It's Not About Time

Anyone who has lived and worked in a boarding school will be familiar with this refrain: "We don't have enough time."  Some variant of this mantra animates my daily rounds at school --

"We need more time"
"If only we could devote time to [name the lapsed priority]"
"This is a waste of time"
"If you want me to do that, you'll need to create some time"

Teachers know the wonders that we can work each day, but are well aware that they are miracles in minature-- frustrating, incremental steps towards progress in our students and our systems that we will mark in years, not days.  Who better to deeply understand the longer time scales of institutional change?  Who better to reckon with the boundaries that precious few minutes can create in our work?

So why are we so bound and determined to make time our master?  Instead of waiting for someone else to create the space in which to do our best work, what if we looked within?

Let's start by accepting the proposition that there just isn't enough time.  Especially in the boarding school world, we live with the constant tension of home and work, our families and our students, our grading and our restorative intellectual (or decidedly non-intellectual) pursuits.  The challenge of living is to make peace with the fact that our time is finite -- that in devoting time to one enterprise, we ultimately end up shortchanging another.  We never have enough time.  So it goes with mortality.

I created time to sit and write this morning.  The space to sit is not an outgrowth of my mastery of the quantum bounds of the universe, but rather a conscious decision to marshal my morning pool of creative energy into reflection, rather than my email inbox.  In reality, this reflective act is not a decision of how to use my time, but rather, how to distribute my attention.  I'd argue that taking 15 minutes to write reflectively each day is actually one of the best uses of our attention on behalf of ourselves and others.  I'm not the first person to articulate the powerful difference between time and attention, but I'm struck by how often I hear time cited incorrectly as the obstacle to being our best selves. 

In a real way, adopting the lens of time leads to a kind of willing powerlessness.  "I don't have enough time" is a statement that implies that we have ceded control over the distribution of our efforts to someone else.  Sure, for those of us who have to get up each morning and go to work, this is true to some extent.   If we looked deeply at the ways in which we distributed our attention while at work, however, we might find that opportunities do exist to use it in more productive and fulfilling ways.  By focusing on our investments of attention, rather than our allocation of time, we make an empowering declaration of control in a world that seems all too out of control otherwise.  To get there, we need to take a hard look at ourselves, and keep a more careful accounting of our attention. 

School leaders (and I don't mean "administrators" when I use this term ... about this topic more later) can empower others by adopting the paradigm of attention in their decision making, asking:

How does this project I'm working on make use of my colleagues' attention?
Is there some other way to harness or consolidate attention on this project and others?
Are my behaviors unintentionally draining attention that could be better directed elsewhere?  [see: our broad misuse of email]

Creating time for someone, or for oneself, is no guarantee that it will be time spent wisely.

Choosing a different way to distribute our attention may actually be the solution we've been searching for the whole time. 

Oliver Sacks and the Stories Behind the Science

"Never forget: beneath the statistics, there are stories." 

My students and I stumbled onto this essential, but often forgotten truth yesterday in my ninth grade Global Seminar course.   It was one of those rare moments where a conversation turns and creates language for something that one has sensed but not previously had the perception, power, or capacity to express in any kind of coherent shape.

The wisdom emerged from a lesson on the European migrant crisis.  As we frame up our work in the course for the year, this topic connects us to so many important conversations that will unfold in the months to come.

• Are our traditional ideas about nationhood adequate for understanding the current geopolitical landscape? 
• How does an impact in one area of a global system produce intended and unintended consequences in another?  
• As global citizens, what responsibilities do we have to each other? 

We struggled through the conversation.  The issue is complex, frustrating the simple cause and effect thinking that schooling may have required of many in the room prior to their arrival in high school.  Along the way, we surfaced some uncomfortable opinions, including talking points culled from the debate on US immigration policy that has dominated the early portions of the current US election cycle.  

