Join The Innovative Educator in a Passion Driven Summer Book Club

I bought The Passion-Driven Classroom last month and regrettably I didn't finish reading it. Here's why.  For me, with the internet, reading has become a conversation.  I love to read, discuss, and write. Lately, I have found I'm less likely to finish books when I can't discuss it with others like I can online.  It's just not as much fun as the conversation that can happen when reading on the web.

Well, I'm soooo excited to share that Heidi Hayes Jacobs and her leadership team at The Curriculum 21 Ning have selected the The Passion-Driven Classroom for their summer book club study.  How awesome is that???!!!  I'll be able to read the book and have conversations with amazing educators like Heidi as well as the authors of the book.  I'm so excited.

It is free to participate in the book club.  It begins on June 14th, with a discussion about the Preface and Chapter One. I hope readers of this blog will join me in what promises to be a powerful conversation about the role passion plays in teaching, learning, and student achievement.

How I Made Leaving School Work. Maybe You Can Too

Deven Black a successful grown high school “Opt Out” is a contributor to “The Teenager’s Guide to Opting Out of High School.” Deven recently shared his experience about when he decided high school was not the place for him on his blog.  

He explains it this way.  

I grew up in Manhattan and in late 1967, when I left school for the first time at age 14, Manhattan was, for me, a 12 mile long, 1.5 mile wide educational experience. A brief subway or bus ride could deliver me to any one of dozens of museums of art, natural history, craft or occupation. Or I would emerge from underground into what seemed like a different city where the people spoke Chinese, Italian, Spanish or Ukrainian and the foods in the restaurants were the best kind of spoon-fed learning.

Eugene McCarthy was emboldening and enlisting young people to become the driving force behind his idealistic campaign for the Presidency and against the Vietnam War. I had already worked on some political campaigns and, when the cold January winds blew, the NYC campaign headquarters at Columbus Circle became my second home; second even though I spent more time there than at my family’s apartment where I went only to sleep and shower.

Read the rest of his post on his blog here. 

Do not teach this stuff to your kids

This morning I did something that would not have been possible a few years ago. My daily reading included Rafael Parente's blog which is written in Portuguese. I was able to do this courtesy of Google Translate. I was brought to his blog as a result of looking at who was coming to my blog and discovered he had linked to my article "Five Back to School Must Haves for Innovative Educators."

I found Mr. Parente was also a fan of Scott McCleod's blog and he had shared a post that he translated into Portuguese and Google Translate turned it back into English.  All of this would never have been possible if we had listened to Scott McLeod's tongue and cheek advice in the English-turned-Portuguese-turned English poem I read there.

The poem addresses a topic I write about often.  "Thinking Outside the Ban."  This excerpt includes some of my favorite stanzas.

Breaking Free From The Boring Prison of School

Former students like me and Aaron Iba felt like school was a sentence.  This Prezi gives some insight into why.

Breaking Free from the Prison of School - Aaron Iba on Prezi

Blocking and Filtering Leaves Our Children Behind and Unprepared

Photo from http://opennet.net/accessdenied

In his post today, Tom Whitby asks How do we fit the policy to the need? in relation to the issue of internet blocking and filtering.  He explains that when we create a sterile, artificial world in schools we are not adequately preparing students for a real, unfiltered world. 

Here's a nugget from the post. 

"Access to, and understanding of the internet is becoming a needed skill if one is to compete in a technologically competitive society.  The sooner we educate our children to be responsible digital citizens, the sooner we can hold them responsible for their actions. Internet awareness must begin on the elementary level. We cannot hold children responsible for that which we have not taught them. Education is the key to safety.

Filtering eliminates the ability to teach children to be responsible. It may allay the flamed fears of parents which are fanned by software companies and TV producers, but it does nothing for preparing kids for the technologically competitive world in which they must live, compete, survive, and thrive. The educator’s job is to prepare kids for the world in which the students will live. It is not the world in which the educators lived. It is not the world in which the kids’ parents lived. It is the world yet to come. There are many pitfalls and safety precautions kids must be aware of, and that cannot be denied.

Teaching rather than blocking is a better strategy to defend against these pitfalls. Fear-mongering to parents may sell software to schools, and build big TV ratings, but in the long run it does not address the issue. We cannot educate kids about content that is filtered and blocked."

You can read the whole post at this link. 

Tom has a great audience as well so don't forget to check out the comments too.  There you will find nuggets like this.

"We don’t allow IT and the legal departments to make decisions on textbooks and other classroom materials. Why should they make decisions about the internet?"

Consider the Student Loan Scheme Before Going the Traditional College Route

At the same time that many school systems are advocating college for all, experts, analysts, and the media are warning teens and their parents that the college bubble is ready to burst leaving their children behind as carnage. This info graphic does a great job of outlining the issues with student loans that should be considered before children and their parents head down this path.  Beneath that is a recent story on NBC News documenting the corruption involved in the students loan scandal.


Infographic by College Scholarships.org

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