Category: Harvard

Future Economy

Posted on by tedoned

If you step back from earth and dial yourself into position between the top of your house and the moon, you will see that things are changing. Once upon a time, to get food, you would see the people grow their own food.  After that, for a while, they went to the supermarket. Now, most of us have it delivered to our door, as you would see from your perch.

In the world, or some fraction of it, that was when things were made in factories. Lots of people using the power of the machines and the force multiplier of oil to make lots and lots of things. But soon, all of this stuff will be made by robots. Much of it is already. Now here's an anecdotal fact that I will absolutely stand behind, and which I ask you to verify in your own experience from your life or from the life of someone, you know. It comes to me in the small data of having had friends and having taught hundreds or thousands of kids. Almost none of these people wanted to work in a factory. However Rich, the assembly line made America and the developed world, and however you parse out the justice of where that money went, it is a reductive but accurate image to say that a dad who worked the line wanted better for his son, and that when women said they wanted to work, those women were of a color in class who wanted dignity, and independence. After all most black women knew all about work. I offered this context because you're not getting ready to work at the factory. Lots of my students would've vastly prefer a life of making things got directed to a life of City. I presume we can agree that there are some disadvantages in life. Increasingly this is the life where you work like a machine. Specifically, the machine called a computer to take on the cog like stress that is in binary opposition to the difficulties of, say farming, or making instruments or greeting people at your café. No way am I suggesting on sitting jobs are easy. No way can I see a future in which farming pays you more than bankiHe saying two things by default. It must be increasingly common for people to get into middle-age and retirement, and even on their deathbed who think some version of fuck why did I bother with that honor office? I was meant to paint or to put a hammer t.

Let's look forward to the time when robots make almost everything. The only people employed by these robots, a few computer engineers, those who can upkeep the robots the owners. Perhaps things will be cheaper than ever, and maybe that will lead to a glorious age of enough for everyone. But even is that unlikely Nirvana comes to pass there's a spiritual problem that's certainly parallels the economic one: what will people do? People need things to do. Even if shopping and video games and texting back-and-forth is a kind of doing I would suggest Dash and I have to believe you know to Dash that there's only so much of that kind of doing people canAnd grow, only so much of that kind of doing, which makes us less holographic or less robotic than the drones, working in the factories of the future. Two of the schools where I have worked I have suggested that we create a course making shoes. Both I was politely left out of the room. Capable and smart students – you know the ones the ones headed to Harvard – should not be wasting their time making shoes. OK. Do you know how to make a shoe. Are you sure that the life of making shoes is not a better one than a life of being a banker, and being able to buy whatever shoe you want to buy.

 

Why don;t students know how to lead in their own communities?

Why The Internet Revereses School

Posted on by tedoned

You are a kid on a mountain, born in the outskirts, likely without a silver spoon.  In the past you would scale down, find your way to a hub, and require funding.

If I met you I would speak of why I revere professors, think libraries churches, why the expertise and experience available on college campuses in America is priceless.  Somewhere here is a school you will think of as made for you, even if you have never herd of it before.

I would still say this.  But it would be harder to say not because America has gotten less safe and everyone is chasing admit to the same schools, but because if your path after your degree is going to take you out of the node or back up your mountain, you and your current school need what higher ed has less and less.

Top-notch instructions, groovy lectures, and original source material is all available to you and your peers.  And all around you are problems to solve: Food that needs growing, businesses that need help, infrastructure that could use an upgrade.

Yeah, if the problem is "how to I get rich and funnel money to those I think of as mine, then a school that gets you into an America College is, everyone in America thinks, still the way to go.  And maybe that will be true forever.

But in the past you needed to be the best and brightest to get that ticket and now you need to be the most by criteria that may not be as useful in terms of fixing problems as growing food, assisting a business, getting your hands dirty fixing the road to school.

That's a reversal. What's more, if you and your school learned how to do this better--solve problems in your village in a way that meant more jobs in the village, you could put it on youtube and work to make what you know go viral.

 

 

climb down, get to the ivory Tower and get your degree.  Then, if you were so willing, you could go back to your mountain and try to make the village and then return home to make a difference they can get, more or less functionally, what they need without ever leaving. What's more they can show the impact of the work they do to the world. The school that does not burn fossil fuels, that grows healthy food nearby, that serves its neighborhood as much as the chronological future of its students could, demonstrate the value of what it does to the whole world.

A Note on Grind

Posted on by tedoned
Getting ground down has at lest this edifying component: you learn it sucks.
Some grinds can be useful:  Build the muscle, expand the brain, get your shit done.
But we are grinding on teachers and they are grinding on our kids.
Attendance is a grind, bells are a grind, and administering all that has to be administered to make kids fit the big data formulation is a grind.
Not pissing people off is a grind.
Consider the workshop and alternative to much of this grind.

