Beginning in the fall of 1999, I had the privileged opportunity to spend two years as an engineer-on-load from Hewlett-Packard Company to a local school district. This allowed a unique opportunity for an outsider to view a school system from inside of the system, without having gone through an acculturation process. These are my observations and thoughts from that and subsequent school engagements.
Browsing Posts in Education
What Educators can Learn from a Fourth Grader
August 4, 2010
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In the spring of 2003, at the Intel Northwest Science Expo in Portland Oregon, I had the honor of meeting a rather remarkable young fourth grader. She was remarkable because, while most middle and high school students, and arguably most adults, have difficulty internalizing and creating meaning from numerical data, this bright-eyed fourth grader in the white cotton print dress knew exactly what her data was telling her.
When I asked what she had concluded from her experiments, she stood up straight, looked me directly in the eye, and made a sweeping hand gesture to her hand-plotted charts, declaring “Well, as you can clearly see from my data, my hypothesis was completely wrong.”
Seven Teachers, Same Course, Different Content
August 4, 2010
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Teachers often complain about the need to spend sometimes as much as the first three months of the school year bringing their students up to the level required to begin introducing new grade level appropriate content.
The paradox is that often those same teachers cannot agree on what the content of that prior coursework should be. If they cannot agree on the content of prior coursework, how can they NOT expect their to have to spend three months the next year bringing their students up to where they ‘think’ they should be?
