This speech suggests our students are no more satisfied than we are with the regime of standardized testing. In the classroom, I once discussed this kind of success with my 8th graders. The reports had come in and we had done “outstanding” on the History test. Best in the district and as high as anyone [...]
Posts under ‘WHOLENESS/order’
World-building and Storytelling
by Hugh C. Howey I just fired off an email to another writer, and it contained some thoughts on these two concepts that I thought I’d share a bit more publicly. Keep in mind: there’s a good chance that I have no idea what I’m talking about. _________________________________ …Another thing to think about is the [...]
Re-writing a bit of Hobbes as Cicero
The Original: Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Chapter 14, Section 31. The force of words being (as I have formerly noted) too weak to hold men to the performance of their covenants; there are in man’s nature but two imaginable helps to strengthen it. And those are either a fear of the consequence of breaking their word; [...]
A Theory of American Identity: Or the Radical American Exceptionalism: Or Why Baseball is Better than Soccer?
An abstract submitted for you consideration. Your questions and assistance in refining the ideas presented here would be greatly appreciated. Over the last year I have been contemplating the notion of American identity, and what that means. As I contemplated the bounds of this notion, I began formulating a rather extreme form of American exceptionalism. [...]
See Like Cicero
After last year’s National Academy, we shared Cicero’s View from 100,000 Miles. He will make his more formal appearance at this year’s National Academy in the morning. Found this video on the Hayden Planetarium’s site and it provides all the perspective to think like Cicero. To think big… and small!
Seeing America
The second week at Montpelier concluded Friday with this question… What do you SEE when you say AMERICA? As the American public celebrates independence through fireworks, BBQ and pool parties, the 80 teachers who studied constitutional citizenship at Madison’s Montpelier know we must keep the future as well as the past in our mind’s eye. [...]
It’s in the Data
I’m a sucker for the intersection of art and technology. Several years ago, the Listening Post exhibit in San Jose nearly convinced me to go AWOL from a conference focused on mentoring new teachers. I could have spent a week with that exhibit and a new exhibit is just as intriguing. Personas, from the MIT [...]
Weekly Wavelength
It’s a spectrum of color that makes light possible. Each color operates at its own wavelength to illuminate a dark space, the face of the moon or the road ahead. Once a week, Politicolor contributors will answer two simple questions to share the objects of their own mental wavelengths that inform their work as teachers, [...]
Bon Jovi Believes in the Power of We
The nightly news in Austin has been dominated by updates from Fort Hood. Perhaps it’s moments like this that justify that last story on the national news. The one about a long lost teddy bear or crazy cute animals at the local zoo. Tonight, however, that last story was more than a palate cleanser. On [...]
Cicero’s View from 100,000 Miles
How is the first picture of Earth from space the most powerful political picture ever published? Marking the 40th anniversary of the famous picture, a British newspaper, The Independent, remarked that the three astronauts of the Apollo 8 mission “went to the moon, but ended up discovering the Earth.” The British cosmologist, Sir Fred Hoyle, [...]
stepwinder
