Beyond School

Photo: “Panic Bear T-Shirt” by Spirals on Flickr, via Everystockphoto.com

[Update 5OCT07: This post accurately captured my feelings about filtering and blocking, but didn't express my absolute respect for, seriously, the best principal I could ever hope to work with. So to be clear, this is in no way an ad hominem, and I regret my inability at the time of writing to make that clear. More here, including a happy ending.]

Please feel free to spread, print, post, and revise this on your own blogs and emails.

Background: This is the first administrative “all faculty” email to be sent after our Web 2.0 Staff Development day:

“Re: Everystockphoto.com

Just a heads up. There are nude photos on this site so be very, very cautious about using this site with students. I would hold off on using it until we see if we can filter content.”

I sent this reply, “all faculty” as well:

SUBJECT: Block Google, YouTube, and Ning: NUDITY

Everystockphoto is a SEARCH ENGINE. It only shows non-copyrighted content, which means no violation of law when students go there for images in their PowerPoints, etc.

If they go to Google SEARCH ENGINE, they steal copyrighted photos for their projects, which is intellectual dishonesty and commercial violation of law.

Hmm. Break the law with Google, or use a solution with a copyright-free version (but also see boobs, which as far as I know are legal). Decision: use Google.

But wait: If you put “boobs” in GOOGLE SEARCH, you’re going to see nudity there too. So the “block or filter sexuality from the universe” approach means NO MORE GOOGLE AT SCHOOL.

And NO MORE YOUTUBE. It has nudity too, if that’s what you’re searching for.

In fact, NO MORE SEARCH ENGINES PERIOD. No more Yahoo, MSN. Nudity there.

[My administrator's name], shut down the HS Staff Ning site you started. If you search for sex on Ning, you’ll find plenty of it. Block Ning. We can’t use it any more.

Avoiding sexuality leads to this, really: No more internet. We’ll just use the laptops for Word documents and Groupwise. You can control that.

No more bookstores either. They have Playboy in them. All kids have to do is search for it, they’ll find nudity in a bookstore.

Sorry, [our librarian's name], no more library. The library has books with sex scenes in. (Read Gilgamesh, the new version, in our library. Or look at any photographic artist’s book. The nude is a favorite of classical art. No more classical art. Let’s cover up Michelangelo’s David, or just block it.)

***

Yes, I’m passionate about this.

It’s the worst strain of American sexual weirdness and Puritanism, and it has teachers in America that I read or talk to daily pulling their hair out.

They can’t use blogs, wikis, YouTube, Flickr, Ning any of the things we’re able to use here.

Europe and Asia don’t have the same hangups America has. But because we’re Americans IN Europe and Asia, we’re carrying those hangups with us and spreading our Nothing Educational If Chance of Boobs Involved hysteria around the world.

If we stop and think, we can export America’s best products - things like the internet, Skype, del.icio.us, YouTube, etc - around the globe, WITHOUT infecting global education with the worst of America’s neuroses and hangups.

This is a VERY American thing. The rest of the world - and I lived in Europe for four years, Shanghai for 5, and studied Arabic for a two years with ten professors from all over the Arab world I came to know well - the rest of the world LAUGHS at America.

Only in America would a large percentage of the population say “Politicians who have sexual lives should not be allowed to serve.” (Examples: pick your latest congressman - Republican or Democrat - or remember Clinton. Bush was “better” because he played to the same Puritanical crowd we’re talking about playing to by BLOCKING and FILTERING. He may not lead to many “sex” links, but if you Google “Bush” and “disaster,” he’ll have far more hits than Clinton. Or “Bush” and “unconstitutional” and “illegal.” But non-nude crimes aren’t scandalous, I guess.)

We should be having discussions about Authrorized Use Policies, Responsible Use, etc - not about simply blocking everything that has images of human reproductive or mammalian organs.

And we should be INVITING parents and students to join those discussions, not trying to avoid the inconvenience with a crippling decision.

