The students shall lead the way. The drawing is similar to the responses I get from high school, elementary students, and some college students who take a course I teach in strategic and creational thinking when I ask the question: “Who are your heroes and why are they your heroes?” Have done this with hundreds...
Category: ethics
Are educators courageous enough to be social media renegades?
the entire scene just reeks of regression. That’s why the future of education will take a brand of forward-thinking educator (teachers / principals etc.) with enough deft and savvy to advocate for technology use in the classroom and enough courage (for lack of a more appropriate word) to wrinkle [districts’] social media guidelines and them...
Are these Illinois students getting the wrong lesson about Twitter and free speech?
[UPDATE: The high school principal is now threatening to suspend students who protest this situation. Never mind that the administrators’ decisions are arguably illegal for many of the suspended students. And apparently also never mind the First Amendment and students’ Constitutionally-protected speech rights. The quote from the Supreme Court at the bottom of this post?...
Does your educational organization believe in redemption?
I saw this poster recently in a middle school. And I confess it struck me the wrong way… Do we really want to send the message to young adolescents that character is nonrecoverable, lost with a single mistake? Or do we want to send messages about learning from mistakes – even really bad ones –...
William’s pseudochoice: Obey or suffer
A teacher wrote to a parent: William had several hours to complete an assignment but chose not to. He will be sent to the room of opportunity for 90 minutes tomorrow to complete it. If he chooses not to finish it, it will be a zero. Not the best way to start the semester… Messages...
Men behaving badly
Lindy West reports: the anti-free-speech charge, applied broadly to cultural criticism and especially to feminist discourse, has proliferated. It is nurtured largely by men on the internet who used to nurse their grievances alone, in disparate, insular communities around the web — men’s rights forums, video game blogs. Gradually, these communities have drifted together into...
2 questions about cheating, copying, and student ‘integrity’
We’re so quick to bemoan the lack of ethics in our students. They cheat. They copy. They take shortcuts on the work. We complain incessantly about their work ethic, their commitment to their classwork and homework, and their failure to find interest or meaning in the learning tasks we put before them. Lost in these...