What Can We Learn From An Experimental High Tech Wunderschool Failure?

Max Ventilla launched AltSchool quietly enough in 2013, but within two years it was a hot Silicon Valley startup. In 2015, $100 million of investment dollars from major education reform players like Mark Zuckerberg and the Emerson Collective spurred an impressive wave of press. In just 24 hours the Silicon Valley Wunderschool had been covered by Kevin Carey in the Pacific Standard, Natasha Singer in the New York Times, and Issie Lapowski at WIRED.com. And USA Today and techcrunch and Forbes.

AltSchool would be a proof of concept for the most ideal version of personalized learning, centered on teachers who would be backed up by tech and tech engineers, and backed by, ultimately, about $174 million. Ventilla envisioned a chain of profitable private schools setting a new standard for high-tech personalization. But click over to the AltSchool website today and all you will find is a push for something called Altitude Learning. Ventilla has sold off the schools themselves and created a new venture that will focus on selling the tech software that AltSchool developed. The headlines are not nearly as glowing as they were four years ago. "AltSchool Gives Up On Schools" and "AltSchool's Out...Calls It Quits" and, most brutally, "How An Education Startup Wasted Almost $200 Million."

So what lessons are there in this startup's trajectory?

Education Is Harder Than You Think

Ventilla came from Google, and had a Silicon Valley attitude about innovating other fields. In 2016, he told Adam Lashinsky of Fortune, "We're kind of flying the plane while we're building it." Lashinsky saw the problem:

The difference is that AltSchool is experimenting with the lives of children, not a better way of tagging beer-bust photos. The reason the plane-flying analogy amuses is that no one in their right mind would tinker with an airborne plane. Yet AltSchool asks parents to pay for the privilege of supplying their children as guinea pigs."

Modern education reform has been driven in large part by wealthy amateurs, convinced that their expertise in other areas can be translated into education reform, rebirth, and revival. Some, like Nick Hanauer in his recent Atlantic piece and Larry Berger (CEO, Amplify), have stepped forward to acknowledge that they were wrong. Others just keep swinging and in the process discover that fixing schools is not as simple as they thought it was. Ventilla was thinking small, investing large financial and human resources, and even paying some attention to trained educators, and he still couldn't pull it off. Keep that in mind the next time someone with big business success but not education background announces that he knows how to fix everything.

Personalized Education Is Much, Much Harder Thank You Think

Personalized learning is one of the great new waves in education, promising that every student can have an individualized, customized education. Zuckerberg has been backing it, both with AltSchool and at Summit Learning. Charles Koch has a new initiative focused on it. What is offered is almost always a version that cuts some corners, because full scale personalized learning would require a huge bank of resources and a great deal of human-hours to do the personalized design for each student. AltSchool had the resources-- human, technological, and financial-- and still had trouble making it work. This is not a complete surprise; a new report from the National Education Policy Center shows that personalized learning has a myriad of pitfalls. Keep that in mind the next time you hear someone announce that personalization is going to revitalize a local school district.

Business Is Business

Some charter and private schools are businesses. That does not make them inherently evil or bad, but it gives them a different set of priorities than those of a public school.

Businesses measure success financially, and they can be very flexible in pursuing it. MTV started out showing music videos, and when it became apparent that there were better ways to remain successful as a cable content company, they did not announce, "Well, we were founded to show music videos, so we're going to stay true to our roots whether that brings in revenue or not." Instead, they pivoted to something else. They shifted their mission.

AltSchool has been shifting for a while. Late in 2017, Ventilla started getting out of the school business. Some parents were not very happy to discover that they had been paying to have their children serve as beta testers for an edtech company. One parent, quoted by Melia Robinson at Business Insider, summed up the issue clearly:

We're not the constituency of the school," a parent of a former AltSchool student told Business Insider. "We were not the ones [Ventilla] had to be accountable to."

AltSchool has shifted its mission. It's certainly within its right--maybe even its responsibilities--to do so. But keep that in mind the next time you're considering enrolling your child in somebody's business.
Originally posted at Forbes.com

PA: Governor Calls Charters Private, Makes Advocacy Group Sad

When Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf trotted out his budget last month, he made it a point to note that he was raising money for public schools-- and that he had some definite ideas about which schools are public and which schools are not.

He wants to see more of those basic education dollars to school districts get distributed through the state’s fair funding formula. He also wants to address concerns related to cyber charter schools, which he referred to as “the growing cost of privatization of education in our public schools.”

