Go ask Alice

How can we rise above "The Gathering Storm"? Go ask Alice.

Corporate officials, educators, and political leaders have been rightfully concerned about the lack of young Americans pursuing careers in Science and Technology related fields. (STEM)

Randy Pausch, author of the national best seller "The Last Lecture", and his team at Carnegie Mellon University have provided one possible solution for attracting more computer science majors...Alice

"An innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects."

And like so many other technology applications, it is absolutely FREE.

Thus far, it has been widely successful and has shown dramatic results with female and at-risk student populations.

To learn more about Alice, visit their website by clicking here.

March Madness

We are nearing the middle of March and for educators, the Madness has begun. School districts all over the country have put teaching on hold, unless of course that teaching involves material worthy of our standardized tests.

So who decided what is worthy?

Below are the 5 activities suggested by Herbert Spencer as "Worthy" to be included in the curriculum:

1. those activities which directly minister to self-preservation;

2. those activities which, by securing the necessaries of life, indirectly minister to self preservation;

3. those activities which have for their end the rearing and discipline of offspring;

4. those activities which are involved in the maintenance of proper social and political relations;

5. those miscellaneous activities which fill up the leisure part of life, devoted to the gratification of tastes and feelings.

For those you not familiar with Herbie...he made this prescription in 1859!
The Skinny ~ Science & Math wins...Arts & Humanities lose...

Not much has changed. The alarm bells are ringing loudly sounding America's failure to produce the next generation of Scientists and Engineers...Great American's like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who...who...dropped out of college?

Like it or not, America is not now, nor should we aspire to become the cradle of engineering. What American's have done and hopefully will continue to do better than anyone else on the planet is foster innovation and creative thought.

According to Yong Zhao from last Februarys' AASA conference, pushing for high math and science scores will not help the United States remain a global economic leader; it will only "discriminate against other talents. … Testing restrains the definition of knowledge".

"Right now, the U.S. need for foreign-language speakers outweighs the need for engineers."

Zhao concluded by saying that "we need to become innovators in a digital world," a goal that can be achieved only through curiosity, risk, and creativity.

Click here to link to Yong Zhao's full comments.

So back to the original question: What is Worthy?

Calling Elliot Eisner, school administrators, teachers, parents, students...Don't let the "Art" of education be lost.

No Fun...

The tests are coming the tests are coming...drop everything, all hands on deck; we must prepare our students to take their standardized tests!

Yesterday, I asked my 8 year old daughter if she was doing anything fun in school. She replied if her teacher was happy with how the class answered the questions on the tests next week, (Standardized State Exams), they would get to have a pizza party!
(Although Julia really would prefer an ice-cream party)

Today I am at an elementary school pouring over department of education data from last year's standardized tests trying to determine what students should be targeted for special remediation. I.E. which kids are close enough to proficient to be worth the effort?

And just a moment ago I was speaking with a science teacher who is sincerely doing her best to cover a full school year of curriculum in 7 months so her students can be ready to test by the end of March. How can she squeeze 9 months of material into 7? Something had to be cut out, but what? Sadly, it was the FUN stuff. Hands-on experiments and inquiry based learning.

These are small children we're talking about. Do you think the next Nobel Prize winning physicist will credit the facts she remembers from her 4th grade science class? We need to create interest, excitement, stir curiosity, and stoke passion. These are the ingredients of scientific discovery. Instead we are allowing yet another generation of students to become disinterested in S.T.E.M. based fields because we've taken out all of the FUN.