Mark Jackson

I’ve really enjoyed working on scratch with my son.  Here are some little snippets where he explains a little bit about what a block of commands does in his pong game:

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I’m excited to continue to work with my boys on scratch and other coding.

After our presentation today, I was reminded of a very influential video I watched by psychologist Jonathan Haidt which really helped me understand ‘the other side’:

If we are going to heal a divided society, we need to discover what the ‘other’ is thinking.  The ‘other’ for me was the… ‘conservative’ voter:

The deeper I looked into it, the more I realized that there were deep moral roots at play here that “liberals” and “conservatives” just didn’t get about each other.  When choices are made, there are basic foundations of values which one references.  Liberals and conservatives have different reference points.  Conservatives value, tradition and, well, conservation, whereas Liberals value fairness.  These structural values play out different in the moral calculus of decision making.  These ideas were all laid out in Haidt’s book “The Righteous Mind”, and after reading it, I’ve never been the same since:

We visited the Pacific School of Inquiry and Innovation:

Home

I must admit that at first I was skeptical about the mission of the school.  The reason that I was skeptical was because I thought it would be impossible to provide a comprehensive education through a variety of fields through an inquiry approach.  Although the “principal” of the school assured us that the curricular topics would be I covered, I still remain skeptical.  However, was also inspired by the decentralized, uncoupled approach that the school provides.  It seemed like teachers and students were more integrated into a common mission, where both teacher and student alike are learning along side.  Additionally, many skills not provided by traditional school are being inculcated in the students.  These include self sufficiency and non directed exploration.  The reason why these are important to develop is that in “real life” these are the skills one truly needs to be successful.  Life is not as simple and closed system style as that presented in school.  Indeed, much of life outside of traditional schooling lies in the realm of complex systems which have multiple solutions.  I have experienced this phenomenon first hand with many of the construction projects I have had to work through at home!  Invariably, the task becomes much more complex than originally thought, and it is the skills of resilience and independence and problem solving which has moved these projects from conception to completion.  By instilling these values and competencies into students at an early age, we are providing context for functional citizens.   Indeed, this school seems to be teaching how to learn, and even if every piece of curriculum is not covered, the students will leave with the capability to learn it later, anyway, if need arises.

As a parent of two young boys, exposure to technology has always been an issue.  Being an educator and learning how to mediate its use in the classroom has made the issue doubly important.  While I was a teacher at Pearson College, I was unable to successfully negotiate a reasonable classroom policy around laptops and cellphones, and it was certainly to the detriment of the learning experience.  Students were very much distracted by their phones, and were therefore unable to focus on their work as a result.  As I’ve been visiting various classrooms at Vic High, I’ve noticed a definite divide between teachers who use the “cell phone hotel” and those that don’t with regards to distraction in the classroom.  For those instructors who permit cellphones in the classroom, the teacher has to repeatedly remind students to take out their ear bugs, put the phones away, and focus on the work at hand; for the instructors who do require “cell phone jail” as Jessie Miller coins it, there is less distraction.  I am skeptical of the amount of anxiety that arises in students being away from their phones; and even if there is that amount of anxiety, it is something which needs be addressed rather than caved in to.  As educators, we are not only teachers, but we are also role models, and it is up to us to provide clear frameworks and boundaries for the use of technology.  This is doubly true as a parent, and I am finding it difficult to “do as I say” as well as “do as I do”.  That being said, the onus IS on me to be a good model around technology.  I do believe that mental health issues are a necessary consequence of being too invested in an online reality, and we must all work together to provide structure for students to create an identity grounded in physical reality outside of the false world of online identities.  As an instructor, I will work hard to live out those boundaries.