Posts by Melia Dicker
Caine’s Arcade
Caine’s Arcade is a short film about a 9 year old boy’s cardboard arcade, located in his dad’s used auto parts store in East LA.
Caine dreamed of the day he would have lots of customers visit his arcade, and he spent months preparing everything, perfecting the game design, making displays for the prizes, designing elaborate security systems, and hand labeling paper-lunch-gift-bags. However, his dad’s autoparts store (located in an industrial part of East LA) gets almost zero foot traffic, so Caine’s chances of getting a customer were very small, and the few walk in customers that came through were always in too much of a hurry to get their auto part to play Caine’s Arcade. But Caine never gave up….
This short film tells the story of Caine’s Arcade, and of our attempt to make Caine’s day. Watch the film: http://cainesarcade.com
Posted on Apr 13, 2012 - 03:51 PM by Melia Dicker
Real Education is Powerful
One of the most powerful experiences of learning I've ever seen is captured in the Frontline special "A Class Divided." Here's an excerpt from the introduction on the website:
Posted on Nov 02, 2011 - 08:26 AM by Melia Dicker
Real Education is Human
Today's theme for Blog for IDEC 2012 Week is "Real education is human."My most recent experience in the classroom comes from Reschool Yourself, a project I undertook in 2008 to reboot my life by reliving my education. I spent a week in each grade in my childhood schools, attending classes with the current students and writing about the process. "Human education" brings to mind something I witnessed in the third grade classroom at El Verano Elementary in Sonoma, California.
When I was a student at El Verano (the first time around), the school was predominantly white, with a few Mexican children in each class. Now the demographics have flipped, and there are a handful of white kids in...
Posted on Nov 01, 2011 - 09:42 AM by Melia Dicker
It’s Blog for IDEC 2012 Week!
The goal of the event is to put IDEC 2012 and democratic education on the public radar. If you have a blog -- whether you're involved with IDEC or not -- you're encouraged to post on the four distinguishing values of the conference --human, powerful, relevant, and transformative.
Here's the schedule:
- Mon, Oct 31: Kickoff
- Tues, Nov 1: Real education is ... Human.
- Wed, Nov 2: Real education is ... Powerful.
- Thurs, Nov 3: Real education is ... Relevant.
- Fri, Nov 4: Real education is ... Transformative.
Posted on Oct 31, 2011 - 09:20 AM by Melia Dicker
Announcing “Blog for IDEC 2012 Week,” October 31 - November 4
We're calling the event "Blog for IDEC 2012 Week." As there are four distinguishing qualities of the conference -- human, powerful, relevant, and transformative -- we are highlighting one per day and are inviting bloggers to write a short post sharing how each value is essential to real education. This is a great way...
Posted on Oct 21, 2011 - 04:47 PM by Melia Dicker
The Landscape Podcast: Education Nation
This morning, I had the privilege of talking with Nancy Flanagan and Neola Young, two of IDEA's Digital Organizers, about Education Nation. NBC describes Education Nation as "a nationally broadcast, in-depth conversation about improving education in America." Nancy and Neola followed the first event last year, which took place over a week in September in New York City, and the second event, which happened this week.Stream the podcast through this link, or download the .mp3 by right-clicking the link & selecting Save Link As.
Follow:
Nancy Flanagan @nancyflanagan on Twitter and at Teacher in a Strange Land on Education Week
Neola Young @neolayoung on Twitter
Education Nation...
Posted on Sep 30, 2011 - 11:05 AM by Melia Dicker
5 Lessons from the Save Our Schools & AERO Conferences
It is summer conference season. Oh yes, it is summer conference season.As you may have noticed from our social media updates, the IDEA team has been traveling all over creation for the past couple of months. Last month Dana Bennis flew to Devon, England, for the 19th annual International Democratic Education Conference, while Scott Nine went to Providence, Rhode Island, for Free Minds, Free People. Earlier this month, Scott and I traveled to Washington, D.C., for the Save Our Schools March & National Call to Action. A few days later, the entire IDEA staff and much of the rest of our team (board members, interns, and organizers) convened in Portland, Oregon, for the 8th annaul AERO...
Posted on Aug 12, 2011 - 08:25 AM by Melia Dicker
Introducing IDEA’s New Podcast: The Landscape
"So what's going on with education in different parts of the country? What should I be paying attention to?"Those are two questions that the IDEA staff often hears from people in our network. They know that we rack up loads of frequent flyer miles traveling to conferences, school tours, and other gatherings focused on reinventing education. That means we have an ear to the ground in a lot of different places.
Executive Director Scott Nine wins the top traveler trophy so far. Over the past several months, IDEA has taken him to Atlanta; Jackson, Miss.; Boston; New York City; Providence, RI; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; and Puerto Rico, just to name a few. He's met with government...
