When walking to school becomes a political act

NYTimes: Why Can’t She Walk to School? :

Certain realities also shape these procedures, such as the schedules of working parents, unsafe neighborhoods and school transportation cuts.

But when these constraints are mixed with anxiety over transferring children from the private world of family to the public world of school, the new normal can look increasingly baroque. Now, in some suburbs, parents and children sit in their cars at the end of driveways, waiting for the bus. Some school buses now have been fitted with surveillance cameras, watching for beatings and bullying.

Children are driven to schools two blocks away. At some schools, parents drive up with their children’s names displayed on their dashboards, a school official radios to the building, and each child is escorted out.

When to detach the parental leash? The trip to and from school has become emblematic of the conflict parents feel between teaching children autonomy and keeping them safe. In parenting blogs and books, the school-bus stop itself is shorthand for the turmoil of contemporary parents over when to relinquish control.

Four Videos on Changing Our Notions About Education

Dr. Tae: “Building A New Culture Of Teaching And Learning”:


TED.com: “Dave Eggers’ wish: Once Upon A School”


TED.com: “Alan Kay shares a powerful idea about ideas”:


TED.com: “Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity”:

Metafilter Thread: Scratch, a beginner’s programming language

Shamus Young: Scratch

Quotes from Paul Lockhart’s terrific essay about the state of Mathematics education in America

Paul Lockhart’s terrific essay about the state of mathematics education and what should be done: A Mathematician’s Lament (25 page must read PDF):

G.H. Hardy’s excellent description:

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker
of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than
theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

So mathematicians sit around making patterns of ideas. What sort of patterns? What sort of ideas? Ideas about the rhinoceros? No, those we leave to the
biologists. Ideas about language and culture? No, not usually. These things are
all far too complicated for most mathematicians’ taste. If there is anything
like a unifying aesthetic principle in mathematics, it is this: simple is
beautiful. Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things,
and the simplest possible things are imaginary.

By removing the creative process and leaving only the results of that process, you virtually guarantee that no one will have any real engagement with the
subject. It is like saying that Michelangelo created a beautiful sculpture,
without letting me see it.

By concentrating on what, and leaving out why, mathematics is reduced to an
empty shell. The art is not in the “truth” but in the explanation, the
argument. It is the argument itself which gives the truth its context, and
determines what is really being said and meant. Mathematics is the art of
explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity–
to pose their own problems, make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be
wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble
together their own explanations and proofs– you deny them mathematics
itself. So no, I’m not complaining about the presence of facts and formulas in
our mathematics classes, I’m complaining about the lack of mathematics in our
mathematics classes.

If teaching is reduced to mere data transmission, if there is no sharing of
excitement and wonder, if teachers themselves are passive recipients of
information and not creators of new ideas, what hope is there for their
students? If adding fractions is to the teacher an arbitrary set of rules, and
not the outcome of a creative process and the result of aesthetic choices and
desires, then of course it will feel that way to the poor students.

Teaching is not about information. It’s about having an honest intellectual relationship with your students. It requires no method, no tools, and no training. Just the ability to be real. And if you can’t be real, then you have no right to inflict yourself upon innocent children. In particular, you can’t teach teaching. Schools of education are a complete crock. Oh, you can take classes in early childhood development and whatnot, and you can be trained to use a blackboard “effectively” and to prepare an organized “lesson plan” (which, by the way, insures that your lesson will be planned, and therefore false), but you will never be a real teacher if you are unwilling to be a real person. Teaching means openness and honesty, an ability to share excitement, and a love of learning. Without these, all the education degrees in the world won’t help you, and with them they are completely unnecessary.

It’s perfectly simple. Students are not aliens. They respond to beauty and
pattern, and are naturally curious like anyone else. Just talk to them! And
more importantly, listen to them!

Read the whole thing. This essay has reinforced some beliefs of mine about software engineering, teaching and parenting.

Slashdot has a decent thread on the piece.

There is a haiku here somewhere, just know it

mom I’m drawing a map
we go to around that twister
its on that map
all finished
oh wow wow wow
first we go round
over the bridge
road get bumpy
then you go thru
theres a little nut
its mikey’s party
its a twisty
i call it the planet
i draw a gate and a rock
the rock is inside the gate
im almost finished dad
i need more colors
im all finished
dad move your computer out of the way
round and around and around
lets play the orange cat

Parenting, Education and Inspiration for Sunday May 17, 2009

Inquirer: Bari Pepe, 46, Years of trauma behind her, now she wants to aid others – ex-addict acheives master’s in social work. Very inspiring story. Read it.

