Boy Scouts and Teaching

I’ve not been blogging the last two weeks because I’ve been working at my summer job, teaching at a Boy Scout camp.  Some colleagues think I’m silly, teaching at a camp when it’s just like what I do in the regular school year — teaching.

Except it’s not.   Teaching summer school is exactly like teaching in a school. Teaching merit badges in a boy scout camp is NOTHING like teaching in a school.

For one, the curriculum is entirely requirement-based.  For most merit badges, there’s a list of six to eight requirements that the candidate must fulfill.  The requirements are clear, concrete, obvious, and real (for a sample, check out Meritbadge.org‘s page on the requirements for Archaeology, the merit badge I’m currently teaching).

This is not wishy-washy.  Either a scout can explain an archaeological dig, or he can’t.  Either he can show understanding of why archaeological sites should be protected, or he can’t.  Either he’s done eight hours under an archaologist, or he hasn’t.  Either he knows three careers in archaeology, or he doesn’t.

The kid sets his own motivation.  Either he works hard, puts in the necessary study, and finishes the requirements (and earns the merit badge), or he doesn’t.  It’s entirely up to him (and to some degree on the interest that the parents put into helping the kid through the process).  My scout kids are not pompous, overly privileged, or (for the most part) mean.  They are not in my experience, catty, overblown, and show no sense of entitlement.  Their ranks include goths and geeks, future Marines, jocks, nerds, wusses, freaks, and all the other categories of the tribes of high school.  But in the camp dining hall they sing silly songs, shout ridiculous chants and cheers at one another, and even get up and dance.  They are happy to be there — where they will learn to swim, fire a gun, shoot an arrow, play an instrument, paddle a canoe, hike a mountain trail, and yes, even root around (safely) in the cellars of abandoned houses.

Most of all, they are sincere.  They’re eager to learn, they’re eager to share what they know with others, and they are tremendously helpful to one another and to the adults.  If a kid sticks with scouting, and gives himself over to the effort of becoming an Eagle Scout, by the time he’s 18 he’ll have spent close to two thousand hours improving himself, helping others, and working to better his community.  There’s a reason Donald Rumsfeld (whom I would normally not quote at all) called the Eagle scout award the only thing you did at 18 that you can still put on your resume at 60 and nobody laughs.

I often wonder if teaching in the regular school year could be more like Scout Camp.  I don’t know, but I wonder… if we must have standardized education at all, maybe we could compartmentalize it more into 5-hour, 20-hour, and 100-hour units, like merit badges, and make all students learn some small number, while encouraging them to earn many many more across many categories, and certifying the results in some other way than “graduation” or a score on a “standardized test”.

Alhambra Updated

Alhambra, take 2

Here’s my renewed version of Alhambra. Call it take 2, or Version 2.0, I don’t care.

Sylvia Martinez is talking about Generation YES!, her program for helping students partner with techers. Not teachers teaching students, but students assisting teachers to understand and learn technology more effectively and successfully.

1. In a learning community, everyone has something to gain, and something to share. Kids want to be helpful and want to build things for their teachers and for each other.  Teachers are overwhelmed if they are expected to do everything alone.

2. Student tech support.  If students run tech support, they learn how to run the tools, repair the machines, build websites, trouble-shoot in their classes, and design procedures that free up our IT personnel for higher-level tasks.

3. Train students to be developers and communicators.  Send them to present to parents, school boards, community.  They can train for cyber safety, they can explain to each other and to the wider world. Example: MediaSmart Day

4. Peer Mentoring.  Peers can train freshmen to do new things, remind sophomores, retrain or boost the quality of junior work.

CMK ’09: FableVision & Minsky

FableVision threw a nice party at their Boston offices for the CMKers this evening.  They put out a moderate spread of food and beverage, but most importantly they brought out their staff — young people who were playful, courageous, clever, curious, and gentle.  Peter and Paul Reynolds spoke, explaining FableVision’s 200-year plan to encourage creativity and artistic ideas in children.  I was impressed, and I’m usually pretty cynical about such things.  Peter said at one point that he usually does his best work with a napkin sketch, but I saw later at dinner that we should take that with a grain of salt (He drew a little image of a waving heart-shaped balloon on a long string on our table later at dinner, in salt grains).