I understand the admin’s desire to avoid parent complaints. But filtering and blocking as a first response will lead the 1:1 program down the wrong road.

This is such a crucial issue.

I’m trying to make a point about the slippery slope you’re entering with this email. It threatens to paralyze the whole potential of 1:1 because a few parents (hypothetical, I might add) think avoiding sex is more important than embracing expanded educational power.

Those hypothetical parents have children, by definition. How scandalous. They must have had sex. We should block them from our school.

Clay

What a horrible email to wake up to after a week of fairly sleepless planning for staff development.

I’ve been up all night catching up on my reading, which these days means feed-reading, more than anything.

Two that struck a chord:

1. That LearnerBlogosphere Idea

Sylvia Martinez on the red-hot GenYES blog writes several posts about getting teens to use Web 2.0 independently - like we adult edubloggers do - to develop their literacy skills in ways that classrooms typically cannot match.

One reason I love Sylvia’s posts is that she references reports and data that I don’t have the will or temperament to seek out, but which speak almost always to my own priorities as an educator. A case in point: the goal of creating a “LearnerTalk” (but that sounds schooly) of student edubloggers to give us teachers lessons on how our Classroom 2.0 attempts measure up. Sylvia writes that this is already happening spontaneously, which encourages me to seek ways to harness and shepherd that trend into this arena. Here’s Sylvia:

Students report that one of the most common topics of conversation on the social networking scene is education. Nearly 60 percent of online students report discussing education-related topics such as college or college planning, learning outside of school, and careers. And 50 percent of online students say they talk specifically about schoolwork. (Read her “Web 2.0 - share the adventure with students” post as well)

Does anybody else read into this that the students are stuck, like we adults are, in their own separate echo-chamber? And that combining the student and teacher discourses in one truly universal “edublogosphere” has the potential to steer our shared enterprise into fertile territory sooner than the current “parallel echo-chambers” situation we seem to have right now?

Scott McCleod’s offer to host a “LearnerTalk” type thing a month or so ago has not been forgotten.* Life and work have been too fast to focus on generating interest in that. Last week, before we began our week-long Chusok holiday, I pitched blogging to my Web 2.0 activity club, and many of my students seemed to get a glimmer from that sermon of the power of real-world blogging. I think a few will bite.

2. The War on Teaching Bad Writing

Anybody who’s taught high school English should know why most students hate to write in schools. It’s because they’re taught to write badly.

If I assigned any of you to write about ideas that aren’t self-selected, in forms that aren’t self-expressive, for an over-worked audience of one that puts two or three words, random red hieroglyphs, and a permanently-branded number into a ledger that threatens to determine your fate, face it: you would learn to hate writing (and school) too.

Like Sylvia, Jeff Wasserman of When the Hurly-Burly’s Done shares some hard data and classroom anecdotes to help us teachers of real writing wage the war against teachers of the poisonously schooly 5-Paragraph Essay [*jeers and hisses*]. I replied to Jeff’s post,

Jeff, this makes me want to make my AP Lit class Ning public. We’re having forum discussions about Organic Form v. Mechanical (5PE and all that garbage).

I’ve been making them write timed essays without outlining, trusting that an organic form will come from simply responding to the prompt and writing from there.

I modeled it for them by writing an old AP Lit exam essay about a poem, under timed conditions, in a screencast here, for what it’s worth. Interesting to be able to let them into my interior writer’s monologue as I read, annotate, and write a response, recording voiceover all the while, to the same exercise they did.

My best student responded to watching it by saying, among other things, “I didn’t think you could make a one-sentence paragraph in the body of an essay.”

One last tidbit: I took an AP Lit workshop from UCLA this summer - a waste of time, mostly - but got this from the College Board/APL celebrity who taught it: AP Lit exam graders appreciate organic form, “as long as it has a beginning, middle, and end.”

I like that: beginning, middle, end. None of this “introductory paragraph, body, conclusion paragraph” drivel.

