February 27, 2013

Bilge Clearing

My list of bookmarked sites about which I'm planning to write at some point has become ridiculously long and unwieldy, so I am clearing it all. Some of the links haven't been presented to you before because I didn't quite know what to say about them. Some haven't been written about because I never quite finished up reading/watch them. I started them, enjoyed the beginning but never got around to the end because they were just too sizable. (tl;dr - too long, didn't read)

Instead of the usual, insightful commentary, you get brief thoughts, and I get a phenomenally smaller list of bookmarked sites.




3 comments:

achilles3 said...

That Ted Williams piece is pretty much the best writing ever. I could read that once a week.

The blog post on US Ed. problems form John Kuhn was interesting. I do wonder if he has his own kids.

I bring that up because I have a sister and a brother. Where I loved school and basically ruled at it my brother and sister LOATHED school. My sis was a bit more passive but she no doubt hated it. My brother was more of a hell raiser and was not shy about voicing his disregard. But we have the same parents. My sis is only 1 year younger and my bro was only 5 years.

And my parents were amazing, loving, supportive etc. As adults my sis and bro are doing GREAT and are parents themselves.

I think Kuhn goes a lot overboard on the parent blame. People are their own. The % hasn't changed in my class room for the last 13 years of teaching...33% don't wanna be there, 33% kinda wanna be there, 33% are solid.

Kinda like my family.

PHSChemGuy said...

Glad you enjoyed the Ted piece. It's impressive.

I struggle to say anything about teaching/education. I do think we have a deeply flawed system. I don't want to blame teachers, but I recognize that what we're doing (delivering largely the same content to large groups of people at once) isn't an effective way of educating unless the students want to be there or unless there is some consequence in their lives if they choose to misbehave/act out/ignore.

I don't know that NCLB is the cure. I don't know that Common Core is the cure.
I don't know that Skype and Twitter and Facebook and Wordles and Edmodo and Prezis are the cure.

I don't really know what the cure is without solving every other societal ill that is contributing to the downfall of education - poverty, jobless/uneducated parents, broken nuclear family units, privileged upper class, angry/uninterested lower class...

It's too big to fix and too important to fail.

achilles3 said...

Yeah I had a jprofessor in college assign the Williams piece. Most people in my class didn't read it b/c it was "too long". bums!

It is way too big to fix and fail. Well said.

I predict that more options for families in regards to how/where formalized education comes to be delivered will be the ultimate solution.