Posted on Jul 25, 2011 - 10:12 PM by Melia Dicker
10 Things to Learn About Good Teaching from “Teach: Tony Danza”
“Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task.” - Haim GinottWhen I heard that a new A&E show was following Tony Danza as he spends a year teaching 10th grade English, I rolled my eyes. Tony Danza, of the 1980s sitcom "Who's the Boss?"? I expected a trashy reality show that made a mockery of teaching. At best, I thought it would be like other celebrity reality shows: like a train wreck, so awful that you can't look away.
I couldn't have been more wrong about "Teach: Tony Danza." It's a beautiful, honest portrayal of first-year teaching in a large, urban public school (Northeast High School is...
Posted on Nov 26, 2010 - 05:23 PM by Melia Dicker
IDEC 2010 Kicks Off in Israel
Once per year, democratic educators from all over the world gather for the International Democratic Education Conference, or IDEC (gotta love all the acronyms). The conference, which Yaacov Hecht started in Israel in 1993, switches continents every year. IDEC 2008 in Vancouver, B.C., brought together a group of educators that became the founding team of IDEA -- Dana Bennis, Jonah Canner, Scott Nine, and myself (among others) -- and we've all come to Tel Aviv, Israel, for IDEC 2010. The Institute for Democratic Education, the Israeli organization that is a model for IDEA, and the Kibbutzim College of Education are cohosting on the college's campus from April 6 through the 13th.This year's...
Posted on Apr 07, 2010 - 04:52 PM by Melia Dicker
Overprotective Parents May Stunt Children’s Brain Growth
Overprotective parents inhibit more than their kids’ freedom: they may also slow brain growth in an area linked to mental illness.
Children whose parents are overprotective or neglectful are believed to be more susceptible to psychiatric disorders—which in turn are associated with defects in part of the prefrontal cortex….
...Narita’s team found that those with overprotective parents had less grey matter in a particular area of the prefrontal cortex than those who had had healthy relationships. Neglect from fathers, though not mothers, also correlated with less grey matter.
This part of the prefrontal cortex develops during childhood, and abnormalities there are common in people with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.
Posted on Mar 11, 2010 - 03:54 PM by Melia Dicker
Howard Zinn: One of the Great Democratic Educators
"The interchange between student and teacher, the free inquiry that is promulgated in the classroom, a spirit of equality in the classroom, to me that is part of a democratic education." - Howard ZinnThis week, the world said goodbye to Howard Zinn, an award-winning writer, activist, professor, and role model for democratic educators. He was 87.
Zinn dedicated his life to promoting true democracy and social justice through education and action. Although he spoke and wrote extensively on the injustices that humans have inflicted upon each other, throughout history and in the present, he never lost hope for a more peaceful world.
In one of his last interviews, Zinn said that he wanted...
Posted on Jan 30, 2010 - 03:10 PM by Melia Dicker
The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting
Overparenting had been around long before Douglas MacArthur’s mom Pinky moved with him to West Point in 1899 and took an apartment near the campus, supposedly so she could watch him with a telescope to be sure he was studying. But in the 1990s something dramatic happened, and the needle went way past the red line. From peace and prosperity, there arose fear and anxiety; crime went down, yet parents stopped letting kids out of their sight; the percentage of kids walking or biking to school dropped from 41% in 1969 to 13% in 2001. Death by injury has dropped more than 50% since 1980, yet parents lobbied to take the jungle gyms out of playgrounds, and strollers suddenly needed the warning label “Remove Child Before Folding.” Among 6-to-8-year-olds, free playtime dropped 25% from 1981 to ‘97, and homework more than doubled. Bookstores offered Brain Foods for Kids: Over 100 Recipes to Boost Your Child’s Intelligence. The state of Georgia sent every newborn home with the CD Build Your Baby’s Brain Through the Power of Music, after researchers claimed to have discovered that listening to Mozart could temporarily help raise IQ scores by as many as 9 points. By the time the frenzy had reached its peak, colleges were installing “Hi, Mom!” webcams in common areas, and employers like Ernst & Young were creating “parent packs” for recruits to give Mom and Dad, since they were involved in negotiating salary and benefits.
Posted on Nov 21, 2009 - 02:30 PM by Melia Dicker
Sparking the Interests of Middle Schoolers
Balme started out as a middle school science teacher in west Philadelphia, and he quickly grew alarmed at the condition his community was in. “It was a very eye-opening experience because the students at that school had a 50% dropout rate and 1 out of 6 incarceration rate,” says Balme.
The spark for Spark came from seeing that ample learning opportunities for his students could be found in Philadelphia’s business community. “There were businesses in the community, and none of those places were being used to engage students. Sometimes these are the best paces to learn.” How so? “Show students what school is for by providing a hands on example,” Balme explains.
