coming together nicely. We aren't going to be using a standard textbook for many reasons. Cost is one, but the assumption that science can be learned via a medium like a textbook is antithetical to the scientific endeavor. Instead, I'm writing everything (along with student work during the "year" that will be incorporated into the book) that will be the backbone of our class. Of course, the students will be doing most of the work and this is a labor of love to provide them with pointers. This isn't me emptying my head and asking them to memorize the facts I proclaim. Instead, this is more of a compass for their own studies of Physical Science. All of the excerpts in the book are from primary texts by scientists and in the public domain. This will all be public domain as well. I'll have it all out there on http://texts.griffinscience.com soon if you'd like to follow along and maybe learn a thing or two about your universe from the incredible young people with whom I'll be working. Here is the HTML outline that you can expand: > GriffinScience Textsbook Here is text file with the outline you can download:

> GriffinScience TextsBook.txt And here is an .rtf file you can open in Word or Pages or OpenOffice:

> GriffinScience TextsBook.rtf I'm also wrapping up on an mp3 version as well as an iPod/iPad/iTouch app (and hopefully Android as soon as I get into the App Builder beta since I don't have time to learn a new programming language after slogging through Objective-C this summer). I'll keep you posted on when those are in the App Store. More soon!

What if Google designed a school? What if Apple designed a school? What if I designed a school?

I have grand illusions of starting a Middle School (or perhaps sculpting a Middle School) where children (and their parents) in traditional 5th-8th grades would be challenged to think critically and become relevant and informed citizens. A part of that dream is the recognition that the demands placed on the teachers would be extreme. Our current 19th century Industrial Era school system does not fit that vision and only complicates the ability of people who have a similar-minded folks who'd like to change America by making better local schools. So, it's always promising to see results from studies that are seeking out a better way. However, what I find the most telling about this report in Mother Jones is that "scalability" comes into play:

KIPP: A Limited Educational Success Story | Mother Jones: "But there's always a 'but,' isn't there? And there are a couple of them here. First, although this study design is solid — it compares kids who got into KIPP schools via lottery with kids who applied but didn't get in — it's still the case that these are kids who applied to KIPP schools. All by itself that means they and their parents are part of the upper fraction who care about education and are willing to put in the work that KIPP demands of families. That's a limited set. Second, there aren't very many KIPP schools, and their structure is a built-in reason for this: KIPP schools demand a lot of their teachers, who work very long hours and are required to be on call at all times. They pay a bit more for this, but only a bit, and this isn't a model that scales well. You can always find a small cadre of dedicated young teachers willing to put up with this, but you're never going to find the hundreds of thousands you'd need to make this work on a large scale."

I'll say this (loudly): SCALABILITY IS IRRELEVANT. Scalability is especially irrelevant in the local school setting. While I do appreciate what the KIPP program is doing and I aim to copy their schedule (7:30-5:00pm including weekends and summer schooling), I'm not an adherent of their more rote and disciplinary methods. That said, we do need a vast change in how we teach our children. The United States cannot rely on our broken public (and private) education system to continue the trend we are on (emphasis on 19th century skills and standardized public tests) because NO education is standard. Let's change the world by realizing the mistakes of the education industry (and I don't use that word lightly) that so mis-informed my generation and instead ignoring scalability and practicality in preference of applicability and local needs (which are mainly covered by the need for critical-thinking citizens).

Most folks have heard of Twitter. Most folks have heard of a teacher's lounge. Put them together and you get #edchat (link to the Twitter Search for the hashtag). edchat is simply amazing to me and points to the power of tools like Twitter for quick professional development jolts (like a much needed double-espresso). It's always a treat to dip into the stream and see what's on the minds of other teachers/educators/faculty/staff and consultants out there in the ever-changing yet constantly familiar world of education.