Achieving equality in education starts by recognizing that nothing is equal to begin with.

Actually, everything is pretty much dynamic. It starts with the obvious understanding that children come from different family structures and different socio-economic backgrounds and ends with the recognition that children have diverse abilities and these abilities need to be nurtured in different ways.

It’s official. The hot buzz word in higher ed this year is MOOC. This stands for Massive Online Open Course. It’s a new type of online class where you have thousands of people in each class and they take it for free (or very low cost). Up till now, you usually didn’t get any kind of certification from it either so it’s been more of casual learning. After about a year of MOOCs, I think I can start to see how it will change the education system. Let me lay out a few starting conditions.

1. It’s clear that most universities have decided they can’t just ignore this new medium. Many schools are now starting up online programs or joining online providers such as Coursera. The barriers to entry have dropped dramatically. What this tells me is we are going to see a flood of online courses in the next few…

        I think I’m on the right track…summative assessments or formative assessments, however you want to categorize them, they are “driving” the educational world.  How do we measure a student’s ability strictly based on filling in circles on a scantron?

On one side of the coin teachers are told to get through a certain amount of information in the curriculum, do it effectively, and do it by the “book” (the rules or literally, however you want to interpret it).  On the other side of the coin, we are also asked to stimulate students, keep them involved, remain positive, and do it all effectively at the expense of losing some of the core content that needs to be stressed.  So how do we as educators find that right balance?

More and more students are lacking the core ingredients, knowledge, or just flat out information in all subjects to really…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/11/27/detroit-schools-public-act-4-repeal_n_2197905.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003&ir=Detroit

It has been almost 3 months since I left my job to work on education in rural areas. The experience has been great and I have learnt something about ‘learning’ and ‘education’. Yes, I do believe that our current education system is all crap and is not serving us well. I am all for alternative education but I also believe that we CANNOT scrap this system and jump to the alternative way just like that. I will try to explain this viewpoint some other day. This post is my attempt to answer an important question:

“What can we change within the existing system of education so that kids actually ‘learn’ and not just pass exams…..?”

So, what is the current scenario?

“School level teaching is unable to inspire a satisfactory learning environment and while children move up from one grade to another, they learn little and comprehend even less.”

In such a scenario, h

A “Found Poem”

By Tyrah Lacy

I was sent off to the kitchen to eat 
I slept in a shed behind his house 
I ate alone, I didn’t want to sit at his table 
I learned what I was sent to learn 
He sent Robert to Savannah and me to a colored school in Macon 
Ray took his hand and shooed me away 
As if i were a fly 
You hit a white man? 
You gonna let a black man talk to you like that ? 
You watch your mouth 
Now strip down so I can whip you

(Found Poems are found by choosing powerful lines from some source like a novel.  Tyrah’s poem comes from writing she found in our novel, The Land)