Loaves and Fishes

Education has been broken for a long time. Perhaps when we proclaimed that no child would be left behind, the opposite is exactly what we proceeded to do. It is nearly identical to the weight-loss craze where we create a billion dollar industry, not to fix the problem, but to keep us in this perpetual loop of not fixing the problem.

It is very clear what the solution is. Better teacher pay and smaller classes sizes which is indicative of respect for the teaching profession. All the reasons that we make up for not implementing the clear solution is just our indirect way of saying that we don't trust the teachers to deliver on this promise and choose to focus on examples of the failures instead of the successes. I am not a politician or an administrator so I cannot enact this solution and no longer am waiting for someone else to do it on behalf of our future.

I encounter on a daily basis students hungry for a challenge. This happens in my classroom and in all the venues where I volunteer. They don't always know how to ask for what they want and need, they only know how to express that they are not sated. Sometimes this is expressed in respectful ways, sometimes it is expressed by boredom or misbehavior, sometimes this is expressed in phrases like "When are we ever going to need this?". I am a technologist and used to believe that online systems would help us scale the solution to create access for all students much like AI is claiming to do, but students only access it if they have already bought in.

In discussions with a colleague about how to teach computer science, I was told that kids don't want to be on the computer all day. It was hard for me to not interpret that as "let's not teach computer science". You are telling a computer science teacher to not use a computer. But I have risen to the challenge. All of teaching is about moving up Bloomberg's taxonomy to reach higher and higher levels of critical thinking. That indeed can be done to teach computer science without a computer, at least the first principles.

As I have stated, I am no longer waiting for others to provide the solution. The revolution starts today. How do we feed all the students hungry for a challenge? We start with the loaves and fishes that we have and when those students are sated, then they will help to feed the next round of students. Our biggest untapped potential is our children. The distribution model has already been in place with the Outreach expectations of organizations like National Honor Society and FIRST Robotics. We just have to leverage that to deliver true sustenance.