When confronted with rhetoric like this that too easily reduces complex debates to simple platitudes, I tend, by training, to turn to stories.   In this case, we were able to draw on our all school read, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat.  In the novel, readers meet the Hatian protagonist Sophie, whose mother has immigrated to the US prior to the opening of the narrative, and sends for Sophie to join her in New York in the opening pages.   In the summary/synthesis exercise that closed the class, I prodded the students to draw the threads of the European migrant crisis together with Sophie's lived experience of arrival and integration in New York.  Slowly, the insights emerged, moving beyond the rhetoric to consider the human scale of the problem.

While reading the New Yorker later that evening, I happened upon Atul Gawande's remembrance of the late Oliver Sacks -- a meditation on Sacks' singular gifts, but also on what narrative storytelling has to offer to the field of scientific writing:

"'Studies, yes,' he wrote in the preface, but 'why stories, or cases?' Because, he explained, the understanding of disease cannot be separated from the understanding of the person. They are interwoven, and this has been forgotten in our era of scans, tests, genetics, and procedures. He compared the modern clinical practitioner to the man who mistook his wife for a hat—able to register many details yet still miss the person entirely. 'To restore the human subject at the centre—the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject—we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale.;"

While the conventional wisdom in schools silos the fields of English, History and Science, there is "real-world" richness in the areas of elision between them.   In order to go about answering some of the biggest questions we can ask in our classrooms, we need to think beyond our artificial structures. We are drawn to narrative -- the arc from mystery, to conflict, and perhaps, to resolution.  How healthy and freeing to to inhabit the perspective of another, no matter how brief the stay.  The "stickiness" of narrative in the human consciousness suggests that teachers are well served to consider the following questions in the design of our course units and activities:

• How do we learn to see the texture of a human life? 
•  Which methods of inquiry and analysis allow us to best capture the complexity of a real-world situation? 
•  How to the decisions we make each day impact someone a world away?

Beneath the statistics, there are stories.  "Suffering, afflicted, fighting," but also laughing, celebrating, and healing.  The trick is learning how to hear them. 

"This is Water": David Foster Wallace on Education, Freedom, and Paying Attention

One of the ways I'm working to grow professionally is in my ability to model and support effective digital storytelling.   The combination of engaging story-craft and compelling digital media transforms a traditional mode of discourse into something even richer and multi-layered for the audience, multiplying meaning and impact.


When I roll out projects of this kind in the future, I plan to use a video remix of David Foster Wallace's 2005 Commencement Speech, "This is Water."  On its own, the speech conveys powerful and simple truths about the nature of consciousness and experience, opening out to consider the ways in which education sharpens our ability to pay attention, and thus to transform the way we think about the"boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life." Ordinarily considered interstitial filler, these humdrum slogs become powerful moments of revelation, and surprisingly apt subjects for the august occasion of the commencement speech.

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom."

This, Wallace submits, is the true power of an education -- the sharpening of attention and awareness.  Put another way, education-- with storytelling at its core-- is the critical equipment that allows a student to make a wise choice about the narratives unfolding in his or her environment, and,  as a matter of considered practice, to configure meaning where others may fail to grasp it.  

On Alternatives to Fractured (Fractious?) Curriculum

In his seminal, Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School, Sizer defines a new organizing approach as an alternative to traditional departmental silos.

1. Inquiry and Expression
2. Mathematics and Science
3. Literature and the Arts
4. Philosophy and History

In essence, these quadrants are the building blocks of an education for citizenship -- each element a contributor to a student's capacity to define and express his or her own values.

Reorganizing has the ancillary benefit of helping to contextualize knowledge more authentically, moving away from what Sizer characterizes as the, "Splintered view of knowledge that usually confronts high school students."  Indeed, Sizer continues, "their world rarely uses the fine distinctions between academic disciplines" (134).  Neither does the adult world, I would argue.

In a consolidated landscape, teacher training transcends the disciplinary, opening more room to focus on techniques to foster the development of essential student skills. Sizer utilizes the paradigm of coaching to describe effective student and teacher training -- a skill we who work in residential boarding schools appreciate and apply on a daily basis.  To Sizer, "good coaching cuts across academic specialization" (134).  Instead of investing our energies in defending our departmental garrisons from incursion, teachers have the opportunity to find common ground in the ways that we think and see in our fields, and to help students better appreciate these connections.

