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Thursday, May 21, 2020

Thinking WAY Out of the Education Box | Teacher in a strange land

Thinking WAY Out of the Education Box | Teacher in a strange land

Thinking WAY Out of the Education Box


Heartwarming current ed-news:
Indiana decides that every teacher deserves to be Indiana Teacher of the Year in 2020!
Because that’s about where the education community is, right now— dealing with one crisis at a time.
We adamantly reject the ed-tech dream of empty classrooms and every kid at home with a device. We know how badly that’s worked, even when teachers had six full months to get to know their students, in person. But we can’t quite wrap our heads around what’s next. When we try, it feels like admitting that the prospect of School As We Knew It is probably down for the count.
Three weeks ago, I wrote a blog suggesting that we start thinking about a modified ‘gap year—an admission that school would not be the same until we had confirmed medical solutions for combatting the coronavirus. So we might try ginning up some creative ideas about what to do with P-16 students in the intervening year. It was pretty amorphous service-learning stuff, with young adults and older teens combining on-line coursework with outdoor work and safe environmental or community health projects, a CCC or Peace Corps Lite, adapted to 2020.
That blog got lots of pushback, some of it downright hostile, with nearly all the angst CONTINUE READING: Thinking WAY Out of the Education Box | Teacher in a strange land