Then, instead of sleeping as I’d intended, my mind shifted into overdrive. Sylvia’s and Jeff’s post led to these fantasies of how we can teach real writing (based on real reading in this “infinite book” we call the internet) with web 2.0:

First, students would write self-directed blogs. No homework assignments allowed in terms of subject matter, though standards of style and conventions would be set;

Second, assessment would be based on readership, comments, subscriptions, visitor stats, Technorati authority ranking (with safeguards against fraudulent links, which are easy enough to spot), self-assessment, and other non-authoritarian, teacher-gives-grades assessment styles. (And yes, as usual, it’s the institutional but otherwise counter-educational imperative to grade everything that presents the biggest obstacle to this approach to learning.)

–Wait, you say. That’s not fair. Some students who are not blessed with verbal intelligence will not attract subscribers, visitors, comments, and so forth. But not so fast: the art of compensation with other intelligences is so much more possible on blogs. Not a great writer? Then compensate by communicating through images (see Diane Cordell’s blog), podcasts (see Wes Fryer), films (see Marco Torres and Mabry Middle School), graphic novels and comic strips (see ToonDo). Carve out a niche doing Google Earth productions (see Google Lit Trips) as your blog’s specialty. Find some skill you have, or some passion you want to extend, and adapt your blog to exploit that.

Really: What form of multiple intelligences does blogging exclude?

Third, grades would be weighted toward the end of the year or term, to allow for experiment, dead ends, learning - through - failure, and other writerly discoveries afforded by real-world blogging. (I’m more and more fascinated by the fact that my own blogging has been a real-world case of what we call “project-based learning” in school, and more and more convinced it’s the way to engage young writers to naturally want to hone their skills and excel.)

I shouldn’t have tried to write this right now. Too tired. But these holidays are short, and I love them for allowing this type of reflection.

–

*I’ll probably just buy the domain and host it alongside the Project Global Cooling site anyway, since I’m already adminstering WordPress MU for my school - and soon will train students to administer these sites themselves. It’s so hard to let go of the reins and give them to the young, and so easy to forget that they’re more than capable. But I will ask Scott to boost, support, read, seed, reply

Photo credits:
Writing by oskay
Borg Drones by Dunechaser
Bible 2.0 by jeff w brooktree
Looking by eskimoblood
Fusion Festival 2005 by Udo Herzog

The first half of this post is written in the (very real) voice of an angry student wanting to “quit school.” The second half is a preview of an upcoming podcast interview with the director-producer of the “unschooling” documentary, “Voices from the New American Schoolhouse,” that I wrote about recently in the “Four Convergences” post. It’s also an invitation for anybody out there to submit questions for that interview, or arrange to call in during it, in this post’s comments.

The two halves of this post belong together. Bear with me.

What Fresh Hell is This?:
When the Desks are Turned….

As regular readers know, I’m a “student” again in this (US) $500 online AP workshop.

I almost “hate” it. And that’s good.

It’s good to sit in the student’s desk and experience the exasperation, the time-wasting folly, the powerlessness, the absurdly arbitrary nature of it all.

Harsh? You decide. Another quick example (after the B+ for assigning a videochat / filmmaking poetry lesson instead of an analytical essay): Course started three weeks ago. Course book was mailed before that, but only included the AP Lit workshop book. No syllabus. On Day One of the course, Blackboard lets students in to see teacher bulletins. I must have missed the mention of reading Their Eyes were Watching God on one of those links. Even if I hadn’t, it takes three weeks for book orders to arrive in Korea. This was a Week Two assignment.

I went to two bookstores with foreign (English) book sections, but no luck. I emailed the teacher, asking for either an extension or a workaround by performing a similar analysis in a different novel. Seemed reasonable to me.

I emailed teacher the day the assignment was due - Sunday in LA, Monday in Korea. (I’d searched in bookstores the day before, so I sent this email within 24 hours of discovering the problem.)

