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Monkey Business

July 23, 2013

During the summer weeks, "From the Director" will bring to you some of our favorite entries from previous years. Today's blog first appeared Aug. 24, 2012.

I hesitate to assert that my wife and I are hikers, but we certainly are avid walkers. Walking is a routine of our daily life; and it’s a highlight when we travel. Walking is the means by which we absorb the sights, sounds and smells of each locale, while faster modes of tourism pass us by.

One of my wife’s delights as we travel is to discover monkeys in the wild; so sometimes monkey sighting has been the goal of walks, for example, in Costa Rica and Panama. This has made us familiar with howler monkeys; and I’m sorry to say, it’s caused me to see parallels between howler monkeys and modern media.

The growls of the howler monkeys send messages through the treetops. One howler begins, and others forward the message for miles. I’ve been told by locals (I’m no expert) that the monkey culture doesn’t reward creativity and that there’s an expectation that the message at the end of the line is the same as it began.

Sort of like forwarding an email, photo or video; or sharing a posting on Facebook. Or like the wire services’ distribution of news through traditional media. It’s rare that anyone vets the information; and retractions or corrections are even rarer.

I read in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Lacuna that the most important thing about a story, and about a person, is what you don’t know, which gets to the heart of the weakness of much of modern media. Yes, because of the volume of information in today’s 24/7/365 “news” cycle with thousands of channels and the universal access to reporting news through social media, we’re likely to get most of the facts, eventually; but the salient and true facts are likely to be lost in the rush and the clutter.

Set at a time before television, Kingsolver’s protagonist in The Lacuna writes in 1946: “The newsmen leap on anything . . . The radio is the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment’s pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence. You can’t imagine the effect of this. The talkers are rising above the thinkers.”

However real that observation would have been then, it’s clear today that cable television, talk radio and the Internet have raised the talking-without-thinking effect to heights that would have been unimaginable in the 1940s.

Integrated Learning

July 1, 2016

One of the positive aspects of life that school sports and other after-school activities do better than most everything else is to build a sense of community. Another is to teach teamwork. And both are mostly missing in the world of individualized, online learning.

It sounds good to advocate for personalized, learn-at-your-own-pace “curriculum” (one can hardly call it “instruction”), but that model misses so much of what education is supposed to help a civilized society accomplish.

Benjamin Riley, founder and executive director of Deans for Impact (deansforimpact.org), makes this point in his May 18, 2016, Opinion on EdSurge (edsurge.com), “Bursting the ‘Personalization’ Bubble: An Alternative Vision for Our Public Schools.” Mr. Riley advances four principles:

  1. Teachers – not technology – should be the primary designers of students’ learning experiences.

  2. The experiences that teachers design should emphasize the social aspect of learning.

  3. The experiences that teachers design should be informed by learning science.

  4. Teachers should primarily use technology to identify social learning opportunities.

Mr. Riley concedes that these four principles are just a sketch – an outline for a different conversation than that which currently dominates education reform. “But there is one point on which I’m unyielding,” Riley writes: “We begin to forge the character of our country in our public schools. At a time when I feel our nation pulling further apart, I hope we start thinking and talking more about how we might move closer together, and promote the integration – rather than the personalization – of our learning experiences in public education.”

It is not Mr. Riley’s point, but it is mine, that school sports – including the requirement that participants be full-time students in the schools they represent on interscholastic sports teams – promotes the integration of the learning experience which is critical to shaping the character of our country.

The integration we speak of is developing the whole child through direct interaction daily with a diverse student body and a wide variety of curricular and extracurricular activities. This builds students, schools and society.