One can imagine the forging of a transdisciplinary framework where students gain the building blocks of curricular knowledge -- or what we call "requirements" in our current parlance -- in common seminars organized around a theme, or a real-world problem.

• Communication: English, History, and Arts combine to approach essential skills of communication through writing, oral and digital storytelling both creative and historical, and other visual media.
• Inquiry and Reasoning: Arts, Math, Science and History combine to approach the quest to derive meaning from diverse sources of information and data.  Infographics and other forms of data visualization are great examples of structuring intelligible meaning from static sources. 
• Movements as Patterns of Thinking: A variety of the traditional disciplines can combine to form a chronological or thematic look at major thought movements, equipping students to study these ideas both within the world at the time of their conception, but also as critical lenses through which to evaluate the development of modern thought, and human artifacts of various descriptions.  Romantic Thought in Poetry, Art and Science could be one example. 

An idea that I have been toying with here as a bridge to more of this sort of work in our curriculum is a common essential question for school-wide, or grade-wide, consideration.  

• What is the "good life"?  
• What is the proper role of a just person in an unjust world?  
• How does the velocity of the modern world impact our relationships-- human and non-human? 
• What are the hallmarks of a robust community? 
• How do we know when "enough is enough?"  

While a more substantive reorganization of our curriculum -- and with it the comfortable, recognizable rhythms of our lives in schools -- requires far more thought and debate (justly so, I'd add) asking each class to ponder a common question initiates a dialogue between teachers about shared skills and ideas. On behalf of our students, who have been dutifully plugging away, trying to assemble coherence from the fractured menu of high school content, it is about time we searched for this common ground. 

Weekend Reboot: September 14-15

Life in any school marches to a hectic, "always on" drumbeat.  Each week, I collect articles to inform my thinking about education, to be digested when 
life slows down to a more appropriately reflective, weekend pace. 

Off we go with the start of the year.  One week of classes in the book, and I'm starting to see my students' personalities emerging from behind the masks of reticence that abound in the first days in a ninth grade classroom.  Transitions are on my mind this week.  As teachers, my colleagues and I are asked to shift gears from self-indulgent days of summer to the selfless energies of the classroom.  The ninth-graders I work with each day find themselves in another vortex entirely-- new school, new peers, new rituals and routines.  In most cases, the culture shock means that students are navigating life away from home for the first time, and coping with academic struggles that were unthinkable just months ago.

Little wonder, then, that an article on emerging work in the area of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) tops my list this week.

• "'Growth Mindset' Gaining Traction as a School Improvement Strategy": Education Week profiles schools using the pioneering "mindset" research of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck to drive improved student outcomes.  

• In an innovative school, what is the proper relationship between teachers, courses, and content?  Ben Olin's piece, "When Memorization Gets in the Way of Learning" urges teachers to mix memorization and meaning to build enduring understandings. 

• To take things a bit further, what is the appropriate interplay between students and content in a truly innovative school? The answer may lie in the intentional cultivation of creators, and not simply consumers, of content -- a theme I'm hoping to explore in more detail as the year evolves. The always excellent "Hybrid Pedagogy" pushes a radical extension of this ideal in "The Digital Humanities is about Breaking Stuff".  Time to move beyond simply "building stuff" and "sharing stuff," argues author Jesse Stommel,  towards an investigative mode that interrogates conventional wisdoms, and reshapes or remixes the building blocks of tradition. 

Dig in!  I hope you'll find something here that challenges you to think in new ways, and that you'll share in kind. 