And just in case that wasn't clear enough, a press release from the governor's office was even more direct:

Pennsylvania must help school districts struggling with the problem of increasing amounts of school funding siphoned by private cyber and charter schools. Funding reform would increase transparency so all schools that receive state dollars are accountable to the taxpayers.

This made Ana Meyers sad.

This lady

Meyers is the current executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public [sic] Charter Schools. She has previously worked as "Director of Legislative Affairs" for LeadingAge PA (an advocacy group for aging services providers) as well as PA Field Director for Libertarian advocacy group, FreedomWorks. Before that she co-chaired the Kitchen Table Patriots, a Tea Party group in southeastern PA, and before that sales and marketing for the likes of Nickelodeon and American Airlines. Her degrees are in business. In short, she has virtually no background or expertise in education, but does have a long-standing experience in arguing that government services should be privatized. This is not new for PCPCS-- their previous chief's experience was as PR head for Westinghouse.

Meyers has been in the charter schools biz for just over two years, but that's plenty long enough to learn the current talking point-- "charter schools are public because they are paid with public tax dollars." This is baloney. But it's popular baloney with privatizers because it's hard to convince people that public education should be privatized-- much easier to get them to change the definition of "public." So privatizers from the Governor of Florida to the Secretary of Education are arguing repeatedly that "public" does not mean what you think it means, even as they hope you will keep believing that it means what it's always meant, because then you will assume that charter schools have certain features that they do not have.

And so Meyers expressed her sadness.

“I am shocked that you and your staff are unaware that none of Pennsylvanian’s charter schools [brick-and-mortar or cyber] are private or for-profit institutions,” states the letter signed by Ana Meyers, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, the state’s largest organization representing charter schools.

“I would have thought that a governor who has championed public education like you have over the past four-plus years would know better. I believe that you would have a much better understanding of how charter schools operate in Pennsylvania if you took the time to visit a few of them.”

Baloney. Pennsylvania's charter schools are not public. They are not owned by the public. They are not run by elected representatives of the taxpayers. They are under no obligation to serve all students who are members of the public. They do not operate with public transparency. They are not public schools, and the governor is exactly correct to say so. Nor would visiting the actual schools reveal any of those characteristics.

Meyers doesn't have an argument here-- just an assertion. This has been the charter industry's tactic-- just keep using the word, claiming the word, demanding the word, and even getting your advocates to insert the word in the language of charter laws. But you can insist that your pig is a cow all day-- when you butcher it, you'll still be eating pork. We can have a conversation about whether or not charters are an educational benefit, whether they can deliver on their promises, and if they should be part of the educational landscape (and under what conditions). But there is no discussion to be had about whether or not they're public-- they aren't.

If you are in Pennsylvania, drop Governor Wolf a line and tell him that he got this one absolutely right, and that he is also right to ignore letters from high-paid mouthpieces who serve as advocacy professionals, but education amateurs.

Ed Reform Was Supposed To Crush Unions

Every once in a while I stumble on an old article from back in the days when some reformsters would just say certain parts out loud instead of trying to be subtle or dog whistly.

Take this piece from April of 2014 by Terry M. Moe. It's an excerpt from his book What Lies Ahead for America's Children and Their Schools, and it's really, really clear what this Hoover Institute Fellow has in mind. Here's the subheading that pops up if you share a link to the article:

Real change won't come until we strip teachers unions of their power.

This frickin' guy

The arguments are familiar: Collective bargaining has forced schools to use inefficient organization. They block change in order to protect their vested interests (not, of course, because they are educational professionals who have some thoughts about what actually works in a classroom).

Moe talks about the "two great education reform movements" by which he means accountability and school choice. Choice progress has been slow, and Moe is very disappointed in accountability because even though students are taking the test, teachers aren't being fired or having their pay adjusted based on test results.

But Moe sees reason for hope, reason to believe that reformsters are going to turn it around thanks to two sets of factors.

One he calls endogenous change. These are politics within the education system, and he points to conservative gains in 2010 that helped lead to states gutting collective bargaining. It is hard to overstate just how positively Moe views any damage inflicted on teachers and their unions. He also points to the rise of reformy groups within the Democratic Party, like DFER and the network of activists rooted in TFA and Barrack Obama and Arne Duncan (who are "clearly in the reform wing of the party). These folks, he notes, are actually "serious about improving the nation's schools" and so think that unions must be made part of the solution. Yes, he missed a lot back then, from imagining that DFER includes actual democrats to the fact that union desire to collaborate with reformists spurred a noisy member pushback.  At any rate, he doesn't see these endogenous changes as sufficient to "bring about major change."

