Beyond School

Another Excused Absence:

I’m still planning

with

,

who will divorce me before we get to the altar for posting this picture.

The ceremony will be on March 8.

(Jeff Whipple says I should Ustream it. Since my parents, family, and friends can’t fly out to Korea to be there, I’m actually considering it. How whacked is that? I love it.)

If what I learned in high school biology is true, a stork might be delivering a

a few seasons later - that means more than nine months later, by the way*. (Or is it a cabbage truck? I failed that test in high school because, unfortunately, that bit of learning hadn’t yet become relevant to my repressed little adolescent soul.)

Because of that, I’ve been writing less. (And spending enough $$$ to make this grown man weep.

But she’s so fun, and her heart’s so good, that it’s worth it.)

But…

But I did drop in for a podcast with Jeff Utecht and Dave Carpenter on Jeff’s Thinking Stick last week, and Wes Fryer posted a discussion at the Shanghai Learning 2.0 unconference facilitated by Will Richardson.

The podcast with Jeff is about an hour, but the one with Wes is only about ten minutes.

I thank Wes for catching and posting that discussion, because it brought out in its flow the reasons I’m pessimistic about schools as places for learning the most important things, and as places that, in many ways, train us to fear learning - by training us to avoid failure.

We should be teaching learners to value failure as the great teacher it can be.

–

*This is to my students, who read an earlier post with the baby picture and showed very poor critical reading skills, which resulted in the widespread belief that our engagement was compelled not by love, but a shotgun.

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