by andrew@learnedleadership.org | Dec 20, 2014 | Blog
I’ll never forget my first experience working at a parent-teacher conference as a young 22-year-old public school teacher in Minnesota. It wasn’t the conversations with parents or students that I remember but one seemingly simple event in the evening…dinner. At this school there was a break for 45 minutes for teachers to eat dinner together in the cafeteria. What a nice idea, right? At this particular school we had class all day, and then conferences started immediately after school and end at 9:00 pm–for two days in a row. For the average teacher this was two 14-hour days in a row. So a little time to break bread with colleagues could be a nice treat. In fact, the administrators were even serving the teachers, which was a nice touch. When I arrived at the cafeteria a cue had already begun to wrap around and zig-zag through the folding lunch room tables. Teachers either stood silently saving their energy for another 3-hours of conferences or were busy debriefing on this-or-that parent. Tonight’s meal coordinated by the school was take out from a local pizza chain. It wasn’t until I reached the table where the administrators were serving the pizza that I noticed what was really going on. Yes, there was pizza, and yes it was being served by administrators, but at a price…$5 for two slices. Truthfully, it might as well been $100 or $1 for that matter. It didn’t matter what they charged, the fact that the school was charging teachers for the pizza was what really stung. After all, the teachers were working extra long hours, away from family in order to be there. I mention...
by andrew@learnedleadership.org | Sep 23, 2014 | Blog
A few weeks back I shared with the education world the provocative statement: Grades are Dead. If you haven’t had a chance to read Why Your Kids Grades Won’t Matter: Part One, I highly encourage you to check it out. Read on for part 2. Now it would be fair to think “Ok, well clearly there are some flaws with the grading system, but since it’s still the standard method, we’re going to stick with A-F grading, which is at least the safe choice.” Hmm, interesting point…and I can understand your desire to lean towards safety. After all, this is a student’s future we’re discussing here. Yet, just for fun, let’s challenge the assumption that A-F grades are the safe choice. Some might think it’s the safe choice because to put it in the words of dollars and cents, grades are the currency that college admissions offices operate on with a little high stakes SAT testing to seal the deal. Historically, this was true for sometime, but as grade inflation has become the norm in most schools, grades have become much less reliable. Still many colleges start the admission process here, because students and schools show up with the same currency. Keeping with this metaphor, if high grades are the currency, yet grade inflation is an issue, then it holds true that today’s inflated grades just don’t “buy” you as much college education as they used to. Look on any top tier college’s admission site and you’ll read about how they look beyond grades, because even colleges know that this is no longer a reliable means of determining whether...
by andrew@learnedleadership.org | Aug 12, 2014 | Blog
A few weeks back I received a grade for a class in which I was enrolled for my doctorate. I received a B+ for 95%…that damn curve. At first I was upset. I thought “in what world is a 95% a B+” or “who curves grades anymore?, why is this happening to me?” or “why is the measurement of my learning affected by someone the grade of someone else?” And then it occurred to me: Grades are Dead! Sure they might not look dead, but they’re gasping for their final breath of importance. A hold over from a different time, like square school lunch pizza and overhead projectors, we will soon see the traditional A-F grading scale finally put out of its misery. I say good riddance. There are few things in this world that make less sense than the traditional model of grading. It’s really not surprising if you think about it, I mean how effective can any system be that is supposed to sum up weeks or months of learning into a symbol. Do we do this in other places? For example, later this month when the school year begins, the inevitable question will be asked “how was your summer?” That’s a hard question to answer, the summer is three months, filled with some great days, a few ok afternoons, and an occasional grumpy morning. Nowadays many of us seem to take a lot of photos with our phones, but I bet people would look at me kind of funny if I showed them a photo summarizing my summer. Now that you’ve viewed this picture do you feel like...
by andrew@learnedleadership.org | Aug 8, 2014 | Blog
The Stupid Tax | tha st•oo•pi•d taks | noun Definition: Money you end up paying because your inexperience, optimism, or naivety makes you really stupid. Have you ever paid the stupid tax before? After living in a few foreign countries my wife Lisa and I have paid our fair share of the stupid tax around the world. There was the time we booked tickets on two different airlines arriving and departing through Singapore with only a 30 minute layover only to learn on arrival that the airlines operated out of different airports…can you say “missed connection.” Or the time we ended up paying for a 5 minute $50 cab ride in Kuala Lumpur (although it was in a Mercedes). My “favorite” stupid tax story happened when we lived in the Philippines. After living in South Korea for a year without a car and only seeing a tiny bit of beautiful Jeju, the “honeymoon island” that we were living on, we made buying a car one of our first orders of business once we arrived in the Philippines. When looking around at other foreigners it seemed that everybody owned horrifically beaten down and expensive used cars, and we figured it must just be common to own a crappy car. One day when discussing where to get a car, a funny looking American with a broad-brimmed hat came over and introduced himself to us after over hearing our conversation (stupid tax red flag). Sensing our lack of wisdom, the next day he stopped by with what looked like the van the Libyan terrorists used from the original Back to the Future,...
by andrew@learnedleadership.org | Aug 7, 2014 | Blog
The other week my wife Lisa and I went out on a group date with my older brother and sister and their spouses. Since we all live far from each other this was uncommon, in fact I think it was the first time we’d ever done something like this. At dinner, as you might expect, we started to reminisce about our childhood, doing things that most kids don’t get a chance to do these days, like bike across town without a helmet to the outdoor swimming pool when we were only 6-years-old. However, since I spent the first 10 years of my life on a farm we had a list of adventures most parents (including myself) would have a hard time letting their kids do these days. There was jumping from the 3rd story barn rafters into the hay loft below, climbing around the 10 story silos, using the electric bandsaw in the basement unsupervised, blowing up the power line transformer with a perfectly placed kick from a basketball to the power line, and my favorite, flipping over the handle bars of a trail bike (basically a motorcycle) going 25 mph after getting shot in the neck by a BB gun. To say the least, life doesn’t seem as dangerous these days for kids. I recently listened to a TED talk by Gever Tulley titled: 5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do. They include: play with fire, own a pocket knife, throw a spear, deconstruct appliances, and drive a car. Tulley is the founder of the Tinkering School, a summer camp outside of San Francisco that gives...
by andrew@learnedleadership.org | Jun 11, 2014 | Blog
Earlier this week I officially started my doctorate at the University of Hawaii. My parents being oh so proud, keep telling me how they run into my former teachers and love telling them that I am working on a doctorate of education. I think they really enjoy the shock value. Truthfully, my former teachers have good reason to be a little shocked because let’s just say I wasn’t a very good student growing up. It’s not that I didn’t want to do good, at least when I was really young. It was just that I seemed to have a hard time following instructions, submitting homework, and doing what the teacher wanted. However, when I think back to my childhood I remember being an constantly curious kid who was always tinkering with this or that and would often walk my own path. In fact although I didn’t always do too well in school, I feel that I was alway hungry to learn something new and interesting. This got me thinking the other day, is learning the primary goal of schools? You’d think so right, but the more I think about it, the more I’m less sure their systems are designed to be flexible learning-centered places of learning (does that sound redundant). For example, on any given day a student comes to school usually at a time when their brains aren’t fully awake, to take classes that are only roughly designed around their individual ability, in core courses (math, language arts, social studies, science) that have remained the more or less the same subject area for over a hundred years, and pep rallies,...
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