My employer wants to standardise our curriculum
I have no problem with him doing that
as long as he doesn’t expect me to teach it that way
He’d have to standardise the kids, first
I dare him
Poem for a Businessman
November 30, 2009 at 6:26 pm (education)
Tags: bad poetry, conversations with a brick wall, standardised curriculum
Take Your Adult To Life Day
November 10, 2009 at 3:43 pm (education)
Tags: adolescence, envy., Radio Free School, Robert Epstein, take your kid to work day, teenagers, The Case Against Adolescence
Radio Free School recently put up a blog about changing the way we view teens. I spend most of my time with teenagers; I actually think they’re not much different from adults. I take that back: most of the time, they’re easier to get along with.
RFS quotes Robert Epstein’s The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen: “Our views can reasonably be conceived of as a kind of irrational prejudice programmed by our culture-almost precisely the kind that mainstream Americans bore towards women and blacks until very recent times,” says Epstein.
They then say: What we need then is more avenues, more opportunities for this to take place-for adults and kids to come face to face in meaningful ways. Take your kid to school day won’t cut it.
I want to hear your ideas and experiences on what can be done (what is being done) to restore the continuum. Please write in.
Some of the suggestions include getting rid of high school and put the kids into something more like apprenticeship work programmes. Not a bad idea. Why do we expect children to go to school until they’re about 23 years old, and then go into work? Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
I’d like to flip it around a bit, though. Rather than having the kids live our lives for a day, how about we live theirs? What if each teenager got to make an adult get up three hours earlier than they wanted to, hang around school for 7 or 8 hours, work a crappy job for a few hours, then do two or three hours of homework? They could also make the adults sit on the floor in a big, affectionate pile and talk about love, religion, politics, society, etc. They could make the adults listen to music which makes them feel extreme emotions. They could show the adults what it feels like to risk their health-and-well-being by leaping fences, BMXing, fleeing the schoolyard in a frenzy of parkour or crossing the road against the light. They could make the adults try something new or do something unpleasant just because it’s good for their character.
The teenagers didn’t choose this lifestyle for themselves: adults created it for them. We decided this was good for them, and then we complain because they don’t act like adults. I think we’re just ticked off with them because they still have youth and freedom and all those things we want to have but got rid of in favour of careers and money and material goods. I think if our society is to the point where someone has the audacity to write a book about why we don’t like a whole group of people, maybe the fault is really, really easy to pinpoint.
Out of the Mouths of Babes
October 31, 2009 at 6:50 pm (Creativity, education)
Tags: education, living, love, they blew my mind, Tom Milsom
Jesus, Mary, Mohammad and Vishnu.
You’ll have to watch Tom Milsom’s video first (the one down below), but then scroll down a little and watch all the responses.
Science, religion, history, biology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology….
Utterly, wickedly cool.
Forget This Universe…
October 23, 2009 at 4:43 pm (education)
Tags: children, Khalil Gibran, new planets, Radio Free School
Macleans Unschooling Article
October 16, 2009 at 1:31 am (education)
Tags: Blake Boles, College Without High School, Macleans, unschooling
University Without High School
The article ain’t much; the book is better.
Guide the Guidance Counselor with a Leash
October 13, 2009 at 4:52 pm (education)
A friend of mine just put her son back into the school system. He had been homeschooled for Grades 7 and 8, but wanted to try high school. The decision was rather last-minute and my friend didn’t have a portfolio put together (not that she could have done much anyway, as a good deal of her son’s learning was unschooling). Their local school had insisted the boy sign up for Grade 9 applied levels for everything, because he would have to “catch up” to everyone else.
Homeschooling does not mean not learning.
The boy was transferred to academic levels this week because he was getting 100% in everything. His mother is leaving him in applied English for next semester because he has no interest in English and doesn’t really care about literature; her son is not likely to go to university but if he does it certainly won’t be for English. Seems reasonable to me.
