My students’ Squidoo lens is up: 21st Century Skills. They’d love to get your feedback. In particular, we put up a “duel” module where people agree or disagree with something — in this case a list of essential 21st century skills. It would be so kind of you to go over and participate. I think the kids would be thrilled.
In addition to finishing up the Squidoo lens, I also did my required blog posts for various people, a newsletter, one of my weekly reports, and some linkbuilding. Today I’ll be rewriting a website, looking after my Dark Art people, and catching up on my homework — I hope.
I’m reading Deer Hunting with Jesus for Book Club. It’s an itneresting book, filled with politics and economics and other jolly stuff. At one point, author Joe Bageant says, “Until those with power and access decide that it’s beneficial to truly educate people, and make it possible to get an education without going into crushing debt [there will be workign class anger and misery and so forth]. And that means educating everybody, not just the small-town valedictorian or the science nerds who are cherry-picked out of the schools… What about this latest generation of kids left to suffer the same multigenerational cycle of anti-intellectualism and passivity?”
This struck me because yesterday, in the course of practicing the idea of supporting a claim, my class discussed whether poverty is a choice. While there were a few students who felt that poverty was the result, at least in some cases, of injustice, a majority believed that it was all about education. Since they are, in many cases, making some serious sacrifices in order to get their educations, they tended to feel that other people could and should do the same.
It was interesting.
I went to “21st Century Skills” and was very impressed — but I couldn’t find a link to the Guestbook. Then I came back here to mention that and couldn’t find a reference [in your post] to the Guestbook. I must have hallucinated the reference… could have sworn that when I read your post the first time you said something about signing a Guestbook. If there had been one, I would have signed it. Myself, I’m still trying to acquire the minimum set of 20th Century Skills…
I work in a school with a lot of kiddos who won’t go to college. And some won’t even graduate high school. Parent participation is pretty good at this school (YAY), but sometimes that’s not even enough. It’s important, don’t get me wrong, but we find ourselves educating the parents as much as the kiddos about the importance of education. But if you have to feed your family and take care of bills, sometimes the benefit of an education is secondary. Nice quote from the author.