It propels the education system in the right direction. But it is inherently limited, because it does little to reduce the power of the teachers unions—and they will continue to use their power to prevent the schools from being effectively organized.

So what are the changes that can bust union power? Exogenous changes, originating from outside the education system-- specifically, those emerging from "the worldwide revolution in information technology."

Online curriculum can be created and customized. Give instant feedback and assessment. Allow students to learn at a personalized pace while giving access at any time or any place. Is Moe excited about these things because he thinks they'll make education better? Not exactly:

By strategically substituting technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive), moreover, schools can be far more cost-effective than they are now—which is crucial in a future of tight budgets.

Teaching staffs will be reduced and dispersed (because they can teach from anywhere). This will undermine the union membership, money and power. Woohoo!

Do we have to wait for this "tsunami" to come and wash those damn teachers away/ Well, Moe had some thoughts about things that could be done to hasten that joyous day. He wants researchers to dig up some information. Does collective bargaining increase the costs of public education? Are unions swinging board elections? How do unions use their power to block ed reform? Do right to work states successfully weaken the unions? Is the rising Democratic reformy tide yield real results? How have the unions dealt with ed tech-- do they control it, defeat it, or "support" it (scare quotes are his, because, you know, any teacher support for ed tech must be fake).

Now, five years later, some other questions occur, like how does the attempt to crush teachers and their unions result in an inability to find enough teachers who will take your crappy job at crappy pay? And how disappointed are you that a Trump administration sucked all the air out of the faux democrat support for reformy ideas? Do you think wealthy parents are really excited about having their children taught by computer screen?

It is striking the degree to which this article completely bypasses the question of whether his dreamed-of reforms will actually help students. "We've got to bust those damned unions" is the main focus, and the most desired outcome of everything from accountability to his nascent vision of personalized learning.

So who is this guy? Terry Moe is a Stanford professor and a Hoover Institution education task force guy. His degrees are in economics and political science. He has also been a fellow at the Brookings Institute, and Fordham Institute gave him an award for excellence in 2005. In 2011 he had published a book along much the same themes outlined above, and it was praised by Joel Klein and former DC Chancellor, She Who Will Not Be Named.

But perhaps his most telling work isn't about education at all-- consider his 2016 book Relic, which argues that the Constitution needs to be rewritten in order to push Congress aside so that a President has far more power and freedom to govern as he will. So, you know, more like a king. Or, in keeping with the corporate school of ed reform, more like a powerful visionary CEO.

You may be asking-- with Donald Trump as President, does Moe still think the President needs more power? The answer is yes. The argument is that Trump is awful, but he was elected because government has been sucky, which is Congress's fault, and if the President had more power, government would work better, and we wouldn't get a Trump in the White House. So there's that.

But we're digressing from the main feature here, which was our little trip back to 2014, when a reformster might just come out and say, "We need more Democrat reformsters and ed tech and personalized learning and students taught via computer because it will help us destroy the teachers union as a political force and so we can remake schools according to our amateur hour vision without anyone getting in our way. It's a nightmare vision of ed reform, but at least it's honest.

ICYMI: What A Miserable Sunday Edition (8/4)

This has not been a great week in the US, but here we are again. Read some pieces about education if you can; otherwise, just go curl up with loved ones.

Testing Craze Is Fading in U.S. Schools. Good. Here’s What’s Next.

At Bloomberg, Andrea Gabor takes a look at testing and what may come after.

Why Do White Reformers Keep Making This Obvious Mistake?

I Love You But You're Going To Hell adds some historical perspective to the issue. As is often the case with education reform ideas, we have been here before.

When Do Not-for-profit and For-profit Mean the Same Thing?

Mitchell Robinson on Eclectablog takes a look at how easily Michigan profiteers skirt the laws forbidding for-profit charter schools.

Top 7 Ways Technology Stifles Student Learning in My Classroom

At his blog, Steven Singer enumerates the problems of classroom tech.

Fake Play and Its Dangerous Alignment to Standards and Data

Nancy Bailey talks about the most critical of issues-- play and the littles.

China has started a grand experiment in AI education. It could reshape how the world learns.

MIT Tech Review looks at one more scary thing the Chinese are up to. If you want to be further alarmed by the company profiled here, I've written about them before-- here and here.

