Yours truly—with a new haircut and a trimmed beard—after the successful launch of one-to-one Kindles in the sixth grade and one-to-one iPads in the seventh grade.
Now that we’ve gotten the devices out the door, I will hopefully have a little more time to talk about how we plan on leveraging them to enhance classroom instruction and what was involved in getting 550 devices prepared and into classrooms.
As far as I can tell, the logic (or lack thereof) in the article linked above is that while teachers make 19.3% less than similarly educated peers, they actually make more because an education major is easier than mathematics or history.1
I am not going to beat a dead horse, but what bothers me is that the authors, Biggs and Richwine, make their point by comparing teachers to the private sector.
First, this is empirically dubious. Biggs and Richwine are comparing a specific profession to the entirety of the private sector—from a few Wall Street tycoons to legions of burger flippers—and expecting to draw a meaningful conclusion. I can’t help but notice that the authors are willing to redefine their sampling of the private sector depending on what point they’re trying to make.
Secondly, as long as you’re bringing the private sector into this, let’s talk about the free market. If I recall my watered-down undergraduate education correctly, the free market is loosely based on supply and demand—if demand exceeds supply, costs rise.2 If that’s the case, then this argument is moot. As long as teacher attrition remains an epidemic and teachers leave the thankless profession at a higher rate than we can toss young, energetic, and naïve souls at it, then teachers aren’t overpaid—it’s simply the free market at work, right?
Neither my wife or I majored in education, does that make us eligible for a pay raise? ↩
The other thing I’ve picked up about the free market is that—despite all what you might think—it involves privatizing profits and—when something bad happens—socializing the cost to repair the damage and having the government pick up the tab (which, ironically leads to teacher layoffs most of the time). ↩
You don’t say.
We knew Steve was sick. Sick enough to step down as the CEO of Apple. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we knew Steve could pass away at anytime, but remained optimistic.
I never thought I would be so upset about the passing of someone I’d never met. A person I didn’t know on any tangible level.
Yes, I found out through a text message sent to my iPhone and yes, my first reaction was to immediately fire up Safari on my iMac to verify the news. But my sadness had less to do with my preference for his products and more to do with fact that Steve Jobs was something of a hero of mine.
Steve’s work shaped my life. He famously said that Apple lives as the crossroads of the liberal arts and technology. My degrees—a bachelors in sociology and a masters in special education—are firmly in the liberal arts. I work in education—technology coordinator and teacher. Many of my core competencies in life and the skills that make me successful in my chose career were forged in front of a Macintosh IIvx at the tender age of 7. My job and my hobbies would not exist if it wasn’t for Steve.
Ultimately, however, it’s Steve’s legacy and his approach to life that had a lasting impact. Bill Gates was a programming whiz kid—a genius in every rite. Steve’s talents lied in his obsessive attention to detail, his intense care, his intolerance for anything but the best, his vision for the future, a charisma that could distort reality, and his focused execution. The typefaces, the textures, the pixels: Steve sweated every detail. He demanded the highest quality work from himself and everyone around him.
In remembrance, Steven Frank wrote:
He challenged us all — not just Apple, the whole industry — to make the world better. Not just make a better computer, or a better application, but leverage those tools to really make an impact, to make a difference in people’s lives.
Steve Jobs changed the world with passion and care. He inspired millions to do better. He inspired me to do better. He impacts the work I do every day as a teacher. Steve Jobs’s legacy, the adopted child of a working class family and a college dropout, compels me to inspire my students that armed with passion, care, hunger, and focus, they can change the world.
The drafts of my post yesterday about the loss of Steve Jobs were much longer than what I finally published. Steve’s passion inspired me, but I’ve also always been infatuated with some of the myths, legends, and tall tales surrounding the man. Below are two such examples.
One of my favorite Steve stories that I’ve retold countless times over the years was an anecdote from Larry Ellison:
I remember when Steve was my neighbor in Woodside, Calif., and he had no furniture. It struck me that there wasn’t furniture good enough for Steve in the world. He’d rather have nothing if he couldn’t have perfection.
And I jokingly said, “The difference between me and Steve is that I’m willing to live with the best the world can provide. With Steve that’s not always good enough.” And if you look at how he tackles building a phone, or building a laptop, he really is in pursuit of this technical and aesthetic perfection. And he just won’t compromise.
But he’s never been motivated by money. Once we were hiking, and Steve looked at me, put his right hand on my left shoulder and his left hand on my right shoulder, and said, “Larry, that’s why it’s really important that I’m your friend. See, you don’t need any more money.”
Last year a former Apple employee related his favorite Steve Jobs story to me. I have no way of knowing if it is true, so take it for what it’s worth. I think it nicely captures the man who changed the world four times over. When engineers working on the very first iPod completed the prototype, they presented their work to Steve Jobs for his approval. Jobs played with the device, scrutinized it, weighed it in his hands, and promptly rejected it. It was too big.
The engineers explained that they had to reinvent inventing to create the iPod, and that it was simply impossible to make it any smaller. Jobs was quiet for a moment. Finally he stood, walked over to an aquarium, and dropped the iPod in the tank. After it touched bottom, bubbles floated to the top.
“Those are air bubbles,” he snapped. “That means there’s space in there. Make it smaller.”
Steve Jobs
I’m a shameless lover of Dropbox (that link will get you and me an extra 250 MB). Dropbox is a magical folder that syncs across all of your computers and keeps backups of every file you use for a month and it’s completely free.
DROPitTOme adds some extra functionality despite its annoying capitalization. It links to your account and creates a web page that allows anyone with your password to upload files to a special folder in your Dropbox—accessible from anywhere. I use it for student work submissions. At all hours of the day, I get a little notification in the upper-right corner of my screen that work has been submitted. Megan in the ninth grade has submitted 2 assignments as I’ve been writing this. It’s backed up by Dropbox, so if anything happens, I have 30 days to bring it back from the dead.
