What’s your school balance in terms of teaching subjects vs engaging purposes?

From “‘The Coolest Thing Ever’: How A Robotic Arm Changed 4 Lives,” Joe Palca, NPR, Morning Edition, November 28, 2013 [HT @tnsatlanta]

The three Rice students heard about Dee in an unusual freshman engineering class. Instead of learning engineering principles from a book, students form teams to come up with engineering solutions for real-world problems.

And remember what Sir Ken Robinson said in September 2013 at colab:

The basics are not subjects. The basics are purposes.

What’s your school balance in terms of teaching subjects vs engaging purposes?

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Previous Posts in this Balance Series:

Ingredient School? Or Culinary School? What’s Your Balance?

How would you think and feel about registering for “Ingredient School” instead of “Cooking School” or “Culinary School?”

On the first day, and everyday, you learn about the various ingredients and inputs for countless dishes. However, you rarely, if ever, actually get instruction, opportunity, and practice in combining the ingredients, experimenting with different recipes (even inventing recipes!), and tasting the concoctions created by actually mixing the ingredients and making a meal.

The course would actually be about grocery store shopping and refrigerator stocking, but the pots and pans would remain cabinetted, and the stove and oven would live without flame. You’d have to combine on your own time, without the support or benefit of your expert guide. You’d have to cook, finally, years later, on your own time.

What would you think? How would you feel?

What if the ingredients were math, English, science, social studies, etc.?

If you calculated the actual UX (user experience) and tabulated proportional time that learners spent dealing only in ingredients versus actually getting to cook something, what would your school profile look like?

[Blogger’s note: I’m so fortunate – blessed – to work and learn in a community that believes strongly in providing “cooking classes” and experimenting with preparing whole meals!]

“my response to the high-pressure environment was making bows” #Curiosity

As I fell deeper into bow making, I began to search far and beyond my neighborhood.

I’ve been studying the TED talk below – “Dong Woo Jang: The art of bow-making.” In a high-pressure, high-stakes testing environment, Dong Woo Jang pursues a personal passion and extended project that helps him construct knowledge, skills, understanding, and wisdom from areas that we would typically separate and subdivide in school, likely with no intentional, threaded connection.

What drive and persistence it takes for a young person to make time for such committed exploration and discovery while living in a system that dominates so much of his day having to study someone else’s interests.

What if school were more purposefully designed for the committed pursuit of our passions and curiosities? So that a story such as Dong Woo Jang’s would be ordinary instead of extraordinary.

 

organized for constant change…organization’s function is to put knowledge to work

Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management, 1998 [Hat tip to Mike Wagner (@BigWags)]

… [A business] must be organized for the systematic abandonment of whatever is established, customary, familiar, and comfortable, whether that is a product, service, process; a set of skills, human and social relationships; or the organization itself.

In short, it must be organized for constant change. The organization’s function is to put knowledge to work — on tools, products, and processes; on the design of work; on knowledge itself. It is in the nature of knowledge that it changes fast and that today’s certainties always become tomorrow’s absurdities.”

Could, should, would we substitute “school” for “business?”

Extreme by Design – @PBS Premier, Dec. 11, 10p EST

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http://www.extremebydesignmovie.com/