Balme went on to found Spark in the Bay Area. Currently serving 220 kids total and 100 in San Francisco, the Spark approach is to head off dropouts early by reaching them in middle school and asking one simple question: “What’s your dream job?”
Spark board chair John McKee thinks this approach is crucial. “[Spark] doesn’t come in and say, ‘We’re going to make you better at math, or at science, or at English,’” says McKee. “It comes in and says to the kids, ‘What are you interested in?’” ...
“Student engagement peaks during elementary school, decreases through middle school and 10th grade, and plateaus through the rest of high school,” says Dr. Shane J. Lopez in a recently released report on the Gallup Student Poll, which investigates how America’s high school students are faring.
Posted on Nov 19, 2009 - 12:42 AM by Melia Dicker
Is a parent’s job to keep a child on track?
You can do several things for your tweenage student who will face the college entrance requirements of 2012 and beyond. Marsha Watson, director of Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning’s College Knowledge Project is tasked with finding ways to equip today’s middle schoolers with the knowledge and skills they will need to successfully enter college following their high school career. “Some families falsely believe that the college preparation process begins about the junior year of high school,” says Watson. “While there are certainly important milestone activities that must be accomplished by then, true preparation begins much sooner. There are things parents and students can begin to do as early as fifth grade.” ...
Don’t Let Up When the Going Gets Tough
As your child progresses, classes become more challenging. One way to help address this is to ensure your child stays on top of all assignments and masters the content presented—because each unit is a building block for the next level.
It can be tempting at times to allow your child to opt out of the more advanced courses. Their best friends may no longer be in the advanced classes and they might not want to be separated from them. The greater homework load might take up a lot of after school and weekend time. There are many rationalizations to justify letting your child take easier classes. It’s your job as a parent to keep your child on track. Aim for the more challenging courses. Locate tutors if needed. Set aside after school time to do homework.
Do whatever you can to keep your child on the college-prep track. It takes more effort to get back on track than it does to stay on track.
A college education can be very important to your child’s ability to navigate successfully through life. By taking proactive steps now to aim your child toward successful completion of a college prep curriculum, you help create a strong base for a positive, rewarding future for your child.
Posted on Nov 10, 2009 - 11:53 PM by Melia Dicker
Video: How JCOS Changes Students’ Lives
Alumni and students talk about their powerful experiences at Jefferson County Open School, founded in 1970.
For over thirty-five years, Jefferson County Open School (JCOS) has provided a viable, vibrant, and life changing alternative to conventional schooling. JCOS features a Pre-Kindergarten through 12th grade environment with inter-age groupings throughout the school. At all levels students work closely with their advisor in the development of their personal curriculum. Both individually and in groups, advising is about developing strong, caring relationships between adults and students, and between students and their peers. JCOS is committed to preserving educational choices for...
Posted on Nov 09, 2009 - 10:37 AM by Melia Dicker
Waldorf-Inspired Public Schools Are on the Rise
Traditional Waldorf schools are private, but the number of public schools inspired by Steiner’s methods is growing, fueled in part by the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act and the charter school movement. In the United States, there are about 44 Waldorf-inspired public schools, most of them K-8 charter schools located in the West.
NCLB requirements mandate that students test at grade level in reading and math, which can result in schools reducing the amount of class time dedicated to art. But Waldorf methods, in sharp contrast to traditional public education, encourage a learning pace dictated by the students themselves and an integration of the arts into lessons. ...
Waldorf education divides childhood into three seven-year stages of development: The first stage, birth to seven years old, is imitation, when children are encouraged to learn through play and movement. The second stage of development, seven to 14 years, is imagination, when students learn through images, art, and stories. At this stage, when the students’ emotions are thought to be developing, Waldorf practitioners believe that the stable relationship with one teacher is key. The third stage, from 14 to 21, is inspired thinking, when students become engaged intellectually and are encouraged to analyze information and think critically. ...
Last September, the first public high school inspired by Waldorf, the George Washington Carver School of Arts and Science, opened in Sacramento. A charter approved as part of the district’s small-schools reform plan, Carver took over a failing high school in a poor neighborhood on the edge of the city. Local children, along with students from John Morse and a private Waldorf school, make up the high school’s student body. (There’s also a private Waldorf high school in the area, which has allowed local students in the program to continue the traditional Waldorf education track from kindergarten to the end of high school.)
With a Rudolf Steiner teacher-training college in the area and many community parents familiar with Waldorf elementary schools, the new high school received early and enthusiastic support. Still, supporters and participants in the school consider Carver an experiment because adapting Waldorf methods to a public high school is uncharted territory for them.
Posted on Nov 08, 2009 - 11:35 PM by Melia Dicker
Leave high school early to go to college?
What should you do if you’re a high school junior who feels that spending one more year in high school would be a waste of time?