Dear Writing Teachers: No More Essays

Posted on by tedoned
Dear Teachers of Writing . . .
No more essays in schools.  Writing yes.  Essays not.
From now on kids write letters.  Essays too?  No.  Not.
Letters from blue states to red and red to blue, rich to poor, black to white and back again.  And–by fiat–young to old.  (Because the old will scrawl back to the young.)
Does the world suffer from a lack of the critical thinking English teachers claim essays teach?  Sure.  Yes.  Affirmativo.  You don’t get to Trump and Putin and The Fake News Follies nor to the average car advert or this summer's pre-sequel without catastrophic failure of critical thought.
But? And?
If one-day argumentation, persuasion and rhetoric defeat the forces of untruth, brutality and ill-reason because essays help distinguish the righteous from the all-spin zone, that would be sweet.  But Sacarmuci?  Gorka?  Bannon?  DeVos?  They all wrote essays.  All got promoted.
We've confused essays with "thinking" in exactly the way Robert Frost would  have us not do when he says: "Thinking is not to agree or disagree, that's voting."
Essays did not weave together the global village because of the quality of the thought therein, but because they were offered up across lines of divide, the division of secular from believer in particular.  And getting into college or getting a good grade from you is not a divide, just a stamp of holy nothing, a way to practice agreeing or disagreeing before casting a vote in anger or ambivalence.
So please, my dear Teachers of Writing, claim not that Montaigne’s art thrives in the prose of our students.  It just ain't so.  Yes, for many kids words matter.  Some challenge their beliefs in what they write and can register measure with measure.  But getting into Yale drains most kids of eloquence, as you well know.
A contest of ideas?  The mind in dialogue with itself? The triumph of a sentence well-formed?  For that get your students some paper, an envelope, and a stamp.
What did you have for breakfast?  What series did you watch last night?  How often do you fart on a bad day? Do you like or dislike flatulence jokes?
In the letters Paul Auster and J.M Cotezee write to each other, for instance, they exchange thoughts about politics and economy and sport and family life and tradition and work and fame and sex and some dozen-score other subjects.  Isn't that what writing an essay does anyway?
And perhaps the value of writing a letter on a real piece of paper to some other person is something we can sell to students as good for their selfish future.
Write 100 letters in high school English class and develop one or two meaningful correspondents and thus, maybe, a future mentor or business partner.
Learn how to approach a future employer or investor or donor tactfully in the doing of this targeted writing.
Or maybe–here’s some seriously wishful thinking–it will be harder to firebomb people with whom you’ve corresponded.  (That dream, however hallucinatory, is not wilder than the idea that some “good essay” will sway Breitbart. )
Besides, such real letters will bring students offline a bit more and perhaps help reset the confusion of “likes” with depth, clickable friends with real ones, and force kids to consider what someone writes to them over the few days of snail-mail back and forth rather than the immediacy of online exchange, the speed of which undermines true contemplation.
And not to worry teachers, you will still have plenty to do.  More, in fact. “Is that what you want to say to your future ally?  To the person you hope will at least respect you? To someone whose sofa you might sleep on someday?  How can you write a cleaner sentence? How might you show yourself more as who you are to this would-be friend?” All the usual questions and advice will be yours to ask and offer.
With maybe less to grade as well.
Yours,
Ted

Dear Teachers: Please, I Beg of Thee

Posted on by tedoned

Please,

Dear teachers . . .

I beg of you.  Try this tomorrow, or the next day, or sometime . . .

A horizontal piece of paper.  Give that to the kids and have them write 'a book.'

The book.  A book.  The words that went into books . . . 500 years of spreading info and upgrading the status-quo of the static brain.  Keystone to community, standard-bearer for time well spent in solitude, 500 years as info source #1 and entertainment central.  That's not a bad run.

As a frame, the frame of a book has cred.  That's my point.

And a frame?  You can imagine anything into a frame.  A lesson.  A writing.

Write a book every day or four days a week or on some kind of routine.   The back cover can be the meta/blurb and the front the title/thesis/fun line.   Spin this however works for your crew.  Put 253 words or a paragraph or a drawing or five minutes (or fifteen) in the two inside pages.

Churn 'em out, these books, you and your class.  500 years: The idea, the sentence, pounded by key of zinc, pressed to paper with pen or ink.

Let not the screen convince you a thing is made of pixels, however space age the appeal.  Give not up the ghost of what you do to those silicon devils.

Let your students think themselves writers only when what they do is tangible and real, like the echo of genius, truth, beauty, and wisdom.