Charter operator: Viral graduation speeches were acts of ‘dishonesty and deceit,’ could cost students their diplomas

Chalkbeat looks at a charter school having trouble with that pesky old First Amendment

For-profit colleges — but not their student 'customers' — have a friend in Betsy DeVos  

Even at The Hill, they've noticed where Betsy DeVos's loyalties lie.

Segregation: Who's The Worst?

A new study of segregation in charter schools has been released. Authored by Julian Vasquez Heilig, T. Jameson Brewer, and Yohuru Williams, "Choice without inclusion?: Comparing the intensity of racial segregation in charters and public schools at the local, state and national levels" concludes that "national, state, and local data indicate that the charter industry has a segregation problem in the US and it is not simply explained away by locality or demography."

In other words, despite charters periodically being labeled the "civil rights issue" of our day, they are failing to reverse segregation in US schools. Public schools have less of a segregation problem than charter schools.

But let's be honest. Having less of a segregation problem than charter schools, like being more civil than Donald Trump, is not a brag-worthy high-bar-clearing achievement.

Even in a post Brown v. Board world, public schools have found ways to maintain plenty of segregation. Some examples are particularly egregious, like the Pinellas County schools of Florida. As laid out in painful detail by the Tampa Bay Times, the district first systematically moved most of its poor, minority students into five previously-average schools. Then they systematically starved those schools of resources, turning them into "failure factories."

School district lines are sometimes drawn carefully to isolate wealthy, white districts from Those People's Children. Adam Harris, in a recent Atlantic article, profiled the Waterbury School District, a district that is systematically "walled off" from surrounding districts that are whiter and better funded. Put that together with years of white flight, and you get a segregated set of districts. And if the feds stop paying close attention-- well, here's a study from Stanford that followed districts under desegregation orders and what happened when the orders were lifted. Segregation increased.

In a sort of counter-report to the Vasquez-Heilig-Brewer-Williams report, the entirely reform EdBuild has a report showing almost a thousand borders between school districts where one side is considerably wealthier and whiter than the other. I've also looked at another of EdBuild's reports showing 128 communities trying to secede from their district since 2000, with 74 succeeding. A local peculiarity in Maine inflated those numbers a bit, but honestly, the uninflated numbers are nothing to brag about. I don't trust EdBuild's motives-- but their basic information

And that's just segregation between and within schools. A 2014 piece from The Atlantic lays out how segregation can occur within a school--by simply keeping poor, minority students out of the higher tracks for classes.

There is plenty of room for discussion and argument, and measuring segregation can yield some conflicting results depending on which yardstick you use. But there is no yardstick that let's us as a country say, "Oh, well, we've totally eradicated that problem now."

EdBuild's chief Rebecca Sibelia points to the case Milliken v. Bradley, a 45-year-old lawsuit charging Detroit with racist policies:

The plaintiffs argued that school policies reinforced racist housing practices that had trapped black families inside the city. It was a story playing out across the United States.

"The story was the story of American apartheid," says Michelle Adams, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York City. She's writing a book on Milliken and says federal redlining of neighborhoods and race-based restrictions on house sales, known as covenants, had made it nearly impossible for black families to move to the suburbs.

"Over and over and over again, the plaintiffs used this phrase, 'contained.' "

Tie school districts geographically, and then restrict where Black folks can live, and you get segregated schools. But the justices decided in a 5-4 ruling that echoes many rulings since, that since the school district lines weren't drawn with the intent to segregate, it didn't matter that those lines followed housing lines that were drawn with intent to segregate.

And with that, Brown v. Board lost half its teeth and white flight was given a supreme stamp of approval. And public education settled into its own version of school district gerrymandering.

Yes, I know what reformsters are getting at-- if public school systems are unwilling to redraw district lines, well, then, a system of charters that could simply disregard district lines should be able to cross those lines and desegregate education.

The problem with that argument is laid out simply enough in studies like the one we started this post with-- charters have had a couple of decades to show how they can be engines of desegregation, and they haven't done it. Instead, somehow, they've done worse. Could be that they've generally targeted poor minority communities as their market and occasionally marketed charters for the white flight crowd. Could be that desegregation was never really on their To Do list. Or it could be something else.

But look-- I'm not one to stand up in defense of charters or any of the reformy groups pushing them, but public education is not in a position to say, "Yeah, charters dropped this ball, but don't worry-- we've got it under control." Because they don't.

I will give the ed reform movement some of the blame. The continued framing of education as a commodity and parents as the only customers in a scarcity market can only lead to people scrambling after what they believe is a limited resource in a zero-sum game-- and in any such scrambling, the wealthy will probably win.