The Boston Globe: Inside the baby mind: It’s unfocused, random, and extremely good at what it does. How we can learn from a baby’s brain. – “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” – Metafilter thread.

New Yorker: The secret of self-control. – let your toddler’s imagination be free, encourage creativity, to try and try again, and understand that we have the power of choice.

Hacking Education – A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing

NYTimes: Marc C. Taylor: End the University as We Know It – straight up inspiration about tearing down the status quo to meet the needs of today and tomorrow.

CSMonitor: In tough times, graduates (and parents) assess the worth of a liberal arts education – just an opinion – I think liberal arts majors are well positioned for the economy of today and tomorrow.

Deseret News: Universities will be ‘irrelevant’ by 2020, Y. professor says

The Atlantic: Who Needs Harvard?: The pressure on smart kids to get into top schools has never been higher. But the differences between these schools and the next tier down have never been smaller

Chronicle: What Colleges Should Learn From Newspapers’ Decline – Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear.

Tom Baker: Getting Involved in Higher Education – software engineers should seriously consider teaching, here’s why.

Slashdot.org: With a Computer Science Degree, an Old Man At 35?

Inquirer: Daniel Rubin: Grads, please note: It’s not about you

xkcd: 1000 Times – its all about context isn’t it?

Some interesting music and children links for today

Boston Globe: Can’t get it out of my head: A father’s yearlong quest to grasp the infant musical mind

NPR: Bringing Up Baby, As Music Lovers Might

Muppet Wiki: Joe Raposo

Thankfully, Emma’s tastes are all over the map, like her Daddy. For example, just this morning she kept replaying The Mother of All Funk Chords – which I could listen to on repeat myself.

Richelle’s grandfather passed away in his sleep yesterday morning

My thoughts and prayers are with the family, especially Emma. She got to know grandpop over the past couple months and she liked him very much.

She is blissfully unaware right now, but the questions will come. They can’t be blown off – she simply doesn’t fall for distractions so easily anymore.

How deep you explain death to a three year old – one that is intellectually curious and has the smarts to handle it – will be hard. Even if it is the simple, “he’s in heaven, with mom-mom Rita and God”.

Yesterday was Ada Lovelace day

I spent last night, like many recently, riffing in Scratch to Emma’s direction. You might wonder what the goal of that would be with a 3 year old – but its simple – programming can be – and is – fun. While we play there on the laptop – Emma has no idea that we’re programming – just that we’re being creative in a way that is similar to when we play music, or color, or sing and dance, or build with our legos. Next step is to get her a keyboard and mouse she can tear apart if so inspired. Like her own ukulele, or her lego brick creations, what she’ll come up with on her own is bound to be awesome.

I mention this because, as the title of the post says, yesterday was Ada Lovelace day. Ada Lovelace was a mathematician and can be considered the world’s first computer programmer. She was born in 1815.

For those not in the industry, it probably comes as some kind of shock that the person considered a computer programmer is a woman. That shock is no doubt due to the fact that the industry has so few women participating in it. It wasn’t always so. And it suffers because of it.

Here are some good reads and links:

Kimberly Blessing: Honoring Ada, Inspiring Women (the story of women in computer programming is commonly taught to begin and end with Ada – which is very incorrect)

guardian.co.uk: Let’s hear it for women in technology

Aaron Swartz: Margo Seltzer – on the creator of BerkleyDB.

KathySierra tweet on women who have made a difference in tech: Just a few of the tech women who made/make a diff: @whitneyhess @avantgame @xenijardin @zephoria @dori @burningbird @maryhodder @nicolesimon

findingada: Ada Lovelace Day

Here’s to dreaming big and doing it

Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta­ Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel, teenage students from IES La Bisbal in Spanish Catalonia, led by their teacher, Jordi Fanals Oriol, tie a Canon Powershot to a weather ballon and send it to the edge of space.

dailymail.co.uk: Students tie £56 camera to balloon and send it to edge of space to capture stunning images of Earth

telegraph.co.uk: Teens capture images of space with £56 camera and balloon

Boing Boing: Teens send balloon into space, get aerial photos of Earth

Flickr set: set on Flickr