A word to the wise, be draconian about your naming conventions. Personally, I don’t have time to cull through a pile of files named ‘Unititled 1.doc’ and figure our who they belong to. Maybe you do, but I can name a number of medieval tortures that I’d prefer. All of my student work is in one folder, I use a Hazel script to automatically sort everything into folders, but that’s graduate-level nerdery.
5th period almost made me cry today.
They were blatantly ignoring things I was saying to them and I snapped and basically was just asking “why don’t you respect me? What is so wrong with me that you won’t respect me?
You probably aren’t going to like this response because it’s not immediately actionable. That said, it’s true: Students will respect you the moment that you put out the vibe that you demand respect.
I struggled with this for years. But, at this point, I can control a room of complete strangers with very little preparation. I’ve put a great deal of thought into how this is even remotely possible and the answer is this: I’m confident in a way that I just assume that my students will respect me.
A big part of this is finding your groove. I made all of the rookie mistakes. I took everything they taught me in graduate school and put it into practice. None of it worked. I was an absolute mess until the morning when I threw out the rules and started over. For me, my strength comes in the form of humor and flexibility. Your super powers might be different.
Teaching is not a recipe. If it was, anyone could do it. The truth is that most people can’t because they never find their voice. Find your voice. Use this experience to figure out what works for you. I turned my class around in late January—so, it’s not too late.
Good luck.
In some form or another, I’ve been a leader since I was sixteen. I was Senior Patrol Leader of my boyscout troop and the youngest Ecology Director of the corresponding summer camp in its history.
I’m not trying to show off. Instead, I’d like to use these facts to draw close attention to the fact that—in my own opinion—I am a terrible leader. I’ve run computer labs, managed teams, developed professional development, fired likeable, but irresponsible, staff. You name it; I’ve done it.
Why am I so awful? I struggle in one area: delegation. When forced to participate in group projects in college, I championed the stance of “Go away, I will do this project alone and you’re all more than welcome to take credit for it later.”
I’ve been told that “perfect is the enemy of the good.” Despite years of experience proving that statement, I constantly struggle with it. I care a lot. It matters to me that things are done perfectly and I trust only one person—myself.
The problem is that that belief system doesn’t scale. Part of being a leader is building capacity in other people and being supportive when they screw something up. Granted, this is harder when you actually care that something is in Helvetica rather than Arial. That said, another part of being a leader is putting aside your profoundly deep mental issues.
Given the things we have going on at my school, there is no way I am going to be able to be the point person for all things technology. I will have to delegate to my staff (currently one 12th grade student—who is amazing) and my colleagues. Also, I am going to have to learn to let things be “good enough.”
For someone as damaged as me, that’s easier said than done.
The textbook answer is that children under the age of 13 aren’t permitted to be on Facebook or any other social network. That’s been the standard operating procedure—at the very least—since I was eleven. How do I know? Because I fondly remember blowing past those warnings when I set up my first Geocities account in 1995. Obviously, I’m very aware that our students today don’t pay any more attention to those warnings as I did at their age. Fair enough.
It’s pointless to reaffirm the fact that they’re not allowed to participate in social networks. If that was in any way effective, you wouldn’t be asking me this question, right? That said, I have a problem with the way we go about teaching responsible Internet use to our students (as well as adults).
The Internet never forgets.
Most people regard that sentence as a bad thing. The Internet will never forget that picture of you at a fraternity party that everyone seems to remember but you. At the same time, the Internet is never going to forget your awesome answer to a programming question on Stack Overflow or your thought-provoking poem on Facebook.
In my less-than-humble opinion, our time is better spent citing positive examples of how you can use the Internet to establish a reputation as a thoughtful, creative member of society. It doesn’t help to live in fear of Google’s long arm. Instead, I challenge you to embrace it and create something meaningful that will draw positive attention to you.
Louis CK
(Source: whydoihaveablog, via revolutionizeed)
I own a calendar and I am familiar without how it works. Despite that, September snuck up on me. It’s only the third day of school and I’m already swamped. That said, I’m excited about the number of awesome initiatives we have going on at the Scholars’ Academy.
I’d love to say this list is exhaustive, but it’s probably not:
Those are the broad strokes. There are lots of other nuances (e.g. I’ve recently upgraded our Xserve to Mac OS X Lion server and I’m pretty excited about some of the possibilities there). In addition, we’ll be continuing with our initiatives from last year. We rely heavily on the Google Apps for Education infrastructure. I rolled it out during my first week on the job last year and in the relatively short time I’ve been at the Scholars’ Academy, it’s become the foundation for most of our collaboration.
In addition, we have our TEAL Lab (five SMART Boards, one room), a brand new music-technology studio, a Tricaster for live streaming events, and we’re trying to implement “digital bulletin boards.”
My goal is to document the process of seeing all of these projects to fruition. Fraser Speirs has documented his experience in rolling out a school-wide iPad program at his school and it’s proven to be an invaluable resource to me at the Scholars’ Academy. My goal is to do my part to add to the cannon. In addition, writing and reflecting about this stuff is essential for me keeping my head wrapped around the task at hand. I’m looking forward to sharing our progress as well as going into the nitty-gritty as to how these initiatives are (or are not) helping or students.
Seth Godin
A static site generator written in Ruby—more flexible than Jekyll, less complex than nanoc.
My prayers have been answered.
I designed it from scratch. Typekit delivers the fonts and I based the CSS off of the Blueprint CSS framework.
If you’re willing to do some backwards engineering, the source code for the theme is available here. You would probably want to change some of the wording and keep your own copy of the CSS file somewhere else (other than my Dropbox, where I’m apt to move it and break your theme by accident).