But ed reform didn't create segregation. Didn't improve the situation, but didn't create it.

The problems of segregation are not simply that we get apartheid, with people growing up in their own isolated cultural silos. The problem-- perhaps even the bigger problem-- is that, as in Pinellas County, segregating the students is a tool for segregating resources. If I don't want my tax dollars to go to educate Those Peoples' Children, then collecting all of Those Peoples' Children in one school makes that denial of resources much easier to pull off.

I don't have a solution for fixing the real problem here, which is racism, prejudice, bias. You can set up any kind of school system you like, and as long as many white folks are inclined to keep their kids away from Those Peoples' Children, you'll get segregated schools. Collect enough people who want segregation, and, as in this NYC school, you get it.

At a minimum, our priority should be the resources. Segregate or don't segregate, but as a state, put an end to districts that can afford wildly different amounts of per-pupil spending. Wealthy families will always find a way to get their children something extra, but we should be making sure that every school district has enough. No, having the money follow the child does not accomplish this, any more than Daylight Savings Time creates more hours of sunlight in the day.

US education has a racism problem because the US has a racism problem. Thirty years ago you might have convinced me that a school choice system that allowed families to ignore school district boundaries might be a help. But we've tried it, and we now know that it makes things worse rather than better. It exacerbates segregation as well as leaving those students who are still in public schools with even fewer resources. We need a new answer. School choice isn't it.

Should A Teacher Be Secretary of Education

This is part of the value of having a clown car full of candidates for a Presidential primary: the contest becomes a primary of ideas, and certain notions gain traction by spreading across the field of candidates. Not that gaining traction means those ideas will ultimately prevail (a widespread notion among the 2016 GOP field was that Donald Trump was unfit to be President), but it's still an intriguing process.

If I were Ed Secretary, I could stand up all day to talk to people

One up-and-coming education policy idea that was first proposed by Elizabeth Warren, but has now garnered wider candidate support, is the notion that a teacher should be the next secretary of education. At last count, four major candidates were supporting some version of the idea. It's an arresting and appealing idea. Betsy DeVos is widely seen as a controversial opponent of public education, and in many education circles, predecessors like Arne Duncan were not much loved, either. Many teachers feel that the folks in D.C. just don't get it, so the idea of someone from the trenches who would, presumably, get it--well, it's an attractive idea. Now we have to ask--is it a good idea?

The devil, as always, is in the details. The idea has been expressed variously as appointing an educator, a public school teacher, or "someone who comes from public schools." That may seem pretty straightforward. It isn't. "Educator" is a loose umbrella term to cover anyone who has held an education-adjacent job: teacher, administrator, education advocacy group member, school bus driver, education-specializing lawyer, or real estate salesman who once opened a charter school. "Public school" is not a clear term, because charter advocates assert that charter schools (privately owned and operated schools fed with public tax dollars) are public schools. Even "teacher" has become a fuzzy term. Teach For America has created a small army of "former teachers" who have only two years of actual classroom experience. Critics have directed lots of attention at TFA's program that claims to prepare college grads for a classroom in just five weeks. Less attention has been paid to how TFA produces "education policy experts" who have only two years of classroom experience. Those TFA grads have moved into a variety of powerful positions, from leaders of large city school systems to heads of entire state public education systems to founders and heads of their own charter schools. And while some TFA grads have emerged from the program as solid career supporters of public education, some remain aligned with the kind of corporate education reform that is unsupportive of public education.

In short, the candidates could appoint someone like controversial former D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee and honor the letter of their pledge. But it would not much alter the trajectory set for the department by past secretaries.

In the original Forbes post, I overlooked one important point-- while we associate the USED with K-12 education, they also mess with higher ed a lot, and in particular, the financial side thereof. There is a great deal of college loan baloney to deal with which may legitimately stretch, challenge, or just plain fall outside of a public school teacher's skill set. Of course, a USED secretary could go the "hiring a qualified person to handle that" route. That would be refreshing.

So assuming that the newly appointed secretary was an actual working public school classroom teacher, would that be a good idea?

