Curiosity

Poughkeepsie Day School graduates students who:

• Are intellectually curious, active seekers, users and creators of knowledge

Curiosity is the natural stimulus to learning and small children have it in abundance. The upturned Frisbee in the picture below is full of the playground gleanings of a kindergartener at lunch-time.

What happens to that curiosity as children grow older? We live in a world of abundant information – some might say an overload. To make use of that available information so that it may become useful knowledge we need not just technological literacy but also the curiosity to seek it out and the desire to put what we learn to good effect.

It is quite amazing how we have managed to turn the process of learning into something children fail.

Ask many adults and they remember times in school as an ordeal where learning was something to dread and teachers people to be feared.

As I imagine children – whether just beginning in the lower school at Poughkeepsie Day School or perhaps returning as older teenagers to the high school – I like to think that they are filled more with anticipation at a new beginning. I hope they have confidence that whatever the year may bring they will experience a school that trusts children as learners.

Our job as educators is not to chivvy and chide the reluctant learner but to exercise what Jerome Bruner somewhere called the “canny art of intellectual temptation.”

Global eye-popping

Among other key attributes Poughkeepsie Day School graduates students who:

• Think globally with awareness and understanding of complexity and multiple perspectives

That’s in our vision.

But how do we pursue global perspectives and teach awareness of complexity? And just how well informed are we about the world and how do we distinguish between what we think we know and what is actually the case?

Hans Rosling is a public health expert, director of Sweden’s world-renowned Karolinska Institute and a founder of Doctors without Borders. He also founded Gapminder -a non-profit that brings important global data to life and makes it accessible.

Gapminder developed the Trendalyzer software (now bought by Google) that converts statistics into dynamic, interactive and eye-popping graphics. It provides fact based global perspectives using freely accessible public statistics

Here are two Gapcasts both available on his blog. One is a TEDTalk Debunking Myths about the World

Rosling challenges misconceptions about global health and economic trends. It shows comparisons between developing countries and the factors involved in how they are pulling themselves out of poverty. Trendalyzer software analyzes and displays the data in accessible and captivating ways. The sword swallowing at the end is a bonus!

The second – Health, Money and Sex in Sweden – shows even more clearly how this tool can transform dry-as-dust statistics with startling impact.

These novel ways of presenting statistics are used here to make sense of mountains of data about global economic and health trends. The power of these tools also bring to mind the caution in the saying There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.*

Using these tools well is an ethical as well technical challenge. Global literacy has many dimensions.

*Attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and popularized by Mark Twain

Voice activated pencils – "The school that we’d like"

A school in a giant submarine with waterproof maps of the underwater  world.

Private helicopters to fly children to France for their French lessons.

Voice-activated pencils.

Rocket launch pads to take pupils on trips to distant planets to study the solar system.

Canteen robots instead of dinner ladies.

Clean toilets, swimming pools, a jug of water in every classroom, enough computers and books to go round, fast food school dinners, comfortable uniforms, flexible timetables, chill-out rooms and quieter school bells.

- the Guardian

The school that I’d like was first published in 1967. Decades later the Guardian (UK) newspaper repeated the exercise and asked children about their hopes and wishes for the school of their dreams. Students spend years of their life in school so it seems fitting to ask them for their insight and engage their imagination and intellect in shaping the experience. Some 15, 000 children participated . They were again articulate and passionate about how they wanted school to be. The article went on to say:

The… competition has unleashed the most imaginative, stimulating and provocative challenges to our educational system. And those challenges have come entirely from children. Entrusted with designing their own schools, where they spend an average working week, they have grasped the opportunity. They want change.

In summary the children wanted:

A beautiful school ….

A comfortable school…..

A safe school ….

A listening school ….

A flexible school ….

A relevant school ….

A respectful school ….

A school without walls ….

A school for everybody….

For more you will have to read the original article. I might not agree with every detail -and some of the flights of fancy are pretty wild – but the kids are onto something.

What do you think?

A world lit by shooting stars

Fred Bruenjes

The exhalations whizzing in the air

Give so much light that I may read by them.

Julius Caesar Act 2 scene 1

The annual Perseid meteor shower was not quite that spectacular but the shooting stars were out last night as our planet sailed through a stream of ancient cosmic dust emanating from the constellation of Perseus. Out in the moonless dark, stretching the neck up to the night sky is an awe inspiring August ritual.

It may be just little bits of comet debris vaporizing in the earth’s atmosphere but to watch for the flash and streak as the “stars” shoot and trail across the sky is to be in touch with an ancestral wonder at the natural world. No surprise the ancient world ascribed significance to powerful natural phenomena.

One required text for High School humanities this summer is William Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire – a wonderfully evocative title. It is books like Manchester’s and Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror that give us not only the sweep of social and political change but also an insight into the medieval mind – what it was like to live in the “dark ages” and stare at the sky and wonder.

The view of the night sky must have been spectacular.

"The school that I’d like"

Back in 1967 – the Observer newspaper in the UK organized an opportunity for children to write on the subject: “The school that I’d like”.

