Year End Musings, Reflections, Predictions and Thoughts: Part Two

The Great Flood (Metaphor)

In Bloomsburg, the year 2011 will always be known as the year of the big flood until, of course, we have another big flood. But this year’s flood was bad, the water covered over 25% of the town of Bloomsburg, houses were lost and people were wiped out. They lost everything. The university was closed for a week due to the flooding of the town. It was and continues to be very sad.

Over where I live, in Danville, we were a little more fortunate. Danville has a flood wall protection system and most of the system held. One weakness in the system is that right near the local middle school, there is a passage way for a highway to pass. So whenever a flood threatens, the passageway is covered with sandbags and it usually holds and a portion of the town is spared. In the other part of town, funding was available to build a wall that comes up from the road and seals it off from flooding waters, on this part of the town no wall is available and the opening must be covered with sandbags. The major building in the area that needs to be protected is our local middle school.

This year we got a call on a Friday morning that any available person was to come to the school to sandbag. The creek was rising and all hands were needed. I immediately went to the middle school and jumped in to help. First I was tying sandbags and then passing filled sandbags to be placed in the passage way and then placing some bags in the passageway itself. See Fighting the Flood, Saving the Middle School.

It was a tremendous sight. Over 100 people where there to help save the school including prisoners from the local jail dressed in bright orange, the local high school football team (who had quite a run this year), local celebrities, local dignitaries, professors from the university, teachers, students, business folks–everyone was doing their best to save the school. In the rain we all worked to avoid the crisis. When we had placed all the sandbags we went home. The next morning, I turned on the local cable channel to see if we saved the school with all our hard work.

We didn’t the school was flooded.(See Unsuccessful: Unable to Save the Middle School)

It’s still not open.

Looking back, this is an incredible metaphor.

Our educational system is in trouble and everyone from politicians, to business leaders to universities and others all think they know what to do to save our school system and they keep throwing sandbag measures to cover up the problems. We won’t spend the money, political capital or change the basic infrastructure enough to make real differences. Our basic education system hasn’t changed since the 1800’s, our classrooms are set up for forward sitting lectures, our academic calendar is centered around the idea of the harvest, many of our school ban items that are used in business every day like cell phones.

We test learning or knowledge not by having students do anything, we just give them multiple choice tests with only one right answer (in my adult professional life, I have never been evaluated on my ability to correctly answer a multiple choice question—I have been evaluated on my ability to weigh options, to look at two sides of an issue and to make a decision but that’s nothing like a school-based multiple choice question.)

We need to wipe out the current structure and put into place a structure that recognizes the realities of today’s modern world, that emphasizes 21st century skills like problem-solving, creative thinking and entrepreneurial thinking.

The school day shouldn’t be divided by subject, it should be based on projects, students working in teams creating a company or answering a request for proposal or preparing for a forensic debate. For an example of one such project, see Trickle Down Education: Taking Graduate Level Work to Sixth Graders

All of these activities teach critical thinking, basic facts and conceptual learning. We don’t need to band-aid the school system; we need to fundamentally change its core. We need to align the educational structure with the needs of society and the world. What we are doing now is “half-heartily” preparing students to be successful students, not successful citizens, business people or innovators.

More musings tomorrow….