I can’t really get a handle on Stephen Downes. Is he for this emergent 21st-century school? Against it? Is he after something far more anarchic than either of these? These are all rhetorical. Whatever his ideology, I really appreciated his recent deconstruction of a post by Doug Johnson. Johnson’s only offense, from the perspective of this School 2.0 skeptic, was leaning too heavily on jargon and coded language when explicit terms are necessary now more than ever. (Maybe this is what Christian would call a Trojan Horse post.) Repeatedly over the course of his post, Downes asks (essentially), “What do you really mean by this?” which is a question that always leaves me grateful to the asker.
Dan Meyer
I watched Freedom Writers two weeks ago and have tried, since then, to graft several different structures to a post which has pitilessly rejected each of them.
There was the drinking game. I had the first rule:
Whenever anyone affirms the heroism, nobility, passion, or self-abnegation of the teacher, take a drink.
I quit that, however, when it became clear I’d be legally blitzed by the first reel change.
Last call for drinks at CoffeeCat. Since 17h00 — from immediately after our staff meeting on — I have been a slowly spreading bomb. My blast radius has expanded inches on the hour; ungraded tests and lesson outlines now taunt gravity at the edge of my table. Last call for drinks and I realize I’ve spent my entire day — 8h00 until 00h30 the next day — in the service of my 80% contract.
I finally read Eight for 2008 and it’s like someone ran the collective blogospheric wisdom through the Nonpartisanship Machine. Seriously, if you’ve ranted or enthused about it sometime in the last year, it’s probably in there. ยถ (Oh, and I think I want to be a SuperPrincipal. Half killing machine, half principal, sent from the third moon of Mars to help teachers teach and students learn. Don’t cut the lunch line though, ’cause he’s still got that killing machine thing going for him.)
