Category: Education
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Teaching programming to children
Kids tend to become interested in programming through being consumers. So it’s likely that if your child expresses interest in programming, it will be such activities as making app’s for the iPod or becoming a computer game programmer. The problem is, those are not really attainable as first goals, and trying to attain them too…
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Running in a Race to Nowhere
The other night I joined a boisterous, energized crowd at the Rio Theater to see the second of two films about education making waves these days. (See my review of the first, Waiting for Superman. I’m going to attempt to avoid a compare/contrast of these two radically different films here; hopefully I’ll get to that…
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Harvest
Lots of schools have harvest festivals, but the best way you can connect your kids to the rhythms of the earth is to take part in the dance. At our house, this happens in a variety of ways. We went on a lovely school fieldtrip to Live Earth Farm. We’ve gone there before, and I…
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Mandate, schmandate
So we have a state budget and we perhaps think that all is good. All is not good. This economy is less like a roller coaster and more like a very slow sink into thick black mud. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll find a diamond down there in the mud, but for now, all we see…
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No time to wait for Superman
I went today to a special showing of Waiting for Superman, the first of the two films about the sorry state of American education that are coming out this fall. It was sponsored by the Santa Cruz Education Foundation and had a panel discussion afterward by John Laird, Ellen Moir of the New Teacher Center,…