Here’s where it gets interesting. Teacher told me “It’s too late at this point to deal with the geography issue.” Note the language: absolute as the Ten Commandments. And so arbitrary. It could easily be otherwise.

Think about that: am I supposed to learn “a valuable lesson” about punctuality here? Is that the teacher’s role? Is that what I’m paying $500 for? To be told, “No learning activity for you because you were tardy”? And “this is going to hurt your grade, young man?”

At 45, it’s absurd. Given the circumstances, it might be at 15 as well.

Compounding the mood is another maddening fact: teacher and I went round and round for probably two or three hours this week in private emails in which she told me I was participating too much in the forums. Forums participation is weighted 400 total points, while weekly work is weighted 100 points each week, so I spent silly energy trying to tactfully ask teacher to resolve the cognitive dissonance of the simultaneous “Talk / Don’t talk” commands she was giving. In a parallel universe with a teacher comfortable with student autonomy, I could have used that time to discover the problem with the upcoming assignment.

(That tact was hard because a forum, especially online and asynchronous, is open space when I teach classes, and I only interfere when there’s abuse. I still don’t get the pedagogy behind this control, and feel more and more like asking for a refund. I participate a lot, yes, and that’s no different from a fantastic AP Language workshop I took last year, in which much good conversation and good will happened. Why the difference now, with this class and this teacher? Where’s the pedagogy?)

Add to that: teacher publishes assignments for each week at a pace she controls. I’d finished the prior week’s assignment within two days, and had she set up the course for self-paced acceleration, would have seen the unavailable novel issue five days sooner. Why not publish all assignments up front, and assign only the feedback on a tighter schedule?

One last doozie: She requires class members to read every post in Blackboard’s primitive forums (proprietary software like that is so painful - you can’t expand a thread to see it all at once, so you click countless posts that say, “Thanks!” Worse, teacher has disabled all multimedia embedding, so we’re stuck with text only). It’s required for the grade.

But what’s in the forums? “Schooly” assignments in which we play high school and write literary analyses of teacher-selected works. We write our analysis, then we give feedback to others. Fine, okay. It can be fun, within limits. But this isn’t an AP Literature class. This is “Teaching AP Literature.” Why so much “playing the student,” instead of focusing on the pedagogy? Yeah, I get the idea of shaking off rust. But it shouldn’t be the major focus.

The more important assignment, though, is our lesson planning for AP Lit - you know, the “teaching” aspect that we teachers enrolled in the course for? Hold your hats, because here’s a bigger doozie: Teacher does not require us to read each others’ lesson plans, and give feedback.

Instead, she alone gives feedback on those - in an email, with a numerical grade.

I’m sorry, but that’s simply bad teaching in my book. I don’t care much if somebody finds fault with my interpretation of a Shakespeare sonnet. I do care if somebody finds fault with my lesson plan design. I’d love to see my classmates criticize that. I’d have 20 peer-teachers. My teaching, and my students’ learning, would benefit.

But no. I have one teacher only here: The capital T teacher, the expert who gives grades to fellow adults. Note the hidden curriculum. Again, absurd.

There’s no less pleasant feeling than righteous indignation. Who likes feeling self-righteous? But I’m burdened with it.

So cure me of this. As usual, dear reader, I beg you: tell me what I’m missing.

For the record: there’s no space on the forums for suggestions to improve the class. I have emailed suggestions, with little response. In the classic “park the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff instead of installing guard-rails at the top” move, those suggestions come only at the end of the course, with the end-of-course evaluation. By then, it’s (fittingly) academic.

Why This Bad Luck is Good Luck

If nothing else, I’m re-living the experience of all intelligent students who have to swallow their insights into how their teacher could foster better learning - and better morale.

And the convergence of this experience with my recent explorations of unschooling, of Illich, of Downes, and of the Sudbury schools couldn’t be more serendipitous.

Danny Mydlack, the New American Schoolhouse documentary director, told me in an email that he’d posted the full documentary in segments on YouTube. So I started watching it tonight to prepare for the interview.

