Writing Here and Elsewhere
This page serves as a table of contents for the long and not-so-long articles that I have written here or on my class blogs. Most of these posts are about education (learning, unschooling, teaching, etc.) in some way or another.
Let me tell you a story explains how my seventh grade class came to work with Robin Sloan. For the super-quick version, see Robin’s post on Snarkmarket. [25 April 2010]
“Special Class” [from the vaults] will give you some insight into the roots of my educational philosophy through an essay of mine from 2005, and through some clips from Caterina Fake, Carwai Seto, and Edward T. Hall. [17 September 2011]
Empathy is exactly that, my thoughts on the importance of empathy, in particular regarding schools. [30 May 2010]
The Future of Learning, framed through some experiences during a spring break staycation, looks at the value of online social networks and how they might change our approach to education. [14 April 2010]
Why the obsession with credentials? is a response to a post by Will Richardson that has an unschooling tone, but also promotes using portfolios rather than credentials. [22 April 2010]
Eliminating the “Don’t talk to strangers” rule is a response to helicopter parenting and overblown fears about online predators, but it moves beyond those topics to explain what we have to gain intellectually and societally from reconsidering the oft-repeated rule. [23 May 2010]
Astra Taylor on Unschooling points to the best one-hour explanation of unschooling, what will now be my default intro-to whenever people ask me more about the subject. [13 November 2010]
Unschooling and Messiness pieces together quotes from a variety of articles and emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary learning and conversation, or messiness in learning. [23 August 2008]
Slow Learning is a term that I like to use in a different way than what most people are used to. [23 May 2010]
Slowness is an act of resistance is a follow-up post on slow learning and slowness. The title is a quote from an article by Rebecca Solnit. [20 December 2010]
More opportunities, not more features emphasizes that a flexible learning program is better than one with many components. [7 August 2010]
Branding and Authenticity and Schools is a rant about the independent school arms race produced by the economic boom of the 2000s. It looks at developing programs in house and moving towards more sustainable schools. [18 September 2008]
Barbarians with Laptops was originally a pair of comments on Clay Burell’s blog post with the same name. It takes a look at my experience with a one-to-one laptop program and the use of social media tools in the classroom. [30 December 2009]
An open letter to those in attendance at The Children’s School Board of Trustees pre-board forum on Monday, January 25 covers a variety of topics relating to schools and gives a better look at the middle years program that I helped to develop at TCS. [31 January 2010]
Our Middle School Is an Art School? compares the outcomes we aim for in the middle school program that I co-built with the description a graduate from Cooper Union gives of what he learned in art school. [30 December 2011]
The fidget tool imagines a small, data-collecting device that might be useful for individual students and/or teachers. It falls under the umbrella term “the quantified self.” [31 July 2008]
A note for Frank Chimero discusses burnout, sabbaticals, and the importance of teaching art and design in our schools. [7 July 2010]
Are Distractable People More Creative? is a response to a playful jab from one of my students and a look into a few of my obsessions. [22 September 2010]
Open Studios is a description of one unique component of the NMY program, our version of Google’s 20%. [27 September 2010]
Living and learning with new media ties many of the philosophies and practices in my classroom with the investigations presented by Digital Youth Research, a three-year project, headed by Mimi Ito. [20 November 2008]
Sociality is learning follows up on the previous post upon the publishing of the full report by Digital Youth Research. [1 December 2009]
Reflections is a short reminder about an important component of learning as practiced by the TCSNMY school community. [15 April 2010]
An argument against grades — in any form is mostly a quote from a student colleague that emphasizes my position on grading as an assessment tool. [17 November 2009]
EdCampOC Profile is a profile and series of session proposals that I wrote before attending EdCampOC in January 2011. It was published on the “Meet the Attendees” page of the EdCampOC website. [5 January 2011]
Growing Together points to the importance of meeting the social-emotional needs of people when building a learning community. [21 February 2011]
