I was in fourth grade in 1963 during the Cuban Missile Crisis when there was apparently a real possibility of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Somewhere in that timeframe I became aware of this possibility, probably as a result of TV news coverage and a couple “Duck & Cover” exercises led by my teacher in my elementary school classroom. For those of you too young to remember these exercises, you were spared a fearful experience of powerlessness and contemplation of the abyss. For me, it was my first confrontation with my own mortality, possibilities for an afterlife and the existence of god. (more…)

It is still more than 60 minutes until Barak Obama is sworn in as the forty-fourth President of the United States. I have turned on the TV and seen the pictures of the National Mall in Washington DC already filled with over a million people. Tears are already filling my eyes. Thoughts are flooding through my head. (more…)

Molly was the “girl next door” (actually across the street) in my life and, most significantly, my best friend from age three to seven. At the time I did not understand how important this relationship would be to me in shaping my adult life, even though I saw Molly only once after age eleven. As a parent, I have also seen how my son Eric benefited from a similar relationship with a girl who lived across the street and became his best friend for several years.

Molly and I were comrades of the soul. We played pretend astronauts and soldiers and created innumerable adventures together. We always had the spot next to each other at each other’s birthday parties, no matter how many other kids were there. There was nothing that divided us. (more…)

There are a couple efforts I’m involved in, and others I am aware of, to try and make the practice of education in this country more humanistic and more closely aligned with our country’s democratic values. One such effort is currently called “Educating for Human Greatness” (based on a book by the same title by the group’s founder Lynn Stoddard) and is endorsed by a number of progressive educators across the country. Click on the links to see EfHG’s proposal (including bios of key supporters) for transforming our education system and the group’s networking forum on Ning.

If you check out the EfHG proposal you can see that it addresses the need to transform the role of teachers and schools in the educational process but really says nothing about the role of parents in that transformation. Some of the people that were involved in the email discussion around starting the group were concerned that this was an important omission. I have heard this in other educational forums, that you cannot transform education without transforming parents and parenting, since it is the expectations of parents that play a large role in keeping our schools untransformed. (more…)

What I have gotten paid to do over the past fifteen years is to be a “systems analyst”, a job that involves understanding all the component parts that make a business process and/or the information systems (generally computer networks) that support that business process work, and given that, how to improve and enhance those processes and underlying systems. One of the techniques of this trade is to define things in terms of categories, some time-honored and used repeatedly others invented one-time to address a particularly unique situation. So applying this technique to looking at schools, I attempt to define a category “school type”. (more…)

After attending a small alternative middle school for three years, our daughter decided, for her first year of high school, to try a more conventional public school, Kennedy High School in Granada Hills here in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. She made it through the year and even got good grades in all her classes except for math (see “Tutoring Geometry”) where I helped her get through with a passing grade, even though she practically speaking learned nothing but a healthy dis-ease with lines, shapes, angles, areas and volumes. (more…)

During my last two years of Junior High (Eighth and ninth grade) I was absent from school as much as a third of the time. Looking back I see it as a coping strategy for a school experience I was not comfortable with. In general I was just not comfortable in my skin at all, lacking self esteem, and my school experience did little to help me with that.

I had been mostly okay with my last couple years of elementary school, though I got through it by being more of a trained seal than a real learner. I particularly remember working my way through the color-coded SRA reading program, reading there level-rated prose pieces and taking the comprehension test after, before moving on the next piece and eventually up to the next color level. What I was reading was not particularly interesting to me, the whole point was to try to “level up” which had some self-esteem boost for me. (more…)

I helped my daughter keep from failing her ninth grade geometry class, but in the process probably destroyed any interest she might have had in the subject (and math in general) and gave her no working geometry skills she could carry forward into life or any further math studies that would build on that geometry knowledge. It is a small case study in “teaching to the test”, or in this case helping Emma complete homework and stumble by with C’s and D’s on her math tests. (more…)

Starting in third grade with learning the multiplication tables, our son Eric started having a problem with school. By seventh grade he would not do any homework, had been diagnosed with ADD, was taking Aderall, had been through an IEP, had had a number of sessions with an educational therapist, and resisted in any way he could think of going to school each morning. When he got to the point in eighth grade of writing “F**k Math” on his standardized math test, we pulled him out of school. (more…)

Most of my posts lately have been related to the various paths forward for youth education in a more formal sense, but I feel that much (most?) profound learning takes place in more informal settings… like play. So rolling back the clock to revisit my own youth…

I am not sure what initially inspired me, at age five, to become obsessed with dinosaurs. Could be it was going to the University of Michigan natural history museum and seeing the big reconstructed T-Rex bones or the tableaus behind glass of small scale dinosaur models in the best guess of what their living environment looked like. Or maybe it was seeing the movie, “The Lost World” (the 1925 version) based on the book by Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame. The story was a wonderful tale about scientists and adventurers who travel to a previously uncharted plateau in South America and discover that the stories of living dinosaurs there were true (kind of the progenitor to “Jurassic Park”). (more…)