A classroom teacher would face some significant hurdles. Betsy DeVos lacks experience in running a large, complicated organization, nor has she shown a great deal of aptitude in dealing with members of Congress. A teacher secretary would face similar challenges. Field expertise is not enough; anyone in that job will need either prior understanding or a crash course in how to actually get things done in D.C. Wags will suggest that herding a room of unruly children through math lessons involves a similar skill set, and there's some merit to that. Teachers manage, organize, and lead every day. But it also seems a legitimate concern that a classroom teacher transplanted to D.C. bureaucracy would have a great deal to learn about effectively navigating the halls of power. But similar transitions have been made. Jerry Oleksiak is a thirty-two-year classroom veteran who is now serving as Pennsylvania's secretary of labor and industry. We often assume that lawyers and businessmen can, of course, "do government." Why not teachers?

What most appeals about the idea is the notion of someone in D.C. positioned to say, "Here's how that policy looks in a real classroom, and here's why it's a lousy idea." It's not just that a teacher would have power, but that a teacher would actually be listened to. But that, too, is a devilish detail. A cabinet office does not come with a guarantee of access to a Presidential ear.

Selecting a classroom teacher does not guarantee a particular point of view. Among the millions of classroom veterans, one finds a variety of viewpoints (one in three National Education Association members voted for Donald Trump). It's worth remembering that although previous secretaries include a school administrator and a college professor, the one secretary who taught in a public high school was Rod Paige, who presided over the "Texas Miracle" that turned out to be a mirage, and who once called the NEA a terrorist organization. Coming from a public school background is no guarantee that someone is a public school supporter.

What could be the best feature of a teacher secretary would be a willingness to listen to other teachers. What has been consistently frustrating about education reform policies coming out of D.C. has been how little policymakers have consulted with actual experts who work in the field. Even when teachers have been involved, they have been carefully vetted and selected to be in tune with administration ideas. The best the next secretary could do, regardless of where she comes from, would be to assemble a broad-based panel of actual public school teachers, consult them regularly, and listen to them. In a world in which real live teachers had better access to those in power than lobbyists do, we could spend less time worrying about what the secretary of education used to do for a living.

Originally (mostly) posted at Forbes

Eight Weeks of Summer: Moving Forward

This post is week 8 of 8 in the 8 Weeks of Summer Blog Challenge for educators.

I've been doing the eight week challenge because why not? This is the final prompt, and like any good exercise, it calls for some reflection. Here's prompt #8:

What will you keep from the #8WeekofSummer Blog Challenge moving forward?

I've been trying to answer these from the perspective of my previous non-retired teaching self, but this is a tough one to twist around that way. But let's give it a shot.

I always carried things forward from my summer growth projects, but never as much as I meant to.

One of the benefits of summer vacations for teachers is that it gives you the breathing space you need to reflect on practices. During the school year, virtually all time is caught up in the dailiness of it, and no matter how much you want to carry over your new deep philosophical insights, it only takes a week or two to go from "What's a good pedagogical approach to including more reflection on the idealism of Romantic authors" to "I think if I hurry, I can get my copying done in that five minute break before third period. Also, I think I've figured out where to move those three guys on the seventh period seating chart so that they'll stop having fart contests." Starting the year can move you quickly from envisioning a moving, breathing image of the cosmos to simply feeling like you're trapped in a game of Space Invaders.

The things that always ended up being useful were the things that I fully learned. Not ideas that I carried around separately, still shiny from just having the wrapper pulled off, but things that were fully integrated into the grubby scuffed cabinet of Things I Know.

My own big cabinet has been getting a steady reorganization, as I integrate everything I ever learned about teaching into a different sort of context. I still think about teaching and, obviously, write about it, but without having to leap entirely into the dailiness of it (though I am, in fact, still married to a teacher).

Integrating matters to me because I see every Thing as part of the Big Thing. I'm not a believer that there's any part of human experience, no portion of our existence in the world, that is somehow disconnected and separate from all the rest of it. Life, the universe and everything is one gigantic elephant, and we are all blindly fumbling away at a toe, a leg, part of the tail, but everything is part of that same gigantic beast.

So for me, understanding something is about figuring out its connections to everything else. Also, nothing can be safely ignored because it just doesn't have anything to do with the rest of existence. It's all connected.

This was always hugely useful in the classroom. Analogies were my bread and butter, explaining one concept in terms of something closer to my students' home. And it helped me say "yes" to plenty of things.

I don't imagine that any of us had our world's completely rocked by the Eight Weeks challenge, but any exercise that gives you a chance to put some things together, to open up your brain and poke around a little-- those are always worthwhile.

So moving forward always meant folding together the Grand Ideas I had developed over the summer with the actual students and classes that I was facing in the fall. Little chats over the summer are fun, but figuring out how they connect to the actual work is important work all on its own.