So incredibly proud of my students…
Science project takes off for Spartanburg Day School students | GoUpstate.com: “Nearly a month of calculated planning and scientific research flew up, up and away Friday afternoon over the Spartanburg Day School athletic fields and into a cloudy sky.”
Go read the whole thing.
So how do we as teachers cultivate and encourage creativity in a human existence that doesn’t require as many gigs of organic memory?
LRB · Jim Holt · Smarter, Happier, More Productive: “It’s not that the web is making us less intelligent; if anything, the evidence suggests it sharpens more cognitive skills than it dulls. It’s not that the web is making us less happy, although there are certainly those who, like Carr, feel enslaved by its rhythms and cheated by the quality of its pleasures. It’s that the web may be an enemy of creativity. Which is why Woody Allen might be wise in avoiding it altogether.”
Fascinating read.
She is reading along with the book portion, watching the embedded videos and recording her voice as the narrator. It’s really something to observe. Then she dips into the coloring book part of the app where she colors on the iPad while describing the scene from the book she just read.
I’m hopeful that books she reads and interacts with in school will capture her imagination in the same way.
If not, our “one size fits all” edu system is doomed.
Well worth your time time to read:
How We Know by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books: “The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.”
A big thanks to Joe Bower for pointing these links from Alfie Kohn out on Twitter today:
I also have to thank Joe for being one of the inspirations for my own “de-grading” trend in the classroom this year as I continue my search for more authentic learning environments for my 8th graders and move away from traditional grading as a means of assessing what they might or might not be achieving.
Instead, we’re sending cameras into space. I’ll take that trade off anyday.
This short video sums up what I’ve learned about teaching over the last six years… get out of the student’s way and let them point you to real discovery.
Camera Into Space – a set on Flickr
“Hey, that worked!”
Exactly.
Thank you, Caroline and Ethan.
People (especially students) don’t do their best work when compensation or reward is based on intermediate performance goals:
Google Wave: Why did Google feel that Google Wave was a good product? – Quora: “In short, Google was experimenting with a drastically new model in an attempt to retain key talent and ended up getting the incentives so perversely aligned that it both directly contributed to a failed product and also compensated that failure more than what a moderate success would have been.”
One of my 8th Graders is blogging about dessert pictures she takes that remind her of books she reads (she’s an avid reader).
You should follow along…
Yes, it is awesome.
Vernier Video Physics for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store: “Vernier Video Physics for iOS brings physics video analysis to iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Take a video of an object in motion, mark its position frame by frame, and set up the scale using a known distance. Video Physics then draws trajectory, position, and velocity graphs for the object. Share video, graphs and data to facebook, your Photo Library and to your computer running Vernier’s Logger Pro software.”
I can’t tell you what this means to me as a teacher.
Wow.
We’re living in the future, folks.
Go read:
The Innovative Educator: I Learned How To Write Without School: It sounds too simple. How can people learn things if they aren’t taught the proper way? If information isn’t broken down for them into bite-sized, manageable little chunks? It’s almost like magic, and no one seems willing to believe in it. No one seems willing to believe in how much children are capable of learning and doing when they’re permitted to exist in a world where everything is interconnected.
Made me cry…
And reminded me that I “learned” about God as a kid (out of my own curiosity) even though I didn’t set foot into a church until I was 13. Not only that, I ended up realizing that I should learn more about God (in the academic sense) than most folks around me, so I did. The same happened with my personal study of science (mostly physics and astronomy) that happened completely outside of my middle and high schools.
I’ve never put together my own background with how I view/practice education in general.
Yet, the very way that I teach is completely informed by that inner voice telling me to “let go” as a teacher and let my 13 and 14 year old students learn about their world like I learned about religion and science (and coding and marketing and computer hardware or anything that I really have been interested in enough to master)… on their own and at their own speed.
Goosebumps.