A Teacher’s Desk: I contributed to Stephen Davis’s blog of the same name, which was composed of a school year’s worth of images of teachers’ desks with descriptive captions by their owners. Mine wasn’t really a desk (didn’t have one), so this monthly assignment was an interesting and enjoyable challenge. Note: February got away from me. [Monthly, September 2010 - May 2011]
Games and Art is a short reflection on “What is art?” following a visit to the Museum of Man as part of a faculty professional development day. [16 January 2011]
Want part of your brain back? wasn’t really written by me. It’s the contents of an email received by a student, a good example of the sort of messy conversation that I find most valuable for learning. Think of it as a glimpse into the classroom where I spend my days. [10 March 2011]
What to expect from me is a follow-up to Want part of your brain back? posted nearly a year later. [23 February 2012]
Challenging People reflects on the feedback we receive when our work doesn’t “cater to the lowest common denominator.” [12 April 2011]
Desire Lines contains little original content, but poses some questions about how we go about planning and designing and whether we are coercing others or forcing our vision on them. [4 June 2011]
Slow and Small is love plea for slow in small options in a culture and economy that tend to reward speed and scale. It was originally a series of messages that I posted to Twitter on June 9, 2012 two days after graduation at The Children’s School, a beautiful, joyful, human event, enhanced by its imperfections. If you are interested in Slow and Small, you will probably like another post that I titled Small and Slow. [13 August 2012]
Semicolon was the final post to my tcsnmy8 blog. It is a goodbye an until-we-meet-again, but it is also a musing on the value of seams, futherances, and affordances, and how we are shaped by those around us. I stitched this post together using quotes from Caren Litherland, Anne Galloway, William Gibson, and Mary Norris after my departure from The Children’s School. [10 August 2012]
Unfinished: Brian Eno and Konrad Glogowski uses a series of passages from Konrad Glogowski and Brian Eno to emphasize the importance of understanding that all the culture that we produce — all work — is inherently unfinished. [23 June 2011]
Heading somewhere is a series of quotes stitched together to suggest that our primary mode of expression is moving in the direction of photography, and, perhaps, video. [23 June 2011]
Walking and Learning is a pair of comments I made in response to Mary Ann Reilly’s “Being in the Middle: Learning Walks”. It’s mostly a set of resources for situated learning and exercises in noticing through unplanned walking excursions with students. [2 July 2011]
Whose education is it? uses a quote from Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals to ask a question that is too often forgotten in the debate about education and education policy. [23 August 2011]
Studio 8 provides a glimpse into the studio classroom and points to two important references regarding the design of places for learning and creating. [16 January 2012]
The Portland Index links to the posts I wrote while in Portland, Oregon with the TCS Class of 2012 on their eighth grade trip. This was the final urban adventure that I shared with students at the school and the culmination of over a dozen years of student-led explorations. To get a sense of the philosophy behind these outings, what they are like, and how they are planned, see the resource documents I created for Portland and San Francisco (the trip taken the previous year). [27 April 2012]
Nervio is an attempt to define a word with the aid of photos. It’s a word you might be looking for. [14 February 2005]
Me gustas cuando callas riffs on a famous poem by Pablo Neruda and can be summed up with one line from within: “Often, I simultaneously need the comfort of company and the quiet of solitude.” [5 May 2012]
Punctuation, emoticons, gestures, and Munari-inspired “visual hashtags” covers all of those topics with a generous sprinkling of outbound links. [16 September 2010]
My Keys, A Big Chair, and Faded Elegance (three separate posts) are quick examples illustrating the concept of beausage. [1 September 2010]
A Serious Answer is not a piece of writing, but a statement in list form in response to a query about female artists. [13 August 2011]
Is Twitter what Rayuela tried to be? frames Twitter as the equivalent of two items described by others: “motley events dispersed across time and space” and “a radically experimental novel more than all other mediums.” [15 January 2012]
For further snippets, images, and videos clipped from the web about education, see my posts tagged ‘education’ or tagged ‘unschooling’