A thread on College Confidential raises that question, and has generated a lot of interesting responses. Here’s an excerpt from the original post:
I am a junior in high school and because I seem like I am more mature and academically way ahead of my peers (especially in the math and sciences) at the moment, am considering an early leave from high school. But the thing is, I cannot get a graduation degree unless I complete four years of high school. Nevertheless, my desire for early admission into college has never ceased because (a) I know what I want to study and roughly what I want to do in life and (b) I feel like my senior year in high school will be somewhat a waste of my time since I would have practically exhausted all the resources available to me.
Posted on Oct 28, 2009 - 10:19 AM by Melia Dicker
For a thriving economy, educate creative thinkers
A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.
That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables—to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies—will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college—more education—but we need more of them with the right education. ...
... Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now—not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
Posted on Oct 26, 2009 - 09:25 PM by Melia Dicker
What are schools really teaching kids?
Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school.
Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
Posted on Oct 25, 2009 - 06:25 PM by Melia Dicker
If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived
Posted on Oct 25, 2009 - 06:15 PM by Melia Dicker
When a Parent’s ‘I Love You’ Means ‘Do as I Say’
More than 50 years ago, the psychologist Carl Rogers suggested that simply loving our children wasn’t enough. We have to love them unconditionally, he said, for who they are, not for what they do.
As a father, I know this is a tall order, but it becomes even more challenging now that so much of the advice we are given amounts to exactly the opposite. In effect, we’re given tips in conditional parenting, which comes in two flavors: turn up the affection when they’re good, withhold affection when they’re not. ...
... In practice, according to an impressive collection of data by Dr. Deci* and others, unconditional acceptance by parents as well as teachers should be accompanied by “autonomy support”: explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child’s point of view.
* Edward L. Deci, a leading American expert on the psychology of motivation
Posted on Oct 25, 2009 - 05:43 PM by Melia Dicker
Get It Wrong Before You Google to Learn It Better
We live in an era where the answer to almost any fact-based question is no further than a Google search away, but Scientific American highlights a study suggesting subjects forced to get something wrong before being told the answer learn it better.
Posted on Oct 22, 2009 - 06:48 PM by Melia Dicker
Teens’ 12-screen theater project premieres
Searchlights will mark the VIP opening for a new movie complex in Petaluma tonight, but it will really be a celebration of the tenacity of seven teenage girls who shared a dream and made it come true.
If not for the “Superb Seven,” as the girls have dubbed themselves, Petaluma’s 55,000 or so residents would still have to trek to Rohnert Park or Novato to catch a film.
Through sheer will and charm, the girls lobbied local politicians, negotiated with theater owners, won support from Lucasfilm executives and ultimately persuaded a developer to build a theater as the anchor of a $100 million downtown redevelopment project that otherwise might not have gotten off the ground.
“If they didn’t believe in us in the beginning, they sure as hell believe us now,” said one of the teens, 16-year-old Ashley Ditmer.
The girls—Noëlle Bisson, Elizabeth Comstock, Ditmer, Liza Hall, Sarah Marcia, Taylor Norman and Madison Webb—are all 16, except Comstock, who is 15.
Posted on Oct 20, 2009 - 11:34 AM by Melia Dicker
The 3 R’s? A Fourth Is Crucial, Too: Recess
The best way to improve children’s performance in the classroom may be to take them out of it.
New research suggests that play and down time may be as important to a child’s academic experience as reading, science and math, and that regular recess, fitness or nature time can influence behavior, concentration and even grades.
A study published this month in the journal Pediatrics studied the links between recess and classroom behavior among about 11,000 children age 8 and 9. Those who had more than 15 minutes of recess a day showed better behavior in class than those who had little or none. Although disadvantaged children were more likely to be denied recess, the association between better behavior and recess time held up even after researchers controlled for a number of variables, including sex, ethnicity, public or private school and class size.
Posted on Oct 20, 2009 - 11:19 AM by Melia Dicker
14-year-old invents surgical technique
Tony Hansberry II isn(tm)t waiting to finish medical school to contribute to improved medical care. He has already developed a stitching technique that can be used to reduce surgical complications, as well as the chance of error among less experienced surgeons.
• I(tm)ve always had a passion for medicine,• he said in a recent interview. “The project I did was, basically, the comparison of novel laparoscopic instruments in doing a hysterectomy repair.”
By the way, Hansberry is a 14-year-old high school freshman.
In April, the brilliant teen presented his findings at a medical conference at the University of Florida before an audience of doctors and board-certified surgeons.
Hansberry attends Darnell-Cookman, a special medical magnet school that allows him to take advanced classes in medicine. Students at the school master suturing in eighth grade.
Posted on Oct 20, 2009 - 10:57 AM by Melia Dicker
IDEA Bloggers
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