Beyond School

Not that my applause is worth much, but anyway - I applaud Dan Meyer’s latest post. And I thank him for pushing past all our stuff in a four-day flurry of often angry emails.*

And while we’re at it, it’s a good moment for me to air my laundry too. It’s Spring, after all. And it will be short. It has to do with my own occasional resentment against what I call The Names in edublogging - you know, the folks with the biggest megaphones (especially the ones who aren’t classroom teachers).

It mostly manifested itself right after the launch of Students 2.0. A few of the Names used their Big Megaphones to write about this project that was so important to the students and me, and wrote about them in ways that angered me, ways that I thought threatened to trivialize and tokenize the “cute kids” by patting them on the head. I’d hoped Students 2.0 would be taken as equal voices, not patronized ones, so I was sensitive to the first reactions they got, how “the Names” framed the project. But I got snarky, normally at moments of too little sleep and thus bad judgment, and hit below the belt by saying non-teachers, in effect, don’t deserve the megaphones any more than generals deserve the medals for winning battles from the rear. I should have stuck to the idea and said things as simple as, “Hey, let’s not patronize.”

I think I cleared those up fairly quickly in follow-up comments (after sleep, usually). I’m thinking of two occasions particularly.

But now I want to add a change of view I had after podcasting last month, here in Korea, with my principal as one guest, and Jenny Luca in Australia, her principal, and the ubiquitous Lindsea, a student in Hawaii, as my other guests. Long story short, Jenny said that she contacted me about collaborating in Project Global Cooling because her “eyes had been opened” by a workshop Will Richardson gave in Melbourne a few weeks earlier. (And Will, for the record, is not one of the “two occasions” afore-mentioned.) The point: no consultant like Will, no connection like Jenny, no Australia in Project Global Cooling.

The lesson? We’re all doing what we’re doing as best we see fit. Not real profound, I know. But too easy (for me, at least) to forget.

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*Dan, if the cast-iron skillet approach really wasn’t necessary to get you to listen, as you claim, then I’m sorry. Being hard-headed myself, I suspect with you it was, though. It’s been necessary many a time to get my attention - ask my parents, my ex-wife, my new bride. We who “think a lot” tend to sometimes not notice a lot as well. And this one I don’t mean sarcastically.

Photos: The Bridge to Spring, Part 2 by WisDoc