I’m not finished yet. But so far, here is what I consider the film’s most powerful moment. Listen to this young man explain why - after a life in public schools - he did nothing in the full first year of his attendance at this self-directed “unschool.” (His clip starts at 4 minutes, and he hits his brilliant stride at 5.30):

Such power in those insights. One day, I hope student voices this honest and insightful are common posts in our edublog readers.

So here’s the invitation, again. If you want to watch the full documentary, it’s posted in ascending order - bottom to top - at Danny’s page at YouTube. It’s very well-done, and worth the hour.

And if you want your questions or comments included when I interview Danny - or if you want to join us on Skype - just comment below and have your say.

Interesting journey these days. More and more, the problem doesn’t seem to be “dropping out,” as much as “dropping in” - or being dropped in, in a perfect use of the passive voice - in the first place.

Treat a student like an infant - even a 45-year-old one - and you get an infantile student. This post is proof.

I look forward to “de-toxing” when it’s all over, and getting back to what I want to learn, for free, grade-free, and above all – teacher-free.

–
*Sorry for the re-post. I want RSS readers to enjoy the epigraphs from the Greeks and Chinese - a stylistic touch I’m learning from Diane’s writing at Journeys. This is another thing I don’t like about aggregators - they don’t update revised posts.

Update on Apress. Predictable: Apress marketers of some sort came to my post giving their book (Beginning PHP and MySQL 5, 2d Ed., by W. Jason Gilmore), forum, customer service, and company a D-. [Update: I assume this because the referral was a search on Tecnhorati for "Apress book" tags, and because the next paragraph happened on the same day.]

They went to the forum and deleted the spam that had accumulated down its first ten rows or so of entries. Nice cosmetic change, as easy as zipping up after someone points out your fly is down. At least they left the posts labeled, “If you’re not going to moderate these forums….” It must have been tempting to delete that too.

But what about the customer posts in those forums, most that I saw unanswered for months? How about the emails rejected as spam, after the Apress authors invite them in their expensive books?

Apress, come on. Don’t just window-dress. Problem-solve. Serve your customer. Or at least communicate with him.

If you can take the time to delete the spam from your forum, can you find a minute to answer your customers there too? Or at least explain?

If you can take the time to visit my blog - twice or three times, my Sitemeter told me - and read the post with the “D-” rating, can you take the time to respond to it as well? You’re a tech publishing house, so you probably know that on blogs, that “comment” thingy is a place to click and communicate. You’re invited.

If not, give me a refund on that $50, 1,000-page book that doesn’t live up to its promise. So I can reinvest it at Sitepoint, which does communicate with its customers, answer their forum posts, and does not make false “for novices” claims on their books.

So, Apress, for ruining my summer vacation, Your New Grade: F.

[This post is a watershed for me, stuffy as that may sound. Many loose threads needed weaving. I apologize for the tone, which I fear is typically more self-important and more harsh than I would like. I also apologize for the length. I hope you'll read it through, and thank you if you do. Update 13 July 07: Be sure to read the conversation with Doug and others in the comments following the post. And the thinking extends in this "Teaching Grammar on the Titanic: on Fear and Irrelevance in Education" post.]

* * *

1. I’m Nobody

Suzie Boss, writer of the upcoming Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age, to be published by ISTE this fall, interviewed me via Skype* (thanks to a referral by the ever-helpful Jeff Whipple of Whip Blog) for an article recently published on the Worldchanging.com website entitled “Education: Connecting the Lonely Profession.” It goes without saying that it was an honor to be mentioned in the same paragraph with Wes Fryer, Julie Lindsay, and Vicki Davis. It was Julie and Vicki’s Flat Classroom Project, after all, that inspired my idea to take the traditional language arts writing workshop onto a flat classroom collaborative wiki, and make it a never-ending global project: the 1001 Flat World Tales**. It was also an honor to appear at all on Worldchanging.com, which I’d subscribed to in Bloglines many months earlier. There are few more important blogs out there for real-world problem-solving in the Age of Mindless Waste and Warming.