Our Educational Labors: on "Artisinal Teaching"

Poetry has power to illuminate, allowing us to see the commonplace or everyday anew.  While the ninth graders I teach have varying feelings about matters poetic, they respond impressively when asked to untangle a few lines.  When presented as a mystery to be understood, a code to be unlocked -- as opposed to august and distant monuments of learning, cobbled from oblique literary terms -- poems speak to the pattern makers in all of us.  Often, I will set a poem beside one chapter from a novel, using it as a fulcrum to elicit discussion on a theme, or to cast new light on the arc of a particular character's journey.  Conversations gain additional depth as the students follow a thread into the labyrinth, emerging with wisdom otherwise obscured.

So it was with interest that I read the rather clever and unexpected explication of Robert Frost's "After Apple Picking" in Marjorie Pryce's recent essay "Artisinal Teaching".   Pryce's thesis is, in essence, that we commodify education at our peril, and that there is still a vibrant role for the small and local in informing that most crucial transaction of the enterprise -- the dialogue of student and teacher.   Using the poem, and some well placed musings on her strivings as a would-be pickle entrepreneur, Pryce unlocks the truth that in our rush towards standardization and MOOC-ification, we risk, "Becoming mere sorters and graders as the students come rumbling down the cellar bin, some inevitably falling and failing 'as of no worth.'"   

Summer Reads: Independent Schools

(Flickr/cantonpubliclibrary)

The arrival of deep summer finds many teachers truly unwinding after a long school year.
For me, that means a chance to make a dent in the pile of books that inevitably accumulates through a mix of aspiration and good intention during the months where much energy flows towards work.

We have the same aims for our students, as independent reading quickly cultivates other admirable habits of mind such as curiosity, empathy, and even grit (it requires some serious follow-through to eschew the lazy temptations of summer long enough to read something cover-to-cover).

While I am a proponent of sending our students off to the summer with a fat stack of texts that might reasonably spark some new interest, or offer a unique angle of vision on the coursework that lies ahead of them, I am aware that others would have students unburdened by long reading lists (one parent at our school woefully recounted the experience of buying four additional books -- course specific assignments -- to crown the three we require as a baseline).  Summer reading cannot be undertaken with the independent or carefree spirit which we aspire to cultivate -- the argument goes -- if it is compulsory.  Some would have students free to assemble their own stacks, or free of summer reading completely -- after nine hard months of school, time out from the intellectual enterprise keeps them balanced and sane.

I hear the counterarguments, but feel that our duty as educators to support our students' developing media and cultural literacy outweighs the impulse to simply "let them be."  When done well, summer reading galvanizes further discussion, incites new curiosities, and brings community together in conversation around a shared set of questions and ideas.    Instead of starting from scratch each September, our campuses (physical and virtual) can be vibrant centers for ideas year-round.   The rich classroom thread picked up in week one of the school year can be traced back to July or August's interaction with a text. 

I have written a companion post, arriving soon, to outline what's on this educator's book list for the summer, but I also thought it might be worth having a look around the world of local independent schools for lists of books (required and otherwise) that students will be reading.  Perhaps there is a title here that you'll want to put on the radar of your favorite high schooler, or even pick up yourself!

Teaching Through Tragedy

As are many of you who might come to read this post, I am up late and haunting the house, attempting to generate some sense of meaning in the wake of today's tragedy at the Boston Marathon. I offer these thoughts out of honor and respect for those who were impacted today, either directly or indirectly-- not as any sort of pIublic declaration, but as a way of processing the trauma in an internal way.  Those of us who write often feel impelled to set down our thoughts in various forms, but never more so in times like this, in part to make something coherent out of something so senseless.  As a teacher, I feel that urgency to respond a bit more acutely.  Our students will be looking to us for that same coherence when we arrive in classrooms tomorrow morning.  The best I will be able to offer them is this-- some evidence of my own struggle to normalize the presence of uncertainty and grief. 

Full disclosure: my second day as a fully fledged professional educator was September 11, 2001.  As the school community attempted to piece together the tragic images and reporting from our (on that day) even more acutely remote-feeling outpost in Connecticut's Housatonic Valley, I remember sensing that I had turned a corner from adolescence to adulthood.  Students were now looking to me for meaning, explanation, reassurance, and I had precious little to offer.  In the face of something so generationally significant, not many could, beyond simply open ears and a steady shoulder. 