I think this is one of the things that I found most valuable about CMK’09 — the chance to connect with real, live human beings who are interested in educating children.  I love my colleagues, and I think they do wonderful things for children.  Yet at some level, we need more adults, and more kinds of adults, to be interested in what happens in school; it’s the only way to make change occur there.

Afterwards the founder of the MIT artificial intelligence lab, Marvin Minsky, held forth in their conference room for a good hour or hour and a half beyond that.  He’s clearly a smart guy, and full of a lot of important ideas.  At the very least, he’ll challenge what you believe about education and schooling and how people (particularly children) learn.

I think the most important take-away from that for me was that Minsky pointed out that evolution saves the genetic information that makes certain proteins or components that are useful for survival.  But that this doesn’t include the code of why individual entities fail. For that doesn’t get passed on, because when organisms fail badly enough, they die.  Hence stories or memes are used to explain how to survive very complicated, diffiult situations.  Evolution won’t tell you how to survive, but stories will.  The corrolary, of course, is that to really boost performance, you have to provide an environment much more challenging than something just outside “the zone of comfort.”  You need something seriously outside the realm of comfort, so that sudents will be challenged seriously to acheive much better than their usual performance.

CMK ’09: Dr. Lella Gandini

Dr. Gandini is the person I came to CMK to see.  I read a little bit about the Reggio Emilia approach; I love northern Italy; and I really wanted to understand this process of learning and teaching.  My comments will be in italics; her remarks will be in regular type.

CMK 09: When is an Image a Computer Program?

Alhambra

Attached to this blog is a picture that I’ve called Alhambra.  The Alhambra, of course, is the palace of the Caliphs of Cordoba in the province of Grenada in southern Spain.  Its name means something like “Red Fort”, and it’s a place laden with ideas of magic and mystery and fallen empires, etc., etc., etc.

This image is meant to evoke that.

Except of course, that it’s not an image. It’s a computer program.

I produced this image using TurtleArt, from TurtleArt.org.  Brian Silverman and Artemis Pappert were here at Constructing Modern Knowledge 2009, where they gave me some ideas about how to proceed with this program.  The bricks along the sides of the arch are small bits of code; so is the arch, and so is the blue background. Actually, the blue background visible through the window is the kludgiest, ugliest thing I’ve ever written.  But hey, it works.

This wasn’t easy to produce.  I could probably have produced this image much more easily by drawing it by hand, actually.  But I learned more about programming by writing the code that drew this image, than I would have by drawing it.  A gentleman at the same table is going to show me the Apple iPhone developers kit tomorrow or Thursday, and I may increase my knowledge by using Scratch tomorrow.

There’s a tremendous amount of satisfaction that I feel right now from discovering that programming need not be a mystery to me or to anyone else.  Is this a powerful, or important program? Maybe not to the world.  But it is to me.

Egregors and Schools

For reasons that initially had very little to do with school education, I’m reading John Michael Greer‘s Inside a Magical Lodge. Greer’s book is published by Llewellyn Books, which usually publishes things about Tarot, Hermetic magic, Wicca, Druidism and other texts that most public schools would likely regard with some suspicion if they turned up in a student bookbag or locker, much less in a teacher’s bag or desk. Greer himself is an archdruid in the Ancient Order of Druids in America.

One of the concepts Greer introduced me to was the concept of the egregor (or egregore), which is the essential spirit of a lodge or magical working group.  Greer likens these spirits or geniuses (or muses) to the sudden emotional change that can sweep through a crowd that turns them into a mob.  In fraternal organizations like the Freemasons and The Oddfellows and the Grange, the egregor is made up of the thoughts, actions, and individual patterns and habits of behavior of the members — but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

What does this have to do with education? Well, in Ira Socol’s piece at Change.org today, he argues (rather successfully) that the structure of modern schools was deliberately designed to separate an elite group from the lower-paid masses.  The goal was to provide every advantage for the children of the existing elites (through private schools), to find the best candidates from the vast majority of students who will be good-quality intermediate and high-level managers, and the ‘unwashed masses’.  He argues that the system is what needs to be changed, not the people in it.

