Infected! (In a good way)

Well, I know that my whole idea of change has been based on the Ghandi quote "Be the change you wish to see in the world" and I believe that some of my "educational system rants" have indeed infected the minds of people around me. My for instance is in the paragraphs below from an email I received from a very close friend after a discussion we had about the "options" for reformation when a school has been "black listed" (AYP). As you can see in the first line, they were looking for a place to share and the words are a wonderful articulation of my often muddled thoughts. He says:

"So just a little food for thought here... I thought you might appreciate my rant. Or maybe your teacher friends.

What if you set your alarm to go off every 20 minutes during the night, for the span of a week? During this week, you would be taught in the same way you always had, and would be tested at the end of the week. Your test scores at the end of this nearly sleepless week would probably not be as high as they were the week before, right? Even though nothing has changed about the teaching methods, you'd be getting worse results.

What is the solution? Extend the amount of time for teaching / studying / homework? Of course not! You'd be even more exhausted and would probably not improve, but you may do even worse. So what would you do? Unplug your alarm clock or set it properly.

Now apply this alarm clock analogy to any number of things. Diet, exercise, household environment, patterns of stimulus [TV and other media], medication, etc. Maybe America is doing so poorly in education compared to the rest of the world, not because of our teaching methods (or not strictly so) but because of our way of life in general.

How can your learn, if you CAN'T learn? If your brain / body / neurotransmitters are out-of-whack, then no amount of "buckling down" or "getting serious" is going to help. When your car engine has fouled spark plugs, do you just mash the gas even harder, or do you replace them? Sure, pushing down on the pedal works in the short term, but eventually your engine will stop working or blow up. Suicide and self-medicating? School and workplace shootings? People shutting down or blowing up.

Why are we trying to hammer in a nail with a high heel shoe instead of a hammer? Why are we "fixing" education when we should be fixing our lives?"

Really, I could not have said it better myself. :)