In the years since, I have taught through tragedy in varying degrees and have arrived at the conclusion that we see the best of schools at the worst of times.  Some of these hurts are still so raw that the pain returns anew on days like this; we know that students of all backgrounds in our communities are struggling with their own grief--no matter the source-- in similar fashion.  As the news from Boston unfolds, we will grapple with deep sadness and search for ways to support those who have been impacted in some way.   Our conversations on a school campus revolve around how to best work through these traumas with our students; they are apt to be most keenly affected by an event whose roots we do not-- and may not --understand, and whose particulars have unfolded in excruciatingly graphic detail on air and online.  WBUR's CommonHealth Blog offers guidance from child psychiatrist Dr. Gene Beresin on "How to Talk to Children About Boston Marathon Bombs"; others have circulated widely Fred Rogers' famous advice to "Look for the Helpers."  All good advice, and well worth repeating.  What can we really say to make sense of tragedy on an unimaginable scale? Tragedy replayed so soon after Newtown, and Aurora?  Tragedy that unfolds against the backdrop of international tensions on the Korean peninsula, and seemingly daily bombings of equal or greater magnitude in places like Iraq and Afghanistan?  The school bell rings (or metaphorically rings, in our community) tomorrow at the usual time, just as it will at schools across the Commonwealth, and we will begin the work of speaking, again, to our students about the unfathomable.

The Connected Classroom as Conduit to Global Community

"Only Connect ..."  -- E.M. Forster, Howard's End 

For years, the assessment I conducted in my English classroom was, in essence, a single-channel dialogue between teacher and student.  The student considers the prompt and puts thoughts to the page.  The teacher responds with commentary.  The student rewrites, perhaps making meaningful use of the teacher's feedback in a way that promotes enduring understanding. Repeat until June. 

Over time, and with the benefit of wisdom that trial and error makes possible, I have refined my thinking about the essential nature of the transaction that takes place each day in the classroom.   As technology becomes more ubiquitous and affordable in schools -- both institutionally deployed, and carried in our students' bookbags each day --  our classrooms now can become platforms for networks and conversations, with the scope of assessment broadening to include all participants in the room.  My aim in planning both the formative and cumulative assessments in my classes is now to promote conversational and connected interactions with the material, and a responsive feedback process that increases the accountability not only on both sides of the traditional channel of teacher and student, but also through the additional channels of peer interaction.

This year, I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to tackle a number of new challenges.  Beyond the work I am doing as a part of my school's academics office, I am also teaching our "Third Form Seminar" course -- an introduction to global studies and essential academic skills for 9th graders.  As in other Third Form Seminar classes, my students are connecting with the global community by reading from a list of newspapers published outside of the United States.  They are also connecting with each other through a course group on the social bookmarking service, Diigo. By sharing their bookmarks and annotations each week, they are gaining a broader view of issues of global consequence than they would if the course simply hewed to the traditional, single-channel dialogue between teacher and student. Our discussions of globalization and trade are now richer for our collective awareness of the issues of consequence to citizens in other parts of the world. 

While technology's capacity to transform classrooms in this way is appropriately labelled disruptive to the status quo in education, in reality, these tools are allowing us to become more faithful to the connectedness that is intrinsic to human nature.  Some bemoan the loss of the human element in the digital world of MOOC's and asynchronous delivery of course content online, but it is worth considering the ways to optimize the connective power of our schools and classrooms. 

Sunday Reads

A short sampling of what I have been reading this week:

"The Social Networks of Emily Dickinson, Paul Gaugin, and Charlotte Bronte":  Do social networks foster creativity? 

"Curation in the Age of Abundance": Curation is a developing buzzword in education circles, as well as in the world of ideas online-- the work of Maria Popova at Brainpickings, in particular.  This article draws a thread from ongoing conversation at SXSWEDU 2012, envisioning a shift from educators as deliverers of content to curators of inspiration.  Side links in the article to Austin Kleon's "Steal Like an Artist" and Popova's "Curator's Code".

