Musings from Elliot Washor

From Elliot - are you with me now?

Reclaiming Conversation

This week I read Sherry Turkle’s latest book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. There’s a great deal here for all of us at BPL to discuss. Turkle uses four chairs to describe our levels of interaction: one chair is being alone, two chairs is conversation with another person, three chairs is conversation with more than one person, and four chairs is engagement with society.

At BPL we have all thought about this a great deal in terms of the environmental preferences of students in conjunction with their time on the Internet. Turkle is concerned with the lack of face-to-face conversation and the increase in time we are connected digitally. How does social media both thwart and enhance how we learn and how we relate to one another?

Just to wet your whistle here’s a short segment from the book:

“When children have experience in conversation, they learn that practice never leads to perfect but that perfect isn’t the point. But perfect can be the goal in a simulation or in a computer game, for example.”

A lot of the book is quite alarming because it deals with an entire new way of not dealing with one another or dealing with one another differently when you text or tweet and what these new codes are doing to people’s relationships at home, school, work and the communities they belong to. The bottom line is that we need to be careful about how we use digital technologies so they don’t make us less present, empathetic and less personal. Presently, in many instances these are the outcomes, but it does not have to be that way.

Ron Wolk's Vision for U.S. Schools

In his latest op-ed in Ed Week, Ron Wolk says it as he sees it. This is a powerful piece that is based not on some pundit’s view of what’s wrong with education but a summary of what needs to happen based on a life’s work in education as a teacher, writer, college administrator, activist and policy advisor. Ron put it out there. It is our job to do the work and get his message out there as well. Thanks Ron.

Marc Tucker introduces Ron’s op-ed, but not without being critical of it. He tells us he agrees with many things Ron says but does not say what they are. Then, he goes on to name the things he does not agree with. My problem with Tucker is that his arguments against what Ron states are dealt with in the text. Tucker still does not trust that students want to learn deeply, nor does he trust teachers to know how to work with students. Even after Ron points out how rigorous this work is Tucker still thinks it is laissez faire. There is plenty of program structure, guidance from adults and an adherence to high standards and multiple measures mentioned. So why does he disagree? Let’s hope that what he does agree with moves him and others into future changes in policy and the rest will come along with it.

Holes but no cheese

And now for something totally different. Well, not really. All of this work on testing in New Orleans has led to a new report from the National Policy Center. The headline is: Post-Katrina Education Reform Results Exaggerated and the key takeaway from the report: “Recent report does little to inform about current and future education in New Orleans or ‘portfolio’ districts.”

My own headline for all of these weekly contradictory reports is: report after report makes exaggerated claims followed by report after report finding the claims exaggerated. When is this going to stop being the findings around the findings? The New Orleans reporting is summed up by the following quote of one Rhode Island state board member who said to me years ago, “Elliot, I see a lot of holes. I don’t see a lot of cheese.”

The Philosopher Chef

Extract from the New York Times Style Magazine's "Jeong Kwan, the Philosopher Chef":

She grew up on a farm, and by the age of 7 she was making noodles by hand. The first time she set foot in a Buddhist temple she felt free, she says, and at the age of 17 she ran away from the farm. Two years later, she had officially joined an order of Zen nuns. Before long she realized that she was destined to spread the dharma by ‘communicating with sentient beings through the medium of food,’ she says.

In her mind, there should be no distance between a cook and her ingredients. ‘That is how I make the best use of a cucumber,’ she explains through a translator. “’Cucumber becomes me. I become cucumber. Because I grow them personally, and I have poured in my energy.’ She sees rain and sunshine, soil and seeds, as her brigade de cuisine. She sums it up with a statement that is as radically simple as it is endlessly complex: ‘Let nature take care of it.’

All of which puts her in the same camp as some of the most influential leaders in international gastronomy — chefs like Michel Bras and Alain Passard, Dan Barber and David Kinch. There is a crucial difference, though. Jeong Kwan has no restaurant. She has no customers. She has published no cookbooks. She has never attended culinary school, nor has she worked her way up through the high-pressure hierarchy of a four-star kitchen. Her name does not appear in any of those annual round-ups listing the greatest chefs in the world, although Ripert will assure you that she belongs among them, as do a few contemporaries of hers at temples throughout Korea.

One last thing

Mark Tucker - this is what you get when you trust young people. Be it a temple or a school, if the environment is right our young people will come and do amazing things with their lives. They have to want to learn and be heard by adults around them. It is not easy but what we have to do is provide the right environment and guidance. If we don’t we will end up with what is happening that Ron Wolk, Sherry Turkle and The National Policy Center are describing.

Congratulations to Maceo, a Met Sacramento student who was on the news this week for his farm. I met Maceo last year and brought him to MUSE. He was amazing.

Elliot Washor is co-founder of Big Picture Learning