This is a fairly long article, but I found it to be a decent read. The first half is a little plain, but my interest picked up greatly at “Friendship-Driven and Interest-Driven Participation”.
There’s also a couple paragraphs about a program in NYC called Quest to Learn, which is apparently a program where kids learn with a “games-based pedagogy”, which in light of the my recent flurry of links… I thought it was appropriate.
If you take a small child into the garden and point at the moon, the child will look at the moon. Take your dog into the garden and point at the moon, and the dog will look at your finger. Quizzically.
Other animals sing, but they don’t compose operas. They communicate, but they don’t write plays. They look puzzled, but they don’t write tomes of philosophy. They get depressed, but they don’t listen to Miles Davis and drink Jack Daniels.
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Sir Ken Robinson promoting his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, which is about finding your true passion(s) and how the current educational system is extremely poor at permitting students to discover what it is exactly that they are “meant” to do.
Without a doubt, this is thus far the most eloquent manner of describing, I think, what it is to be quintessentially human.
His talk reminds me of what the things I find to be most appealing about ATDP: that is, for the teachers who stick around for progressive years, you know they are there because they love what they do and they are trying to impart their passion onto students who are interested in learning their craft.
Also, this is why it drives me so bonkers sometimes to find parents who shove their students into this class or that class (english! math! science!) because the parents think it’s important that their kids get more practice in said subject. While that may be true, I think it’s a damn shame that the summer time (the supposed vacation time) isn’t used to explore topics that you don’t get any exposure to in the regular school year.
Kids should be exploring their options at EVERY available opportunity and in today’s society, summer vacation is the perfect time to be discovering something new.
As for me, I find that I’m interested in a number of different things and have been fascinated by several reoccurring topics. But it’s hard to say if I’ve really discovered my so-called passion. What a frustrating predicament.
The quotes I agree with that were said by Michelle Rhee, on what is necessary for improving education.
“real focus on teacher quality and human capital”
“level of compensation that puts them on par with doctors, lawyers, investment bankers … the most respected professions in the country”
But… I don’t agree with her on the point that technology will not play a more critical role in education in the future. At the lower grade levels, yes, perhaps this is true: a living, breathing human being is critical to oversee the education of really young children.
But at high school and college level, after the desire to learn has been properly incited (hopefully)? Then you want the passionate experts teaching their subjects; anything less is just damaging.
Stuff online about education that I really love and/or agree with (all of which I’ve linked to in the past):
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