Philosophy Without A Home

  I was thinking the other day of the great waste in the world. How so many people in this Image by wpwend42 via Flickr world spend the majority of their waking hours using all of their energy and resources to survive. I wonder sometimes if the cure to cancer might be sitting in a refuge camp in Darfur. Perhaps the inventor of a FTL engine is  selling drugs  because she can't get a scholarship to college. It could be Einstein is throwing a rock at a tank in some desert. Who knows. Perhaps the next Bill Gates will be in India. She might have been here  http://www.honoraryunsubscribe.com/arfa_karim_randhawa.html We just don't know. I got into education because I saw it as an equalizer. A poor child with an education can compete with the son of a rich man. Almost, perhaps the 1% is exempt. Now if we can just convince our children to wait and be good for about 20 years or so, then they too can compete on equal footing. As long as they can find the  seed money  to inves

Image by Sean MacEntee via Flickr Look I understand math pretty well. I like math and tend to get excited about the nitty-gritty details about what is happening and how to teach it at a very granular level.  I am not an English teacher I don't get excited by the granularity of the mechanics of writing I just do it. Examining student work for the exact level they reached and teaching to that exact level is not fun and tends to be a lot of work Should our teaching be all about drilling down using data to find out exactly where students are deficient and correcting that? Does that take all the art, all the love out of teaching? Is it possible that the tests are that accurate?Do I need a test to tell me that information?

What I want to say when the interviewers ask “What makes you the best fit for the job?” is: You’re asking the wrong question. There is no fit for the job of leader. Unless, that is, you want to keep things going exactly the way they are. The world is changing, it has changed profoundly just in our lifetime and the pace of change is increasing exponentially. Sure, we can prepare our children for today’s world or even yesterday’s world and most of them will be fine. 70, 80, maybe even 90% will earn a decent living, raise a family, grow old and die without experiencing true hardship. What if hard times hit? Times like we are in now. Will our students be able to recover from being knocked down? It is said that most people who lose their jobs in a recession never recover. Sure, eventually they will get another job, but they may never reach the same pay scale again. Do we want to set our future up for that crap shoot? Don’t worry kid, these cyclical downturns actually only af