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams announced his plans to step down this week.  One of my favorite Williams moments was his discussion with author Philip Pullman (the His Dark Materials Trilogy) regarding the role of religion in modern life.  Here they are as a part of a BBC "Start the Week" Podcast and the continuation of the Dark Materials Debate (via Telegraph UK).

"I Was a Cookbook Ghostwriter" a food industry confessional written by Julia Moskin , a former cookbook scribe who tells all about the cult of the celebrity chef, and those who toil -- sometimes in obscurity -- to reproduce a chef's style in a set of recipes (via The New York Times). 

"30 Ideas for Teaching Writing": A collection of ideas, reflections and resources to enrich the experience of writing in the classroom (via The National Writing Project).  I have used "metawriting" techniques (#8) very successfully in the past, in the form of self-diagnostics and proces-based writing conferences. 

"9 PBL On-Line Resources that Put Students at the Center": Using tech tools to generate a richer, more inclusive, and student-driven dialogue.  (via Michael Gorman)


"Toward an Architecture of Place": The Project for Public Spaces (PPS) on using architecture to create a cohesive sense of context in public space, and considering human aspect of place-making in particular.

Edible Institute 2012 Recap: A useful overview of current ideas and discussion in the world of local food, sustainable agriculture, and ethical eating.  In three parts: I, II, III (via Be Food Smart)

The Future of the Book

Apple's iBooks Author hit the wires last week, with the education world alternately praising the innovation of the self-publishing model, and condemning Apple for taking a piece of the action (or for "Unmasking the Death Star" ... depending on whom you ask).  More on Author, and its impact on the independent school world, anon.  This new development in publishing has me thinking of a piece I saw some time back, IDEO'S "The Future of the Book" 


The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

29 Ways to Stay Creative

There's no time like the new year to revamp your strategies for success both at home and in the workplace.  Sure, given the volume of resolutions that go unfilled by year's end, starting over on January 1 might seem like setting oneself up for failure (why not March 1st?  September 18th?).  This year, I'm hoping to set in motion some simple, easy habits of mind and rhythms of life that will provide a positive rate of return.

On that note, here are 29 Ways to Stay Creative


29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo.

I'm already drinking coffee (#8), so I've got that going for me... which is nice.  

As I re-energize my writing and thinking in this space over the next year, I'm sure that you, gentle reader, will find these strategies informing my work.  Chiefly, the potentially isolating work of teaching is one of the issues I'm hoping to address as I improve my effectiveness in the classroom and expand my PLN (Personal Learning Network).  To that end, I am grateful for those who have helped in offering me feedback (#12), and who will be creative partners in collaboration (#13).

What the musings gathered here offer us is a way to make our peace with the modern working world.  Though the myth of the individual innovator abounds, we are more effective when we network with other creative people (#11), and allow ourselves to be imperfectly human (#14, #16, #25).  Here's to more instructive errors, and creative success in 2012.

A World Class Education ... For Free

Your seat is waiting in lecture halls and classrooms all over the world.   The 21st century classroom is networked and global, with universities leading the way in breaking down the traditional barriers to entry.

Among the leaders are MIT Open CourseWare and Open Yale Courses.  Still more content can be found on iTunesU and lectures from PBS and NPR's Forum Network.  Finally, TED Talks offers a chance to watch lectures by the world's thought leaders on a wide variety of topics: technology, sustainability, globalization, music, and even tying one's shoes in a properly innovative fashion. 

Perhaps most germane to your high school experience are enrichment courses offered by Khan Academy and HippoCampus, both designed to provide a series of videos explaining concepts from topics like Algebra, Calculus, Chemistry, History, Physics, and even SAT Prep.

Sure, you could continue to see the internet as purely a social vehicle, and a time waster.  While the internet is very good at providing a platform purely for entertainment, the emergence of video content provides the potential for more robust educational experience, informed by the same traits we seek in our diversions.   The keys to the world's libraries are in your hands; use them!

