I went and saw one of my former students in jail this past weekend. Hakeem has been sentenced to 23 years with no chance of parole. He was arrested when he was 17. He still looked like the 6th grader I knew. Same smile. A number of new tattoos. I wasn’t sure how this was going to go. I’m not good at small talk under normal situations. The stakes are raised when you haven’t seen the person in about 6 years and they only have 30 minutes of contact with non-prisoners a week. The poor reception on the phone didn’t help anything but Hakeem seemed happy enough to see me that it didn’t seem to matter. We talked. Apparently I need a hair cut because he thinks I look like Tom Brady. Hakeem also let me know that half my class is now in jail. He listed too many of those kids and what they were arrested for. It’s not like I’m totally naive, I figured a number of those kids would end up in jail but each name I heard knocked me down another notch. The whole thing has been eating at me more and more. So many people failed these kids.

This is probably too simple. My belief is that we (my colleagues and I) should make/find interesting things. We should publish them online in a way that integrates these interesting things into the frameworks that govern the lives of our teachers (pacing guides, curricular frameworks, state standards). Associated with each interesting thing should be the option to expand outward into the rationale behind its selection/construction and/or towards the tools of its construction. I think this does at least two interesting things. It forces a deliberate rationalization and explanation of what you’re building/linking in and a transparency for the user to see those thoughts and perhaps shape how they think about the media/tools/lesson plans. This framework also provides an example and the tools to make/manipulate what you see. It should be empowering- kind of a “if you like this . . . ” here are the tools to build your own. In both these cases, the instructional rationales and the tutorials on the tools should be fairly common between a wide range of media objects. I’m also hoping they’ll grow organically over time with people adding nuance and depth to various sections as needed. I’m not entirely clear on decent ways to have elements of this happen automatically- similar to the way associated posts occur on some sites. It may be […]