The results became a Penguin book edited by Edward Blishen and a collection of opinions that provided a trenchant critique of school and school life. The students wrote with freshness, passion and insight and their words provide a sustained attack on the status quo as perceived by the children actually in the schools.

One girl wrote in her essay: “I don’t think I would get on very well in my ideal school because I am too used to being told what to do.”–Frances, 15.

Here are some other extracts:

“I am not preparing for life. I am alive now,” Melanie, 14

“The pupils should be given more chance to speak and the teachers should be given a chance to listen,’ – Susan, 13

In editorial Blishen wrote, “Standing out above everything else is the children’s desire to teach themselves, rather than be the passive targets of teaching…they long to be excited, to be amazed by learning, since amazement seems to be a proper response to life…They want to learn to govern themselves. They want to take risks – lord, how anxious they are to be at risk, intellectually and emotionally, and how shameful it is that so many of them should find their teachers, the whole system of education, lacking in every kind of courage! They want to break down the walls of the school, to admit the wider world”.

Children spend years of their lives in school. How is it that they are so rarely consulted about how things and how they could be improved? Young people are much to offer about how their worlds can be structured for learning and for creating an ethical and safe community. These are high priorities for children and they have a great deal to tell us about how to create effective school environments that promote and expect these values. When we fail to engage students as active participants in their own education we are missing a great opportunity to teach, and learn.

Here’s Edward Blishen back in 1967 again, “From all the quarters of the educational scene it comes, this expression of children’s longing to take upon themselves some of the burden of deciding what should be learned, how it should be learned.”

Thirty plus years on the newspaper repeated the experiment. More on that next time.

To make a difference ("Can’t we do better?")

These are words from our mission:

Poughkeepsie Day School graduates students who:

• Know who they are and follow their own compass with optimism and courage

• Lead and inspire others through example, dedication and commitment to equity and justice

This is a part of Tom Brokaw’s commencement address at Stanford University last year:

“…welcome to a world of perpetual contradictions, welcome to a world of unintended consequences and unexpected realities. Welcome to a world in which war is not a video game, … in which genocide and ancient hatreds are not eliminated with a delete button. You won’t find the answer to global poverty in Tools or Help. You cannot fix the environment by hitting the Insert bar….
…
The memorable people for me represent that vast population of young and old of every hue and origin who gave up comforts and convention to answer their conscience, who are guided by their moral compass to difficult challenges and who are determined to make a difference. They lived in the real world and they took responsibility for it. They did not attach themselves simply to a virtual experience and find satisfaction in a search engine. They were boots on the ground, hands in the dirt, nights in scary places, healing and courageous. They stepped into the unknown and they made it more welcoming for the rest of us.

It is part of my privilege and my good fortune that I can stay in world-class hotels, I can attend state dinners and chat up kings, queens, billionaires, I can knock back a beer with Bruce Springsteen and talk back to Jon Stewart, I can call on movers and shakers on every continent. But I am never more alive intellectually or emotionally than when I am, for example, sitting outside of a ger in Mongolia listening to a young nomadic tribesman describe how he rode his horse 20 miles through freezing temperatures just for the chance to vote. Or sleeping in a cargo container as I did just this spring in the Pakistan earthquake zone with young American relief workers who had been on duty there for three months. Or riding a humvee with American Special Forces through a hot combat zone in Afghanistan to a primitive village to make sure people have the medical needs that they desired and needed. Or stepping into a wilderness anywhere in the world with all that I need in a backpack, no call waiting, thank you very much.

Life away from the keyboard, the PDA and the cell phone is a life in which you connect to the websites of your personal convictions, and that is an obligation you must carry with you the rest of your days. And that role is never more satisfying when it is expressed robustly, especially when others are attempting to suppress your participation or belittle your beliefs.

These are difficult times. We are at war. And this war, as all wars are, is one freighted with mistakes and miscalculations, lethal consequences, highly charged emotions, defeats and successes. It is the debate in which we all have a say. I have a special place in my mind and in my heart for those who understand that patriotism is not a loyalty oath. I am never more proud to be an American than when a fellow citizen steps forward and says, “Can’t we do better?”

One young person I know who graduated from Stanford that year has just such a moral compass and a commitment to making this world better.

College admissions: “What is more interesting: Gorillas or guerrillas?”

That question is one the prompts from the new Tufts University optional essay section. It’s part of its Kaleidoscope program based on the psychometric work of Robert Sternberg who is now the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts. Sternberg’s work has long focused on notions of successful intelligence and creativity.

‘If you want to admit people who are going to be leaders in tomorrow’s world . . . focusing on GPAs and SATs

does not get you very far.’ — Robert J. Sternberg

The first results are in. Here’s a link to an article about this experiment to find a new way to assess candidates for college admissions. It’s followed by a lively comment section – it is clear that this venture is not without controversy.

Inside HigherEd: New View of College Admissions

For more on this admissions project at Tufts here is a link to a powerpoint. It includes the slides with additional questions using in this search for students who are creative, practical and wise.

Arts and Sciences at Tufts