I was teaching high school English at an international school in Nairobi during the shift to online pandemic school. We went online after spring break 2020, remained so for fall term, and shifted to in-person in winter 2021, with a return online for several weeks during the fourth quarter. Like most teachers and students, I…
Author: Steven Slaughter
I am a teacher in search of better ways of facilitating education.
Some of my recent writing has been looking at the problems of conventional education. (Using the word “dystopia” in my title may not have been an appealing lead for some.) Today, I’d like to present a positive vision and introduce you to some folks I’ve gotten to know who are tackling these challenges in a…
In a recent survey, 48% of teachers polled say that in the last thirty days, they have thought about quitting their jobs. Thirty-four percent said that they are thinking about leaving the field (Forbes Magazine, “Why Education is About to Reach a Cris of Epic Porportions”). Think about that. What happens to a society if…
This week, a meme popped up several times that caught my attention. It was probably created last year during the height of at-home learning and I missed it until now. The message, written by a teacher, is addressed to parents during lockdown, and the heart of it reads: “I had a parent tell me this…
From all sectors, I continue to hear the plain acknowledgment that school, as it is, is fraught with problems. But what can we do about it? What other choices do we have? As we consider how education might be restructured, two forces make this reimagining difficult. The first is Experience Bias, the belief that whatever…
At the turn of the millennium, Mitchel Resnick was invited to a conference. Various thinkers were asked, What is the most important invention of the last thousand years? One said the printing press; another, the steam engine; and a third, the lightbulb. Resnick proposed that kindergarten was the most important. An odd response, right? We…