My very first teaching job was in a brand new charter school in Fort Collins, Colorado, called Pioneer School for Expeditionary Learning. (It’s now called Polaris.) And our director there, as a way of helping people better understand why our school did things so differently, used to tell this story:
There's a tradition in his family of cutting the Thanksgiving turkey in half before cooking it. It's something his mother did, and her mother, and hers. When it came time for him to cook his own turkey, he asked his mother why they cut it in half instead of baking it whole. "That's just the way we've always done it," she said.
So he asked his grandmother the same question, and she said, "When my mother came to this country, the oven in our house was so small that a whole turkey wouldn't fit, so we had to cut it in half. I just thought that was the way it was done, so I cooked mine that way, too." And so a tradition was born that at one time had reason, creativity, and problem solving behind it, but by the time it reached the twenty-first century, no one knew why it was that way anymore, and it was no longer necessary.
This is the story of education in America. Maybe, a hundred or more years ago, there was a good reason for the way children are still being taught, but those same methods don't work today. We're using them out of a sense of tradition, or maybe out of fear that if we don't, children will experience a terrible loss. Of what? I don't know.
Another story from my own family. I have a niece who's twelve, and she's not only really smart, but she's always been motivated to learn and loved school. This summer she was chosen to go to an academic camp at Northwestern State in Louisiana. She got to stay in the dorms for a week and take college level classes of her choice. She chose literature, folk lore. At the end of the experience, she'd written four essays and was one of a handful of kids who had done good enough work to earn college credit for their experience. She came home excited and proud of herself. She was, by the way, the youngest person there. On the way home, she told my mom that she's really starting to hate school because it's boring. It didn't used to be boring, she said, but now that she's in seventh grade it seems like the teachers spend most of their time reviewing things they learned two years ago, things her little sister is learning now. This is a kid who reads voraciously and writes pretty darn good short stories in notebook after notebook in her free time. And the system is failing her.
Hence the need for Dream School Commons.
The genesis of this idea came to me about four years ago just after watching the documentary TED: The Future We Will Create, which was the first time I’d heard of TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design), and I wondered, if I could go to the TED conference and make a wish, what would I wish for?
My initial idea was to edit an anthology of essays about education reform. I thought I could solicit all the best educators and most educated thinkers, and then we could look for backers: organizations, philanthropists, corporations who could afford to invest in the most innovative school ideas would help us build the first “Dream Schools,” as I’d started calling them.
There was only one problem, getting the darn book published and promoted well enough to even get this idea off the ground. Besides that, I was reminded by my ever-so-realistic boyfriend that any old person can’t just go to TED and make a wish. I know, I know, I told him. And years went by, almost five now, and I didn’t forget about my idea, my wish to propose a big solution to a big problem.
Fast forward to earlier this summer, and you’ve got my father and I doing our usual emailing back-and-forth until he stops replying for a week or so. When he does finally reply, he tells me he’d been distracted by a new computer language he was trying to teach himself. This new project could result in a website, he told me, and he wanted me to be his guinea pig. He thought I might like a website about poetry or teaching or something that I could fiddle around with. And that’s when it happened...in a split second I remembered the Dream School idea, told him about it, and the rest is, as they say, well, a work in progress.
The thing that’s so exciting about Dream School Commons is that, unlike my anthology idea, anyone can participate; all possible voices can be heard here. This is a democratic space where ideas are cherished as powerful tools that can build on each other to make something new, and better.
And now is the time. I currently teach writing at the community college level in the Portland, Oregon, area, and my students tell me all the time about how the classrooms their children are entering are so much fuller (30+ kids per teacher) than when they were in school. They talk about resources and after-school programs being taken away, about entire schools closing. They worry about all the testing and the lack of individualization. And I worry about them.
My students are inspirational because they are working hard to improve their own lives. Many of them have families, work full time, and still manage to succeed in college-level classes. But the sad reality that I see in my students is a certain level of hopelessness about whether anything can be any different, about whether they have any control over the systems of which they’re a part. Their psyches have been so beaten down by those systems that they often feel powerless and exhausted at just the point in their lives when they need to be energetic and creative.
Which leads to my final question: What do students need to be successful?