That being said, though, that interview with Ms. Boss came at a pregnant moment in my own journey not just as a teacher, but as an earthling. I had just taught a unit of satire in which Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels - and the multimedia Yahoo Project we finished that unit with - probably changed my thinking more than it did my students’. Swift’s novel nailed human folly with the timelessness that makes it the classic it is. The Yahoos he pillories in the novel are alive and well today, inside us all. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were most painfully present in our schools, in my classroom - in my teaching.

Here I was, assigning four dozen 15-year-olds to take action addressing whatever “Yahoo-caused” problem in the world disturbed them via a digital storytelling product and a plan involving the use of web 2.o to create positive change about their chosen issue, and thinking I’d done my job at inculcating a sense of citizenship and agency in them. “Think big,” I told them. “Look at the Flat World Tales: it was an idea in January, and by May more than a dozen countries were participating in the project. Use that as a lesson to see how possible it is to use web 2.0 to create real change.” I was pretty proud of that. Until.

I started listening to my students talk about how bothered they were about The Big Issue affecting their futures: global warming (and I’d love any deniers out there to comment so we can debate this). They were bothered about it because “Nobody’s doing anything about it, and we know it’s a problem.”

That set off my 5-alarm Hypocrisy Detector. Sure, the attempt to be “Classroom 2.0″ with the 1001 Flat World Tales was not your run-of-the-mill way to deliver a lesson - it was inventive, it was fresh, and it had pedagogical potential to improve both engagement and literacy. But. In terms of its content, its basic objectives, it was nothing new at all. Just a traditionally irrelevant and arbitrary, teacher-dictated little exercise in writing a nice little story for school with other nice little students stuck in their classrooms around the world.

It wasn’t “Beyond School” at all. It was Classroom 1.0 with web 2.o bells and whistles. In terms of vision, it was still “school-y.”

“Nobody’s doing anything about it.” It kept on echoing. My pride in the 1001 Flat World Tales collapsed as a result. I wasn’t “teacher 2.0.” I was one of the “Nobodies” that frustrated students by my complicity in schoolhouse irrelevance.

The rest is history, unless you were at NECC or Disneyland while I was writing a dozen posts in Korea that you didn’t read upon your return. Here’s the short version:

1. I read that over 200 universities in the US had signed a “carbon neutral” pledge in recognition that they, as educational institutions, had a responsibility to set an example in responding to the overwhelming scientific evidence that human activity was the key factor in global warming.

2. I blogged about that pledge, asking why K-12 schools aren’t following suit, and Jeff Wasserman blogged about that post in a Very Strange Coincidence that set the Global Cooling / Community Service 2.0 project in motion. (Were I superstitious, I would have thought that coincidence a sign. I suppose I did see it that way, somewhat.)

3. In the intervening 3 weeks, I’ve written a dozen or more posts developing the idea. In the midst of that, Suzie Boss interviewed me about her WorldChanging.com article (ironically, her interest was in the 1001 Flat World Tales, which I’d come to view as too “school-as-usual”). But the title, or, more precisely, the tagline of Suzie’s forthcoming book - “Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age” - worked a spell on me. Real World. My world, the students’ world, the students’ future. Projects that were relevant to that. That was key.

And the title of the website Suzie’s article appeared on: WorldChanging. That too was key. As a teacher, I’d been “World-Ignoring,” creating nice little exercises to connect students with other classrooms around the world, but not to connect with the world itself. Harnessing the power of Web 2.0 to reinforce the disempowerment and infantilization of adolescents around the world. School-y. “Beyond School”? Again, a joke.

Yeah, the students thought it was more interesting than most of the stuff they have to put up with in schoolhouses. But it was still just homework. Nothing WorldChanging, nothing that taught them that they have the potential to affect this world for the better. Nothing that encouraged their empowerment. Nothing that gave them the opportunity to apply their learning to something that mattered to them, or to discover that, if only schools would let them, they could learn about the limits of their own power to make change in the world.