UPDATE (10/18): Mind/Shift offers up "10 Open Education Resources You May Not Know About (But Should)" in honor of the OpenCourseWare Consortium's celebration of 10 years of OpenCourseWare.  Check it out! 

Summer Reads!

(Mortsan/ Flickr)

July 4th, that most quintessential of summer holidays, has come and gone.  For me, this is the point in my summer when I finally feel the grip of school start to loosen, and take up the projects I have neglected for the previous nine months of the year.  Among them is the decadent luxury of reading --at length--for pleasure.

I hope you'll settle in on the porch, at the beach, or even at a local coffee shop with great book for an afternoon or two this summer.  

Looking for titles?  Check out these lists:
NPR's Summer Reads 2011
The Guardian (UK) "1000 Novels Everyone Must Read"
NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) "Summertime Favorites"

My favorite independent book shop, The Harvard Bookstore, also maintains user friendly lists: check out their slick Top 100, and Staff Fiction Suggestions.  Their homepage, complete with interactive store window display, is an engaging example of a bricks and mortar business adapting to the new 21st century landscape of digital bookselling.  Not to be too preachy, but remember to buy locally, and support the businesses that make your community a unique place to live.

Read on, readers!

Biodiversity as Natural Capital

Diversity is more than just a mantra. Beyond the mission statements, glossy admissions brochures, and announcements at meeting time, we feel the importance of diversity intuitively, viscerally. Are we hard wired to seek diversity? On a more rudimentary level, does a healthy society require diversity? Public Radio International's fascinating daily program The World features a story today, "Biodiversity as Natural Capital" about the work of Thomas Lovejoy, who examines the importance of biodiversity to our ecosystems.

The Elusive Small House Utopia

The Elusive Small House Utopia is a fascinating recent article from the NYT Magazine, both for what it says about what we want from shelter these days, as well as what we might desire at some point in the imagined future. What sort of future will it be? How might we create a home ground that actually might work to enable our utopian vision of the future? Local boy Thoreau gets a mention (of course), but the Home for a New Economy is not gunning for anything quite so radical as his 10 x 15 foot hermitage. Think 1,700 - 2,000 square feet.

What does your ideal home look like, and what does that say about you?

Banned Books Week

Happy Banned Books Week! Check out the American Library Association's list of the Top 100 Banned or Challenged Books, 2000-2009.

Achieving Techno Literacy

From the recent New York Times Magazine Education Issue (9/16/10): Achieving Technological Literacy. A collection of observations gleaned from Kevin Kelly's experiences homeschooling his eighth grade son, the article offers some wisdom regarding the proper role of technology in a school setting. Kelly recommends the following course for educators teaching Technological Literacy:

* Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused. Look for its costs.

• Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything you need until the last second. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete.

• Before you can master a device, program or invention, it will be superseded; you will always be a beginner. Get good at it.

• Be suspicious of any technology that requires walls. If you can fix it, modify it or hack it yourself, that is a good sign.

• The proper response to a stupid technology is to make a better one, just as the proper response to a stupid idea is not to outlaw it but to replace it with a better idea.

• Every technology is biased by its embedded defaults: what does it assume?

• Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. The crucial question is, what happens when everyone has one?

• The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful.

• Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.

What does "Technological Literacy" mean to you, and what sorts of skills ought we to be teaching to students headed for the 21st century marketplace of ideas?

A Haiku for You

Here is an excerpt from Paul Muldoon's Haiku cycle, "News Headlines from the Homer Noble Farm"

III.

"He has, you will find,
two modes only, the chipmunk:
fast-forward; rewind."

(from Moy, Sand and Gravel, 2002).

Click below for my crude reading of Muldoon's haiku:

Don't Eat the Marshmallow!

TED Talks are enlightening, uplifiting, and entertaining. Sometimes, I ask students to watch one before class, and use it to jump start the discussion the next day.

This one always hooks the students (many of whom would have eaten the marshmallow too soon):



Head on over to TED to find some other "Ideas Worth Spreading."