A Whole New Mind: Join Us For Year Four

Once again this year students in Anne Smith and Maura Moritz's English 9 Honors classes will be reading Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind and discussing it with each other, with many of you, and with Daniel Pink himself (read about previous years' experiences). Students will be holding in-class fishbowl discussions and live blogging chapters four through nine (Design, Story, Sympathy, Empathy and Meaning).

The process will be very similar to previous years, but there are a few variations on our end. This year students will also be reading excerpts of Drive, watching and evaluating some TED Talks, and then their culminating activity will be giving a 5-minute Pecha Kucha style TED-like talk answering the question What Matters? for their final exam.

We are again asking other folks from our learning networks to participate as the students discuss specific chapters of the book. We hope to broaden their perspectives by extending their Personal Learning Networks to include thoughtful folks, both locally and from around the world. Like previous years, an inner circle of students will be having a face-to-face discussion, and the outer circle of students can periodically join the inner circle but will also be live-blogging. (If you want a refresher, here are some links to help explain the process and see the students' work.) We will again be using Ustream to broadcast the inner circle discussion out to remote participants, parents and other interested folks, and CoverItLive for the live blogging.

We would love to have some of you join us as well. This wiki lists the dates and times along with which chapters will be discussed on which dates (note that due to time constraints we’ll be combining the Empathy and Play chapters). If you are interested in participating, please do the following:

• Re-read (if you wish) A Whole New Mind, or simply review the chapter(s) you'll be blogging with the students.
  
  
• Visit the wiki and add yourself to the appropriate date(s) and time(s). You may add yourself to any spot, even if someone is already signed up, but it would be great if we could fill all the open slots first if possible. Also please add your "participant biography" at the bottom of the page. To keep the live blogging manageable, we'd like to have a maximum of three folks sign up for each slot (although everyone is welcome to observe the live blogging).
  
  
• On the day and time you've signed up, tune in to our ustream channel and to the appropriate blog post (linked from the wiki - as we get closer to each live blog date the period number will link to the live blog post).

We're really excited about this opportunity for our students and want to make the most of it. We really hope that you'll join us and add your thoughts to our conversation.

The CSAP is Dead. Long Live the CSAP (err, TCAP)

The Colorado Department of Education just announced the name of the test that will replace the CSAP next year - it will be called the Transitional Colorado Assessment Program (TCAP). It's "transitional" because it's a bridge between the current test and the new test that will be coming in 2014 once our new state standards (based on the Common Core) are fully in place. (I predict it will be called the Colorado Common Core Assessment Program, or C³AP ™.)

No word on whether the TCAP (or the C³AP ™) will, in the words of Will Richardson,

. . . tell us anything about the qualities we most want from our children: a love of learning, a willingness and the patience to grapple with important, real problems, and the ability to make sense of the world as they experience it.

Dear Denver Post: No More Horoscopes

Dear Denver Post,

While I’ve sometimes questioned your overall commitment to education, your columnists and editorials frequently stress the importance of education and how important it is to us as individuals, a community, and a country. If that’s truly how you feel, then I have a suggestion for you – please stop printing horoscopes.

Clearly over the last few years your paper has gotten physically smaller. As the Internet and Craigslist have bit into your revenue, you’ve had to make hard decisions about what stays and what goes, and I assume you painfully agonize over what gets printed in the limited amount of space you have left for articles. Yet in both Saturday and Sunday’s paper you devoted about 260 square centimeters to horoscopes. (In comparison, you devoted almost exactly the same amount of space in Saturday’s paper to the horrific school shooting in Brazil and considerably less to the story about the Juno spacecraft.) This prominent endorsement of pseudoscience seems to be at odds with your stance on the importance of education.

Now I know some people will argue that this is political correctness run amuck, that horoscopes are simply a form of entertainment and therefore should be left alone. I could perhaps even agree with those folks except for one small problem, survey (pdf) after survey show that about one-fourth of Americans believe in Astrology.

One. Fourth.

To be effective citizens, Americans need to understand what science is – and what it isn’t. By continuing to use your valuable and increasingly limited newsprint space to print horoscopes, you are enabling (and, in fact, encouraging) a belief in pseudoscience and are helping create a less scientifically literate population. This needs to stop.

So here’s my proposal. Stop printing horoscopes each day in your paper and instead devote that 260 square centimeters to science. Each day you could run an article looking at the science behind the headlines. (Surely there’s no shortage of material: earthquakes, tsunamis, climate change, energy production, energy consumption, health care – to name just a few.) Now, I know that 260 square centimeters is not really enough to explain such complex issues, but it is enough to write an introduction to the issue, and then at the end of the article you could link to your website which could take a more in-depth look at the issue (perhaps including multimedia and links to other sources). You would be modeling for our students the importance of science and what lifelong learning looks like.

Dan Haley’s editorial in Sunday’s paper said, in relation to a different topic,

We consider it part of our responsibility, part of the newspaper being a good citizen.

Shouldn’t supporting a scientifically literate population be part of your responsibility to the citizens of Colorado as well?

I'm Going (to) Nowhere, How About You?

If you live in the Denver metro area, considering attending a screening of Race to Nowhere on Tuesday, April 5th, from 6:30 - 8:30 pm at Laura Ingalls Wilder Elementary School in Littleton. I'll be there and I hope you'll join us. You can purchase tickets for $10 (plus $1.54 fee) online or pay $15 at the door (space available, I assume).

Following the screening they will have a student panel discussion, moderated by my district's Director of Secondary Education.