A friend of the family who uses TD Compass and other AAC tools to communicate has a new blog and podcast about his love for the Beatles. Check it out.
In the academy, intersectionality was the antidote for that kind of white blindness. Intersectionality’s raison dêtre is to reveal the systems that organize our society. Intersectionality’s brilliance is that its fundamental contribution to how we view the world seems so common-sense once you have heard it: by focusing on the parts of the system that are most complex and where the people living it are the most vulnerable we understand the system best. Mark Lilla and others who critique this view of the body politic, reducing it to the caricature of “identity politics”, refuse to engage intersectionality’s most powerful empirical truth: we all have intersectional identities and all of them matter, if not all in the same way.
Source: The Intersectional Presidency – Tressie McMillan Cottom – Medium
As part of unschooling, my kid writes songs in the back of a bar with a rock journalist & music teacher who interviewed Roy Orbison, Queen, ELO, Grace Slick, Fleetwood Mac, Dire Straits, The Go-Go’s, Nils Lofgren, Joe Jackson, Robyn Hitchcock, Boy George, B.B. King, …
I’m going through Twitter profiles, adding the blogs of educators I follow to my feed reader. Here’s who I read:
“Unless you already have a readymade tool to protect propaganda from the kind of informed critical thought that can pop it like a bubble. Something to insulate the ignorance and keep out the enlightened analysis.”
I am, of course, talking about Common Core.
A generation of Americans have been brought up with these shoddy academic standards that don’t develop critical thinking but actively suppress it.
Source: The Alt Right Has a Friend in Common Core | gadflyonthewallblog
“Design for the real lives of disabled and neurodivergent people. We are always edge cases, and edge cases are stress cases. The logistics of disability and cognitive difference are exhausting, often impossible. A necessary part of design is compassion, and a necessary part of compassion is recognizing the structural realities of marginalized people.”
Source: Classroom UX: Bring Your Own Comfort, Bring Your Own Device, Design Your Own Context
“I struggle with the conflict between writing something new and building on existing ideas but shouldn’t; a blog is just as much a process, an evolution of thought, as an act of creation.”
Source: Required – Colin Walker
The visitors highlighted that the conventional teenager can seem like a “rabbit in headlights” when asked the “big” questions regarding themselves and their future but that the students in the “why school” had competed to discuss themselves and critically discuss the issues regarding their future.
My conclusion from all this is that students and schools focussed on why they exist develop stronger engagement in all activities and this results in making achievement in what we do much easier.
Challenge all those things you think you are officially obliged to do, in many cases you find you do not have to do them. You can build a whole new rich learning environment by returning to the real why behind education.
The people who run the world are all heavily invested in stocks and their markets only have an appetite for one thing: growth. The last 40 years has seen an insatiable demand for monetary growth from these investors. This has led all corporations to keep wages low, bonuses huge, and push extreme consumerism as a norm. This is all to convince investors of yet more future growth. The stagnation of wages has impoverished even the lives of middle class families from needing one working parent to needing both in work. All parents, poor and middle-class, all now return home every evening tired and robbed of family time. Any housework is rushed and children in most homes are left staring at screens while parents complete house chores or just drink alcohol to relax.
The way in which society has been restructured by the banks and markets, particularly since around 1980, has reduced the quality of life for all and made all families poor in energy and time. This mold that currently shapes society needs to be broken by considerable regulation, so as to share wealth more equally and give back families their time and dignity. Unless society can break this mold, we will only see increasing levels of stress reduced well-being.
Source: Let’s break 2 molds that hurt everyone’s wellbeing – EDUWELLS
One of the interesting points that I found was that ‘why’ is not necessarily something that you just sit around and decide. It involves culture and therefore action. In some respect it reminds me of trust. You cannot necessarily create ‘trust’, instead you put in place the conditions for trust to prosper. I think that the challenge we face is creating the conditions for why to prosper.
Source: 💬 Is your School an X or Why School? – Read Write Collect
rnbn 