What is in the box?

   It is interesting how you can engage kids without a lot of effort. I have talked this week about dark matter and the fact that it is hard to study something when you cannot see it. To illustrate this point, I put different objects in several cardboard boxes and had the kids go around and try to guess what was in them. The cool thing about this was the amount of participation that I had. Quite a few kids that are usually not interested in most of the things that we do were tripping over themselves to participate. I called this little game "What's in the Box," a reference to the movie Seven. It was this lab that really set the bar for the rest of the day. I have talked a lot about kids being engaged and wanting to learn. Little things like this are beacons of light in a teacher's day. The sad part is that I do not have time to create lessons like this every day. Sometimes that fleeting inspiration comes and helps me to create something good. If this happened more I would be in heaven. This work that I put into this class and into others takes years to perfect. It is imperative that we try and work together to create curriculum that works.  The same old worksheet routine is old and tired. We have to continue to innovate to be successful. This is true in the corporate world. The innovators lead the pack. The Bill Gates and the Steve Jobs of the world have to innovate to survive. Companies that fail to innovate fall into a rut that eventually results in their losing their effectiveness and their place as number one. Google expands and invests in their future while yahoo fell into a rut. I think that this is the reason that our education system has come down so far over the past 50 years. We have created a static system, where that moment of inspiration is fleeting. If there is something that I have learned about this entire process it is that the system really makes innovation hard. I think a solution to this is innovation sessions. The future of education is not worksheets, but instead sharing those moments of inspirations. I would love to work with some of the teachers at school to be something better than what we are. I think that if our system has any chance of surviving, the future will be in the collaboration of teachers sharing ideas and working together for the common good. Programs that embrace this have been successful. The problem is all the extra stuff that we have to do to get to the innovation.

Until Tommorow,
"Good teachers are those who know how little they know. Bad teachers are those who think they know more than they don't know."
-- R. Verdi