I recently discovered this draft of a piece I wrote about five years ago. It is still relevant and explains my recent decision to leave teaching. “It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain, but, once conceived, it haunted me day and night.” Those words begin the second paragraph of Edgar Read More
In 1981, I was a sophomore in high school, and I decided to be a teacher. In 1988, I was in front of middle school classroom filled with science students. I still have the observations in which my department head and principal attested to the quality of my interactions with students. My wife still reminds Read More
While computer rooms have largely fallen out of favor in schools (they were perceived to the removing computing from the classroom where most learning occurs), they continue to be maintained on many schools. As more diverse computing devices have emerged, computer rooms have become more important for providing capacity for specialized purposes that require sophisticated Read More
This brief post continues the theme of: Wicked Problems Transparent Taming of Wicked Problems Solving Wicked Problems Wicked Solutions Matter Because education is a wicked technology, it is anticipated that curriculum and instruction designed for 21st century classrooms will be assessed and evaluated using terms such as good or bad, working or dysfunctional, acceptable or Read More
Last week, I attended my first meeting of a user group for a particular educational platform. In my new position, I was glad to find a cohort of professional who do similar work at similar institutions, using the same software. As a newcomer to the group, I introduced myself to many attendees, gleaned what I Read More
We can see that education is a technology by reviewing several characteristics of technology: One of the underlying assumptions about technology is that it makes life easier or more efficient. This turns out to be a false assumption. When computers arrived in offices, secretaries did not spend less time writing memos. They wrote (and rewrote Read More
I found this quote in the data for a chapter I am preparing for publication: We spent so much time trying to decide if the goals were specific, measurable, and all of the other adjectives for the acronym, we had no time to think about what we were going to do. Even when we decided Read More
Hegemony is an interesting word. It describes the dominance of one idea (or culture or social group) over another. Users typically adopt a critical tone when using the word; hegemony is established and maintained by imposition. Pedagogy is also an interesting word. It captures the actions taken by a teacher in a classroom, as well Read More
In 2018, one of my high school classmates wrote Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America’s Students (Baker, 2018) in which he takes a close look at the myth “we are spending more, but getting less” out of our school budgets in the United States. Looking back on more than 30 years Read More
If you knew me, you would not be surprised to hear that I have a book on my “to read” pile named The Revolution in the Schools. The edited volume begins in a promising manner; the second paragraph of the Introduction states: Revolution always look impossible before the fact, inevitable afterward. So it is with the Read More