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Showing posts with the label Education

School in September

How should we approach the opening of school in Sept?  Schools of the future need to be rethought.  When I started teaching I wrote a letter from the future to each of my students asking them to attend their 30 year high school reunion. ( I was younger then so I figured 30 years out I would still be able to attend. ) The idea was to get students to picture themselves as adults and to imagine a future they have helped shape. I received wonderful letters from future dentists, artists and millionaires. The return address to the invitation was “School name, Community Learning Support Centre”. In the future of education that I pictured schools would be community spaces that would double as senior learning centres as well as community resource places.  I thought of that this week as I read a proposal in a NYTimes OpEd by Dr. S Jogee, an Astronomy professor and parent, suggesting we make kids stay home this fall if they can access online learning and leave schools open to only t...

Those Who Do Not Learn From the Past...

Here’s the best line that I’ve read in a while:   “Restaurants get eulogies. Airlines get bailouts. Shakespeare gets kicked when he’s down.” It’s sooo true. Sure says a lot about what we value as a society. I walk a lot with a friend- we start each day off with a 1 hour walk in Earl Bales Park. It’s gorgeous and energizing and I cannot do without it. One morning my walking partner asked me “Is Covid-19 is God’s response to human kind’s hubris?” This is a deeper topic than we typically cover in our morning walks. We usually discuss distance learning/teaching challenges, why dogs should be on leashes, and how gorgeous the forest looks today... But hubris? God? Wait up! It’s too early for this... But as you can tell, the question has stayed with me, because I think it is true: not the God part- but the hubris part. I’m partial to Greek philosophy and the concept of our creating our own circumstances, and I often teach the nature of humankind as seen through literature. So I was d...