And Greer’s point about Egregors suddenly comes into sudden relief.  Greer argues that when you connect an initiate of a fraternal lodge with the lodge symbology, you’re bringing them into direct contact with the subtle, spiritual energy of the lodge’s guiding spirit.  But there’s a risk when you’re forming a new magical organization — because the old spirits are out there, and they want to have a group of people to connect with magically on this side of “the veil” that separates their world from ours.  If your magical group connects with a spirit that does bad things, or at least doesn’t connect well with your your group’s intent… well, Greer says, you have to stop using the symbols that call that spirit, and probably even formally banish that spirit from being involved in your group.

Thanks to Harry Potter, we can sort of imagine what Greer is talking about even if we have no idea how magic is supposed to work.

But let’s consider our schools as magical organizations for a moment.  The state or national education department is perhaps the Grand Lodge, that maintains standards and hands out warrants to the individual schools.  The local superintendant or principal or head of school is the Master of the local lodge, and the teachers and students are members at various levels or degrees of initiation.

But all the schools are using the same symbols.  They’re all using the same symbol-set, and so they’re all seeking and using energy from the same symbolic framework — and they’re all charging the same energetic group of spirits/geniuses/muses. For my part, I can see that the egregor of a group like WildFire, where I learned to firespin, or the egregor of the Live Free or Die Tattoo Convention that left this hotel yesterday,  are much different from the egregor of my own school, and both are different from the egregor of my college or both of my graduate schools.

So let me ask…. if we were to anthropomorphize our school system, and describe it as a spirit or a god or goddess or an angel or something like the overarching Force from Star Wars, what characteristics would we assign to it? What virtues, powers, and capabilities would it possess? What symbolic tools invoke its presence? What would be its character flaws?

And is it something that we want running our lives, and the lives of our children?  And if not… how do we banish it?

Fiber Fabric & School

I’m currently in Manchester, NH, which is home to a mill complex that from the mid-1800s to early 1900s was the largest cotton-textile manufacturing center in the world.  Today, the news is that DARPA and some other companies have developed a fabric that acts as a camera.

Let’s say that it takes 5 years to bring this tool to market for the military.  Let’s say it takes another 5 to get it to the commercial sector.  Kids will come to school with videorecorder t-shirts. And ties. And jackets. And. And. And.

How would you use it?

Perhaps more importantly, how would your school ban it?

CMK ’09: Introductions

Gary Stager: Welcome! I’ve been in education for 26 years, trying to help teachers understand digital technology, and teach them about the potential in these new tools.  The digital technology teachers. Many powerful educational ideas and powerful pedagogical practices.  I got interested in computers because they made me feel creative and powerfully expressive.  These tools have the power to get kids to play and express themselves in new ways. Lots of toys, books, materials available  to you. There will be much time to experiment and invent and reflect.  We want you to get deeply engaged in project-based development.  It breaks my heart to go into a classroom and see students staring into their laptop screens on Facebook and looking for flash games to play; there’s all sorts of tools and materials around them, but they don’t know how to engage with them, because they haven’t been introduced.  We’ll have dinner tonight at a banquet facility.

Talk to brain scientists: they have tremendous humility about saying, “we don’t really know how the brain works.” Talk to ASCD members; if they’re paid-up, they know exactly how the brain works! (laughter) Why does knowing how the brain works make us better teachers? It’s like knowing how the mechanism works, does that make it easier to justify treating each child as an individual human being?

Science education is really like Bigfoot: everyone knows it exists, but no one has ever seen it.

We tend to have an additive curriculum. We keep adding to what teachers are supposed to do, and leadership requires us to subtract material from that lists.

it’s as if we had a secret meeting, and we decided that we were going to shut children out of all learning processes connected with the technology which surrounds them all their lives.

Habits of Mind: Be able to sniff out BS.  Be able to be curious, creative, persistent. Look at problems from multiple angles.  Swim in the beakers with the molecules. Put yourself into the shoes of an ancient Egyptian.  Cultivate the habits of mind first, and all things follow from that.

Computing vs. Technology; computers were the game-changer. We talk about “the technology” but it’s really the microchip that changed the game. Regardless of how much we lower our standards, the resistance remains constant.  We need to have higher standards and expectations because the resistance will remain constant regardless.

