Audrey Watters: Hack Education: Building Anti-Surveillance Ed-Tech | National Education Policy Center

Hack Education: Building Anti-Surveillance Ed-Tech | National Education Policy Center

Hack Education: Building Anti-Surveillance Ed-Tech

These are the slides and transcript from my conversation this morning with Paul Prinsloo — a webinar sponsored by Contact North

Pardon me if I just rant a little. Pardon my language. Pardon my anger and my grief. Or don’t. Let us sit with our anger and our grief a little.

We are living in terrible, terrible times — a global pandemic, economic inequality exacerbated by economic depression, dramatic and worsening climate change, rampant police violence, and creeping fascism and ethno-nationalism. And in the midst of all this danger and uncertainty, we have to navigate both old institutions and practices — may of which are faltering under a regime of austerity and anti-expertise — and new(ish) technology corporations — many of which are more than happy to work with authoritarians and libertarians.

Education technology — as a field, an ideology — sits right at that overlap but appears to be mostly unwilling to recognize its role in the devastation. It prefers to be heralded as a savior. Too many of its advocates refuse to truly examine the ways in which ed-tech makes things worse or admit that the utopia they've long peddled has become a hellscape of exploitation and control for a great deal of the people laboring in, with, under its systems. 

Ed-tech may not be the solution; in fact, ed-tech may be the problem — or at the very least, a symptom of such.

Back in February — phew, remember February? — Jeffrey Moro, a PhD candidate in English at the University of Maryland, wrote a very astute blog post "Against Cop Shit" in the classroom.

"For the purposes of this post," Moro wrote, "I define 'cop shit' as 'any pedagogical technique or technology that presumes an adversarial relationship between students and teachers.' Here are some examples:

• ed-tech that tracks our students' every move
• plagiarism detection software
• militant tardy or absence policies, particularly ones that involve embarrassing our students, e.g. locking them out of the classroom after class has begun
• assignments that require copying out honor code statements
• 'rigor,' 'grit,' and 'discipline'
• any interface with actual cops, such as reporting students' immigration status to ICE and calling cops on students sitting in classrooms.

The title of this webinar is "Building Anti-Surveillance Ed-Tech," but that's a bit of a misnomer as I'm less interested in either "building" or in "ed-tech." Before we build, we need to dismantle the surveillance ed-tech that already permeates our schools. And we need to dismantle the CONTINUE READING: Hack Education: Building Anti-Surveillance Ed-Tech | National Education Policy Center

NYC Educator: Tweed Says Safety First--for Tweedies Anyway

NYC Educator: Tweed Says Safety First--for Tweedies Anyway

Tweed Says Safety First--for Tweedies Anyway

 That's the Deputy Chancellor. He has three air conditioners and an exhaust system in his office. After all, it's Tweed and they do Very Important Stuff in there. I look at this photo and I think about the VIP pigs in Animal Farm who needed to eat the apples because they had to do brain work. They needed to fill in ledgers very, very carefully so they could be burned in the furnace. That's about my impression of the Chancellor's team right now.



Like everyone else in this meeting, the Deputy Chancellor was all by himself. You see, while you are supposed to sit with a dozen students in a classroom built over a hundred years ago, barely improved since then,  the VIPs need their own space. Perish forbid they should set an example by setting up a classroom, sitting socially distanced, and all facing in the same direction so no one would face anyone else. Instead, they set an example of what people do when they are actually concerned with their own safety.

In fairness, the chancellor and his peeps repeatedly said they were concerned with our safety. Safety first, safety second, and safety third. However, we would not be working under the conditions that they did. It's curious, because a group of adults can behave in a room a lot easier than a group of children or teenagers. Believe it or not, teachers often have to CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Tweed Says Safety First--for Tweedies Anyway

My New Video Series — Essential Math For Kids (And Parents) | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

My New Video Series — Essential Math For Kids (And Parents) | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

My New Video Series — Essential Math For Kids (And Parents)

Even though most people who read this blog know me as a critic of ed reform, the thing that I spend most of my time thinking about, actually, is how students learn math and what the best ways to teach it is.

Depending on how you count it, I’ve been teaching math for at least 23 years.  My first year as a professional teacher was in 1991, and that was 29 years ago, but I took a few years off after my fifth year of teaching.  But I was tutoring math when I was a high school student which was back about 35 years ago.  And even before that, one early memory of mine was helping my older sister with counting when I was about 4.  What I’m getting at is that I have been teaching math for a long time.

I teach high school now, but I’ve taught in middle school too, and as far as elementary school goes, I have two children, one is 9 and the other is 12, and I’ve helped them with their math and studied the skills that they have learned in their schools.

In this pandemic, parents find themselves in the position of trying to help their children with their math more than ever.  So something that I’ve thought I might do is create a series of videos that go over what I consider to be the essential skills I think kids should know as they progress through the grade levels.

Depending on whether anyone is watching these, I could see myself making about 50 of these 40 minute videos, starting with lower elementary and going though Algebra II and Trigonometry.  Anyway, here is the very first one in the series and it covers what I think the essential math skills I want my own children to master by 3rd grade.

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My New Video Series — Essential Math For Kids (And Parents) | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

CHANGE IS AFOOT WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT – Dad Gone Wild

CHANGE IS AFOOT WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT – Dad Gone Wild

CHANGE IS AFOOT WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT

“We have more to fear from the opinions of our friends than the bayonets of our enemies.” Politician turned Union General Nathaniel Banks, in plea he couldn’t abandon an untenable position.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin

It’s a few minutes before 9 AM. The wife is heading towards the bedroom, which has now become a classroom, to begin teaching her first class of the day. The kids are sequestered in their room, beginning the log in process for another school day. Myself, I fill another cup of coffee and settle in to begin my workday. Ours is not a unique scene, as similar routines transpire all across Nashville.

Three weeks ago Metro Nashville Public Schools kicked off school via distance learning. To say it’s been a painful process is been an understatement. It’s required long hours by teachers to try and fill gaps left open in a skeletal plan designed by district administrators who haven’t taught in a classroom in years. Parents have had to adjust work schedules and child care options, often with limited resources. All of this playing out in front of the backdrop of a global pandemic.

Success has been very slow in coming, frustrations continue bubbling forth, but victories are being won. More than once around our house I’ve heard cries of “I can’t do this”, “I hate this stuff”, “What CONTINUE READING: CHANGE IS AFOOT WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT – Dad Gone Wild

Teacher Tom: How Viral Learning Works

Teacher Tom: How Viral Learning Works

How Viral Learning Works

A parent asked me if we could use medical feeding bags, the kind used in hospitals for patients who can't feed themselves. I knew what she was talking about, but had never given them much thought, let alone wanted one for the preschool. My rule of thumb, however, is that if anyone wants to contribute 20 or more of anything we'll take them. She had 30 so I had no choice but to say "Yes."

They came in two large boxes, one of which I put on the workbench along with a couple of old tempera paint jugs full of water and for the rest of the afternoon we roamed the playground experimenting with them.

The kids who play at Woodland Park are already experts on water and gravity, so it wasn't long before one of them figured out that the water only ran through the hose when the nozzle was lower than the bag of water. This knowledge went viral the way knowledge does in a play-based curriculum, where the children mostly teach one another.

As I watched the play unfold, I began to think of the virality of knowledge. Even before the pandemic, in this age of the internet, we all know about videos and articles that "go viral" through the democratic process of sharing, but this, what the children were doing with the feeding bags, has always been CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: How Viral Learning Works

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