Bo Adams's List: Real-World Ed

• There was a time when parents trusted the resilience of childhood.
• We’ve come so far that there is now a counterculture to this type of parenting. There are people like Gever Tulley, who founded the Tinkering School as a space for kids to play with power tools and wield pocket knives. In places like Wales they are building “adventure playgrounds,” essentially controlled junkyards where kids can slide through mud, build precarious structures and light fires, all with the hope of re-creating a childhood that includes freedom and a sense of danger.
• parents today operate under the assumption that society is more dangerous than when we were kids, when in fact the opposite is true.

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• Christian began wondering if he could apply this everything-is-connected idea to a larger scale: “I began thinking, Could I teach a course not of Russia but of humanity?” He soon became infatuated with the concept. “I remember the chain of thought,” he said. “I had to do prehistory, so I have to do some archaeology. But to do it seriously, I’m going to talk about how humans evolved, so, yikes, I’m in biology now. I thought: To do it seriously, I have to talk about how mammals evolved, how primates evolved. I have to go back to multicelled organisms, I have to go back to primeval slime. And then I thought: I have to talk about how life was created, how life appeared on earth! I have to talk geology, the history of the planet. And so you can see, this is pushing me back and back and back, until I realized there’s a stopping point — which is the Big Bang.” He paused. “I thought, Boy, would that be exciting to teach a course like this!”
• “What this course can do, however it’s taught, is validate big questions” — How did we get here? for instance, or Where are we going? — “that are impossible to even ask within a more silo-ized education.”
• True to Christian’s original style, however, the high-school course links insights across subjects into wildly ambitious narratives.
• “Most kids experience school as one damn course after another; there’s nothing to build connections between the courses that they take,” says Bob Bain, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan and an adviser to the Big History Project, who has helped devise much of the curriculum. “The average kid has no way to make sense between what happens with their first-period World History class and their second-period algebra class, third-period gym class, fourth-period literature — it’s all disconnected. It’s like if I were to give you a jigsaw puzzle and throw 500 pieces on the table and say, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m not going to show you the box top as to how they fit together.’ ”

  • I wonder what this Big History course's "Learning Outcomes doc" looks like. It would be interesting to compare it to a school's subject-area divided L.O.s
• Ravitch continued: “It begins to be a question of: Is this Bill Gates’s history? And should it be labeled ‘Bill Gates’s History’? Because Bill Gates’s history would be very different from somebody else’s who wasn’t worth $50-60 billion.”
• Wineburg’s deepest concern about the approach was its failure to impart a methodology to students. “What is most pressing for American high-school students right now, in the history-social-studies curriculum, is: How do we read a text? How do we connect our ability to sharpen our intellectual capabilities when we’re evaluating sources and trying to understand human motivation?” he asked. “When we think about history, what are the primary sources of Big History? The original scientific reports of the Big Bang?” Wineburg, who also has developed an electronic history curriculum, scoffed.

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• There’s

• What if we invite students to solve real problems? What if the classroom doesn't have walls? What if learning activities don't always end with letter grades?
• When Lehrer pitched the idea to students, he made it clear that they would be heading into uncharted territory.
• Van As generously offered to fabricate a prosthetic hand for the child himself, but Lehrer decided to "keep that offer in my back pocket. I think he was surprised when I explained that I wanted to build this with my students."
• In hindsight, Lehrer can see how the club structure offered a range of benefits for this unusual project. He didn't have to map the project to learning goals or think about grading. "I didn't need to do assessments for these kids. Not that rubrics aren't important," he adds, "but there are times when you want kids to just take an idea and soar. What these students have learned is so clear to them. Their level of reflection is like nothing I've ever seen."
• "This wasn't just an assignment. This is real life,"
• If anyone's thinking we can't do real things with kids, I'm telling you you're wrong."

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• When leaders exchange a scarcity mindset for one of abundance and innovation, they open the door to an empowering click-through curriculum.
• it’s about self-direction, passion, interests, persistence, critical thinking, curation, and outcomes. There’s a greater focus on what they have done and will do with what you’ve learned, rather than how they learned it.

• The teaching and learning of the students overflows beyond any individual teacher so quickly, it’s almost amazing that we’ve intentionally left the community out of education for so long.
• grades are supposed to be communicative over time, instead of summative of a time
• symbiotic, intentionally-built relationship between education, business, nonprofit, government

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