long time coming.
I am currently up, writing some materials for my class and dreading it. The materials are for a lab practical, a test that kids have to pass in order to demonstrate and ensure that they have some basic lab skills before they move on to the tenth grade science. I know that it is defying my deepest instincts about education, and so it hurts, but it is what my department chairs and administrators want done, so I do it. It's time.
It has been nine weeks since I wrote anything, and I've been thinking. I mentioned a while back that I have begun to worry about the state of education in the United States, and that has compelled me to write about what is wrong with the way we teach our kids, and what a solution is. I feel like the time has come to have some dialogue with those ideas and commit them to paper. Yes, I am writing a book. It needs to be done, because I feel like I have a solution that is worth hearing, and worth implementing, if I can reach the right audience. I hope I do that.
And in order to do that, I had to gather my thoughts about it and focus them.
So, last week, I bought three paper notebooks and pens at Staples. Yep, I am going at this one by hand. I wrote a few introductory sentences on our trip to Vermont last week, which was refreshing and invigorating. Every time we go there, Shannon and I feel like new people. I don't think that's an accident.
I also finished a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I feel has changed my life. I was able to see some old philosophy in a new light, and I had a revelation about the relevance of the main topic of that book, Quality, to education as a whole. I don't feel like the education we deliver as a whole contains Quality, and I want to research and develop a way that we can inject that Quality into education again.
Ah, the things I think about when I don't write in my blog.
It has been nine weeks since I wrote anything, and I've been thinking. I mentioned a while back that I have begun to worry about the state of education in the United States, and that has compelled me to write about what is wrong with the way we teach our kids, and what a solution is. I feel like the time has come to have some dialogue with those ideas and commit them to paper. Yes, I am writing a book. It needs to be done, because I feel like I have a solution that is worth hearing, and worth implementing, if I can reach the right audience. I hope I do that.
And in order to do that, I had to gather my thoughts about it and focus them.
So, last week, I bought three paper notebooks and pens at Staples. Yep, I am going at this one by hand. I wrote a few introductory sentences on our trip to Vermont last week, which was refreshing and invigorating. Every time we go there, Shannon and I feel like new people. I don't think that's an accident.
I also finished a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I feel has changed my life. I was able to see some old philosophy in a new light, and I had a revelation about the relevance of the main topic of that book, Quality, to education as a whole. I don't feel like the education we deliver as a whole contains Quality, and I want to research and develop a way that we can inject that Quality into education again.
Ah, the things I think about when I don't write in my blog.