Education

As a physicist who left and is looking to transform a field (teaching social and emotional skills, which I generally call leadership), I like noticing other physicists who left and ended up transforming fields. The first one to come to mind for me are Erwin Schrödinger, of Schrödinger's Cat fame, who came up with one of the first equations at the root of quantum physics. Later in life he wrote a book called What Is Life? based on a series of lectures he gave, in which he predicted many of the properties of DNA. People already knew about DNA, but not its structure. His book influenced both Francis Crick and James Watson to study DNA. They eventually both won the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA's…

UPDATE: I was wrong about this situation. Read the update here. I was visiting my friend's class at Parsons, the school for design not far from me. I went to the men's room, or what used to be the men's room and found it had been converted to an all gender bathroom. Okay, no problem. I used it, but when I leave, I pass the bathroom that used to be the women's room and it still is. So there are no men's rooms but there are women's rooms. I took a picture of the signs on the bathroom doors. Is this equality? What is this supposed to mean? How did this decision get made? What does a man who wants a men's room do?

The book and documentary Most Likely to Succeed are about the most inspirational and frustrating works I've seen on education. They describe the type of teaching I like---inquiry-driven project-based learning---as well as the problems with the current school system. I feel irresponsible just writing that I liked them without saying much about them. Reading the book, nearly every page merited a post. So I couldn't think of how to represent it. All I can say is you'll be glad you read them if you do. Especially if you teach or have kids in school. Here's a video of an interview with the director and producer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hmlAXIVtw0 I may have posted about the movie before but probably not the book.

American education has become institutionalized to value credentials and scores on abstract tests unrelated to life activities that students and their families pursue meaningless goals instead of improving their lives. As a professor, I see college students packing their transcripts and resumes with tons of majors, extracurricular activities, sports, and other things without doing the work behind them that makes them valuable. They look great on paper, but are more busy than accomplished. It's sad, but they are just doing what the system rewards. Most adults suffer from the same distortion of values. Ironically, a student broke from the usual system to create this simple, effective video illustrating the situation from a high school student's perspective. The video has no special effects or magic. Anyone…

I first met Whitney Tilson probably ten years ago. He was creating a slide show on education reform like Al Gore's that became An Inconvenient Truth. I've subscribed to his mailing list since and emailed with him periodically. I finally watched the movie he made on his slide show, A Right Denied. He made it in 2010, so we're late. If you care about education, especially K-12 education in the United States, you'll be glad you watched it. I'm sure some will disagree with his ideas for reform, but even if you do, you'll learn from watching it and appreciate the attention he's generating. More likely you'll find his ideas compelling. Having toured several KIPP schools, which I found inspirational, as well as other new…