Beyond School

[Update 16 June 07: This is Part 2 of a series. See Part 1 here; see Part 3 for an invitation to students who can take the lead in your area; and see Part 4 for how this could be integrated into Understanding by Design - based "classroom 2.0" digital, flat classroom projects. Part 5 is a 5-minute video invitation to global teens that lays out the simple steps to making this happen by Earth Day 2008. Become a point of light--by giving your students the chance to become one.]

This one’s amazing. I just browsed my Bloglines, saw a new post about an Odyssey class filmmaking project by Connecticut HS English teacher Jeff Wasserman at “When the Hurly-Burly’s Done,” clicked on the link to go to his blog and leave a commiserative and congratulatory comment, clicked “leave comment,” and when the page refreshed, Lo!–I saw my own lines about global warming, K-12 education’s need to awaken to its urgency, and the “melting sky” sentence from my last post staring back at me as a quote from a fresh-off-the-keyboard newer post from Jeff’s blog.

How’s that for synchronicity 2.0? We both must have clicked about each other within 15 seconds on opposite sides of the world.

And I read commented on Jeff’s new post, which comment I paste below because sometimes you just do some good thinking when writing on other’s blogs, and want to have a copy for yourself on your own blog. So here’s my comment. I hope you see, after reading it, why I’m so excited. The idea is only a day old, so there’s much fleshing out to do, but I think it’s The Best Idea I’ve Ever Had. If I die after launching this, I’ll consider my life not useless. Here’s the comment. Read beyond the lines:

….I pitched–okay, preached–my world high school rock concert idea to fight global warming to my ninth graders today as something to chew on over the summer, and a good number stayed after each class to volunteer. So we’re off and running on this project already. (One student has connections with Samsung and LG, so those doors are open for corporate sponshorship, student-enlisted, in Korea.)But “Think globally, act locally” is so 1.0. Come on, Jeff, be the first to get another school on board. Let’s get a community service 2.0 project going where students organize, promote, concsciousness-raise about their own complicity (and their schools’) with global warming and take action by having city-wide rock concert fund-raisers in as many locales around the world as we can muster.

Myspace and YouTube will be our free advertisement. Wikis and blogs will be our headquarters. And students will get corporate sponsorship, raise hell about their HVAC classrooms and Poland Spring bottled water degeneracy, and proclaim their hip status by walking or biking to school.

We can make doing this all without a paper footprint a badge of honor and principled point of pride along the way.

And your filmmakers (and my digital storytellers) can put their fledgling editing skills to work by making commercial spots (to embed on their Myspaces) illuminating their peers about the problem, selling wisdom instead of consumption with their films, and spreading the concert idea to their real-world peer audience in the dreaded, non-schooly Facebook Xanga Myspace universe they live in.

What shall we call it: Something about “cool,” “cooling,” and music. I want a Greek theme, since Gaia was “the earth who feeds us all” to the Greeks, who didn’t look forward to her death at the end of the world. Nature was all to them, and the Muses sang their hymns in her praise.

How many concerts at how many “points of light” around the globe can happen for this cause on the same sunny springtime Saturday afternoon next May–and be filmed and embedded as streaming video music performances from around the globe on a project website? And how many more such concerts can happen the year after that? And what shall we do with the money? Buy some Amazon acreage to save it from Burger King?

My final pitch: I’m resolved that the students, not me, will exhaust themselves over this next year. I don’t know about you, but one of my needs pedagogically is to make 2.0 projects ones in which I don’t (as I did this year) work harder than all my students combined, but instead empower them to. They’ll coordinate and manage this campaign. We’ll just hook them up and provide advice. They’re natives. They’ll probably blow us away with the buzz they can create, given the freedom, on their social networking sites.

I can already hear “Mercy, Mercy Me” playing around the world as this thing spreads. (And remember, I’m an international school teacher, and we swarm the globe with former co-workers everywhere, so I really do mean “around the world.” We really can make a network like this, and so can our students. And we can assign commercials and multimedia projects as English projects to align instruction with the real world, and get beyond school in our classrooms that way.)

Come on, now. Say yes.

I repeat that proposal to the rest of you reading this: “Come on now. Say yes.”

(And James, Barbara, Chris, you all seem positioned to help this happen. And Jeff Utecht, my teacher band played in Shanghai’s student band “Rock for Charity” last year. Can you hook me up with anybody involved in that in Shanghai? And is that shaven-headed middle-school teacher-rocker, Dale E., still there? He’d probably make it happen. Patrick, you want to pull Boston in? Scott, how about Minnesota? Kim, Bangkok? Julie, Qatar? Darren, Clarence , Jeff Whipple, you want to bring Canada on board? Patrick, New York? Doug, England? Karl, Denver? Bing, New England?

The beauty here is, we don’t have to teach this in our classrooms. We just have to hook students up –musician and promoter types, recyclers, anybody else with a skill and/or passion to contribute — and let them show us what they can do. We can always refine the following year. It’s education that matters–because the earth is sort of important. And so far, we’re educating our kids to keep screwing it up as badly as we in the developed world already have, but to make really good grades and get into really good colleges while doing so. So let’s face the music–and the science, and the future–and do something to make a difference.)

Photo on Flickr by snowriderguy

If you like this post, please spread it:

1. "The Year of Global Cooling" and "Understanding by Design" (part 4 in a series)
2. Call to World Teens: "Concerts for Global Cooling," Earth Day 2008 (Part 5 in a series)
3. Passing the Torch: A Letter to the Next "Greatest Generation" (Part 3 in a series)

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