Having a good rolodex is a good thing. Everyone talks about their professional learning network or PLNs these days, but I used to call them my friends.  Now apparently you need an NSF grant to have “friends”.  Where learning occurs is where there’s a community of practice.  There need to be newbies, intermediates, masters (look, apprentice-journeyman-masters), and learning occurs across all three levels, as newbies try things, intermediates try things, masters try things.

There’s a camera in the room so if you feel like being a documentarian, you can do that.

Try to focus. Try to play.  Work with others. Play with others.  Introduce yourself around to everyone, and communicate your ideas to others.  Introductions of some of the faculty: John Stetson, master learner and tinkerer and one of the best teachers I know; Sylvia Martinez, president of Generation YES!; Cynthia Solomon, an old, old friend who was partially responsible for the LOGO programming language, recently working with OLPC; Brian Silverman, a mathematics teacher and someone with a hand in almost every programming language for kids in the last two decades – he’s involved in Scratch, built a computer out of TinkerToys, and built some Turtles (Me: I have no ideas what this means), and is an amateur mathematician [but real math, not that stuff they do in high school; that stuff should be called Ma, so it's not dignified with too many letters].

Major pieces: Brian Silverman on science, math and computing this morning.  Deborah Meier tomorrow, followed by Lesa Snider on Photoshop CS4 in the afternoon.  Dr. Lella Gandini, talking on the Reggio Emilia education method, on Wednesday.  Dr. Marvin Minsky and Peter Reynolds on Wednesday evening.  Sylvia Martinez on Thursday morning.

[ME: I am a history teacher.  I have a feeling that I'm in way over my head here... a lot of these folks are science teachers, mathematicians, and computer programming teachers... I think I'm either going to learn a lot, or be overwhelmed.  I hope the latter]

Leader Day follow-up

Yesterday, I urged bloggers everywhere on educational matters to e-mail their heads of school, principals, whoever, and let them know that Leadership Day 2009 was underway.

Then I took my own advice, and e-mailed my head.

He wrote back yesterday to say that he’d skimmed through the sites, and read a few entries, and thanks for the information.  Just a quick note — three lines, no more, and no evidence of what he’s thinking or what he read. It may all come to naught, or it may be the beginning of something wonderful.

I’m inclined to think it can be rich, though.  If you haven’t written to your principal yet about Leadership Day, it’s not too late. Go do it now.

Leadership Day 2: E-mail your Head

My new head of school just started school on July 1, 2009.  I just e-mailed him an explanation of Leadership Day 2009, and a link to the Twitter search engine so that he can learn more.  I don’t know this man at all, though his reputation and initial actions speak well.

This means that if he wants to, he can find this website, and he can read this — and everything I’ve ever written, both good and bad, that’s on the Net.

It may sink me as a teacher, it may save me.

But as anyone who’s ever been part of a major organization knows, leadership isn’t just about the guy at the top.  It’s also about the folks at the bottom helping move things forward.

So here’s my advice for the rest of us, the folks of influence but no power, online voice but little control.  E-mail your administrators a brief note explaining Leadership Day 2009, and invite them to read the conversation. Give them access to the guidelines; point them at search.twitter.com or some other place where they can find a list of the materials. In a few days you can point them at Scott’s summary list, I’m guessing.  You don’t have to include links to your own posts, but you should include links to the summaries from 2008 and 2007.  Don’t tag any particular posts as worth reading; they have their biases and interests, just as we have ours.  But let them know the conversation is taking place, and that they can be part of it.

It takes a certain bravery to stand up and invite someone to the digital conversation, particularly someone who may have hiring and firing power over you, and who may not approve of your ideas or someone else’s.  But really, it’s the only thing that allows the conversation to progress.  The people who have authority have to be invited to the conversation.

YOU, fellow bloggers, are the ones who must extend the invitation.  Stop writing blog entries, and go write an e-mail.  NOW.

And remember, Leadership Day 2009 is forever.  It doesn’t matter if they read the e-mail or handwritten note today, tomorrow, next week or next year.  The entries will still be here.  They can still read the transcript, and encounter ideas they hadn’t thought of yet.  But they still must know the conversation is there.

Don’t give in to fear.  Go write to them. Now.  Be a leader.