I was keeping these young adults in diapers, checking their homework, teaching them that changing the world was something to leave to others. Our purpose was to teach them what a metaphor is, and a synecdoche. Leave the fate of the planet to politicians and prayers, and other such time-tested solutions. Depend on anything but your own skills and agency to avert catastrophe.

4. I invited my AP Literature students, strangers I’m getting to know on our AP Lit Summer Reading Ning, to begin organizing the “Year of Global Cooling” and “Concerts for Global Chilling” here in Seoul, so it can all come off by Earth Day next April. Over 20 of these young adults are active on it now, and a dozen met me yesterday for a Sunday afternoon planning session at a downtown cafe. I left early, because they were so all over it, they didn’t need me - which was what I’d hoped would happen.

On the Global Cooling Collective Ning I started, another member I’d invited sent out over 100 invitations to other “Classroom 2.0″ adult types. About 20 of them joined. 20 of my students also joined. So far, the students are active, while the adults are, with a couple of exceptions, pictures on the “Members” box. But maybe they’ll contribute at some point.

That’s about it, on that front.

* * *

2. Goodbye to All of That

On New Year’s Day, 2007, I started this blog. I named it “Beyond School” and, in the months that followed, thought I was being true to the aspiration so vaguely adumbrated in that title. A lot has happened in the seven months since that time that has energized my professional life beyond my wildest expectations, and none if it would have occurred if I hadn’t started participating in the edublogosphere.

But I see now that my personal journey to get Beyond School is only now starting to crystallize. It’s not about web 2.0 for me anymore (though that is a tool I’ll continue using). And it’s definitely not about “Classroom 2.0,” since I dislike the realities of schools and classrooms as much now, as a teacher, as I did when I was a very miserable high school student.

Putting “what it is about” in positive terms is more difficult, but here are a few stabs. It’s about not being “a Nobody doing anything” when my students are looking for “Somebody doing something” about what they care about. It’s about inviting them to discover that they have the power to do something too. It’s about being a community leader more, and a teacher less. It’s about extending my relationship with these young adults beyond the nine-month term (if church youth group leaders can do it, so can teachers). It’s about re-conceptualizing schools as community action centers instead of walled gardens (or day-care centers, or juvenile detention centers). It’s about designing relevant experiences and projects in which any metaphors or synecdoches that, god help us, they learn, will have a purpose and meaning beyond an alphanumeric grade.

It’s about trying to be World-Changing instead of World-Ignoring and World-Ignorant.

That’s the best I can do right now. Does anybody out there want to talk about ways to collaborate on “real-world project-based learning” along these lines?

—

*I podcasted part of that conversation, in which Ms. Boss was kind enough to indulge a 15-minute “think-aloud” about the Year of Global Cooling project, which was then a four-day-old (obsessive) idea, in an earlier post.

**I’m incredibly excited, by the way, to report that Dana Huff of huffenglish, one of my favorite English teacher blogs, dropped me a message on Wikispaces saying she wants to participate in the ‘07-’08 iteration of the 1001 Flat World Tales - talk about “connecting the loneliest profession” with a vengeance! Dana’s the kind of English teacher I dream of having in the classroom next door. And now I will, virtually. Too cool for words. More on that later, I’m sure. With Dana on board, and the logistical lessons learned about flat classroom projects under our belt from the first run last year, this year will surely see a focus on improving the project’s pedagogy. Dana’s been studying Wiggins’ and McTighe’s Understanding by Design for her summer vacation, and has inspired me to do the same. So this looks like fun. You’re invited too, by the way. See the 1001 Teachers wiki to sign on.

But it should be clear that I’m ambivalent now about the value of the 1001 Flat World Tales. I wonder how it can be modified to make it more relevant, and less school-y.