While I will gladly tear strips off the stupid guidance counselor who guided this family so very badly, I suppose I must consider the chicken-or-egg theory. Who taught this guidance counselor to be a guidance counselor? There are many homeschoolers in that area, so it can’t be the only exposure the guy had to alternative education. Are the school boards doing anything to ensure their employees are able to do their jobs? I realise funds are tight but it wouldn’t cost them anything to have a couple of homeschoolers come in to talk with a new guidance counselor.
Walaikum recently had to write an essay about whether Canadians view post-secondary education as credential or educational. He did a great job on it. However, we spent about an hour and a half talking about the differences between the two adjectives. The concept of education purely for the sake of knowledge is a difficult thing for Walaikum to handle yet he deliberately asked questions until he understood. If a high school student is able to do that, why can’t a guidance counselor?
Standardised Testing
October 5, 2009 at 3:11 pm (Reading, education)
Tags: mixing elements, rant, testing, who do they think they are?
A cousin of mine is a Reading Recovery specialist in the US. Apparently, they have standardised testing – just as we do in Ontario – and she is having to prepare first-grade students for a written test in their second week of school, and give them weekly spelling tests of nonsense words. She wrote a letter to my mother in which she complained about having to give up 20% of her teaching time to prepare the kids for these ridiculous tests. My mother forwarded the letter to me. I think my mother likes my rants. 
Business dudes who are very good at business may be quite useful when one is organising a school; most educators are not likely to be very good at the business side of things because they’re too busy concentrating on the students. If I ever get to open a school, I’ll definitely hire some business dude. But the business dude will never be allowed in my school when the students are there.
It’s like the elements: air and fire are both perfect elements but if there is too much air either the fire gets blown out or it rages out of control. Add the wrong kind of air and you get a pretty nifty explosion which is fun to watch until all the particles fall back to earth and make a royal mess.
Do you have any suggestions for the improvement of education? Great! Write them down on a piece of paper and we’ll circulate it amongst the students (’cause they’re the ones who are doing the learning… and even paying us to teach them), and we’ll see what they think. If any of the Grade 1 students want to write essays and spell nonsense words, we’ll give you a call. In the meantime, here are some nonsense words for you to study for next week: freedom, democracy, reason.
Idols
October 4, 2009 at 6:13 pm (education)
I remember the day I fell in love with Berthe Morisot. It was in Grade 10. We had a new art teacher because the old one (one of my favourite people, who later became my mentor) had gone off the deep end and had to take a little break from teaching. I was mightily ticked off by the whole situation; even if the new art teacher had been a good one, I wouldn’t have admitted it. (The next art teacher was a good one, but I pretended I didn’t like him either.)
The new art teacher even had us use a text book. A text book. For art? Yep. E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art. The new teacher even had us start at the beginning of the text book and work our way through it in chronological order.
On page 407 of The Story of Art is an image of Manet’s The Balcony. Berthe Morisot is the seated woman. When I discovered she was a real person – Manet’s sister-in-law – I started researching. Not only was she astoundingly beautiful, she was an Impressionist; I loved her for her audacity to stand up to art snobs and sexists, alike. I loved her paintings. I loved the group of people she hung out with. I wanted to be Berthe Morisot.
Morisot is still one of my ideals. She reminds me of Virginia Woolf. Woolf provides me with a mirror for the dichotomy of my life, and Morisot brings light to the dark places.
My favourite Morisot painting is The Butterfly Hunt. The tree in the top right-hand corner is the best thing ever painted. 
Modern Ode to the Modern School
September 30, 2009 at 6:14 pm (Creativity, education)
Tags: poetry, John Erskine, Modern Ode to a Modern School, stuck in my head
I was given this poem in Grade 13. It’s been in my collection ever since. It’s been stuck in my head for several months now, so I thought I’d get it stuck in someone else’s head, too.
Modern Ode to the Modern School, by John Erskine
Peacock is finally interesting
September 26, 2009 at 3:19 am (education)
Tags: murder?, Thomas Love Peacock, Walaikum
It’s 11:17 p.m.
Walaikum’s essay is due at midnight (the school uses turnitin.com).
The boy is fascinating.