That is the question I hope we can answer here at Dream School Commons, but to get us started, here’s a guess at what they need:
There's a tradition in his family of cutting the Thanksgiving turkey in half before cooking it. It's something his mother did, and her mother, and hers. When it came time for him to cook his own turkey, he asked his mother why they cut it in half instead of baking it whole. "That's just the way we've always done it," she said.
So he asked his grandmother the same question, and she said, "When my mother came to this country, the oven in our house was so small that a whole turkey wouldn't fit, so we had to cut it in half. I just thought that was the way it was done, so I cooked mine that way, too." And so a tradition was born that at one time had reason, creativity, and problem solving behind it, but by the time it reached the twenty-first century, no one knew why it was that way anymore, and it was no longer necessary.
This is the story of education in America. Maybe, a hundred or more years ago, there was a good reason for the way children are still being taught, but those same methods don't work today. We're using them out of a sense of tradition, or maybe out of fear that if we don't, children will experience a terrible loss. Of what? I don't know.
Another story from my own family. I have a niece who's twelve, and she's not only really smart, but she's always been motivated to learn and loved school. This summer she was chosen to go to an academic camp at Northwestern State in Louisiana. She got to stay in the dorms for a week and take college level classes of her choice. She chose literature, folk lore. At the end of the experience, she'd written four essays and was one of a handful of kids who had done good enough work to earn college credit for their experience. She came home excited and proud of herself. She was, by the way, the youngest person there. On the way home, she told my mom that she's really starting to hate school because it's boring. It didn't used to be boring, she said, but now that she's in seventh grade it seems like the teachers spend most of their time reviewing things they learned two years ago, things her little sister is learning now. This is a kid who reads voraciously and writes pretty darn good short stories in notebook after notebook in her free time. And the system is failing her.
Hence the need for Dream School Commons.
The genesis of this idea came to me about four years ago just after watching the documentary TED: The Future We Will Create, which was the first time I’d heard of TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design), and I wondered, if I could go to the TED conference and make a wish, what would I wish for?
My initial idea was to edit an anthology of essays about education reform. I thought I could solicit all the best educators and most educated thinkers, and then we could look for backers: organizations, philanthropists, corporations who could afford to invest in the most innovative school ideas would help us build the first “Dream Schools,” as I’d started calling them.
There was only one problem, getting the darn book published and promoted well enough to even get this idea off the ground. Besides that, I was reminded by my ever-so-realistic boyfriend that any old person can’t just go to TED and make a wish. I know, I know, I told him. And years went by, almost five now, and I didn’t forget about my idea, my wish to propose a big solution to a big problem.
Fast forward to earlier this summer, and you’ve got my father and I doing our usual emailing back-and-forth until he stops replying for a week or so. When he does finally reply, he tells me he’d been distracted by a new computer language he was trying to teach himself. This new project could result in a website, he told me, and he wanted me to be his guinea pig. He thought I might like a website about poetry or teaching or something that I could fiddle around with. And that’s when it happened...in a split second I remembered the Dream School idea, told him about it, and the rest is, as they say, well, a work in progress.
The thing that’s so exciting about Dream School Commons is that, unlike my anthology idea, anyone can participate; all possible voices can be heard here. This is a democratic space where ideas are cherished as powerful tools that can build on each other to make something new, and better.
And now is the time. I currently teach writing at the community college level in the Portland, Oregon, area, and my students tell me all the time about how the classrooms their children are entering are so much fuller (30+ kids per teacher) than when they were in school. They talk about resources and after-school programs being taken away, about entire schools closing. They worry about all the testing and the lack of individualization. And I worry about them.
My students are inspirational because they are working hard to improve their own lives. Many of them have families, work full time, and still manage to succeed in college-level classes. But the sad reality that I see in my students is a certain level of hopelessness about whether anything can be any different, about whether they have any control over the systems of which they’re a part. Their psyches have been so beaten down by those systems that they often feel powerless and exhausted at just the point in their lives when they need to be energetic and creative.
Which leads to my final question: What do students need to be successful?
That is the question I hope we can answer here at Dream School Commons, but to get us started, here’s a guess at what they need:
- To be metacognitive, creative problem-solvers
- To be flexible and able to see and relate to multiple perspectives (i.e. practitioners of cognitive dissonance)
- To be self-motivated while also working well as leaders and followers of others
No comments:
Post a Comment