Never put Science Teachers in a Room Together

I watched Al Gore: New thinking on the climate crisis from TED the other day. So I sent it to some of my science colleagues and they loved it as well. After a PD today one of the teachers I sent it to told a teacher from another school he would show it in his room after our session. So he, I and three other science teachers watch the video. Do not get science teachers fired up about the climate crisis. Well in actuality we should all be fired up about it. After watching the video and getting ourselves calmed down and rational again I had a chance to talk with a teacher from the other building and we started discussing how Gore's talked fit in with the new "Flat World" of Friedman. Included in that the facilitator at our PD mentioned Pink and Right brain thinking. So now here are a couple of science teachers standing in the hallway linking Gore, Friedman and Pink and what it means for not only our own children but how we have to teach our students. We brought back one of the strategies from our PD called QAR. We all said that our students have a difficult time with the two in their head types of questions, and that is exactly what Pink says they will need to prosper in the Friedman Flat World. Now Gore puts into place being politically conscience and wow. And what are many teachers doing, getting students ready for mandated tests to show AYP. God (or some higher power) help us. This needs to be a discussion for a late night with group of committed educators who are ready to change the face of education in America. Anyone ready to join me?

Left Brain Right Brain Cycle

During Dave Solon's Twenty Minutes for Tech podcast interview with Jim Gates he mentioned two teachers that were interviewed and quoted in The World is Flat 3rd edition. Dave said he would like to see that part but he had a 2nd edition. Well I had a 3rd so I sent him a copy of the two page section with the interview. That got me to reviewing this book again and thus the reason for this post. In skimming thought the first chapter I came across two passages that really struck me having just read and discussed Dan Pink's book The New Mind. Here are the gist of the passages.

In the first passage Friedman discusses the product development cycle. Every new product begins with basic research, then applied research,.....then continuation engineering in order to add improvements. His point was that each of these phases of production is specialized and neither India or China do not have a "critical mass of talent" to handle this production cycle. Well that lead me to Pink, if the US economy is to prosper we better keep churning out those right brain thinker, because there soon will be a large enough mass of talent to take over the production of large scale products.

The second was a quote from a mayor in China. "Today, the US, you are the designers, the architects, and the developing countries are the bricklayers for the buildings. But one day I hope we will be the architects".

Then I started thinking of my experience of becoming obsolete. I came to think of a grad course I was taking in web design. We learned html code and had to create and post a web page. The page had to include a bio (including different size and styles of text), pictures and links to sub page within our page. Boy a whole semester grad class on an operation that anyone can now do in about 5 minutes. Naturally there were steps to the development of these canned pages. Programs like FrontPage that you could, and still can use. Then the development of open source software to use, and so on. But at that time we were really cutting edge, now in order to be called that you need to be creating widgets or java applets for us left brainers to use in their canned point and click web pages.