Education on the Rocks

When we hear people talking about schools, it’s often in the vein of what “kids these days DON’T know” rather than what they do. And it feels like we don’t hear about schools succeeding - we only hear about failure, and that failure is talked about in what teachers aren’t teaching and what students aren’t learning. Today, we want to dig into questions around knowledge and what students should be learning in school. We’re asking the question: What do our students need to “know” to be successful?

English. Math. History. Science. A second language. PE. And an elective. For many of us, this is what our middle and high school schedules looked like year in and year out. And we never asked any questions about it. If you’re like us, many of our teachers taught and thought about their courses in isolation. Their subject was the most important subject and it was confined to that classroom and that 50 minutes. Today, we’re going to push back against siloed learning and think about what would happen if our schools thought about knowledge as interconnected. Today, we ask the question, what would education look like if we thought about interdisciplinarity as key to our students’ success?

In his inaugural address, President Biden talked about “teach[ing] our students in safe schools,” and while making schools safer places for children to learn and grow has been a priority in the United States for decades, the new president’s words loom very large at a time when many public schools across the country have been shuttered for nearly a year. This week, the CDC published an article that says that evidence suggests that opening many schools safely for in-person instruction is possible. Today, we discuss what it’s like to be at the heart of this national discussion, as we talk about what it’s like to get ready for the first day of school and ask: Welcome back to class, where would you like to begin?

This past week, the College Board, the company that owns the SAT, announced major changes to the test that they say have been accelerated due to the coronavirus pandemic. While many of us think of the SAT and the ACT as impacting students in their final two years of high school, testing culture in our entire K-12 system is to some extent shaped by these capstone events. Today, we will discuss these changes and ask: how will the re-tooled SAT affect students in our public schools?

After a short hiatus, The Education On The Rocks starts off with an interview with a college student fresh out of the university. Jon’s guest today is Katie Bullock, his daughter and BFA Theater graduate. What was it like studying in college while the Covid pandemic raged all over the world and how life looks like after graduation?
What kind of skills were students able to develop and how these can be applied later? Let’s dig in.

Up here in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, the snow is starting to fall and schools across the country are getting ready to shut their virtual doors for winter break. Whether students, teachers, and administrators are wrapping up final exams or coming back in January to prepare to wrap up the first semester, this is the time of year when people are tired and anxious. This year, as many of us in education exist in the universe of comprehensive distance learning, all of those typical stressors are amplified, so we want to spend some time today talking about putting the brakes on during winter as we address the question: What aren’t you doing over winter break?

This is the time of year when seniors across the country are filling out college applications and applying for scholarships, and teachers and counselors are writing recommendations. However, just like everything else over the past 9 months, this year is anything but business as usual. The coronavirus pandemic has reshaped every facet of American life, and it may very well be reshaping our society’s relationship with higher education. Today, we explore the impact of the coronavirus on this year’s seniors, the college class of 2025, as the question shifts from “Where are you applying?” to “Are you applying?”

As schools head into the Thanksgiving holiday, we are seeing coronavirus numbers spike across the country. While there are a lot of questions to be answered about how the holiday season will affect schools’ abilities to open up in 2021, today we’re going to focus on a trend that we’re seeing at every level of public education in the United States. From kindergarten through college, students aren’t enrolling in school at the same rate as before the pandemic. Today, we’re going to take a look inside these numbers to see what it means for the future of education in the United States as we ask the question: so, you’re done with school, now what?

Those of us who are products of the 1980’s or 80’s pop culture have fond...or not so fond recollections of the teachers in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Fast Times at Ridgemont High who make learning a gauntlet of boredom and fear. For many of us and our students, those satires, while intended to highlight the absolutely un-fun nature of the high school classroom, are all too reminiscent of our learning experiences in school. Today, we’re going to talk about learning and how learning and practice is connected to the idea of something being fun. We’re going to grapple with: Is learning fun? Should it be fun?

Over the course of the pandemic, we’ve discussed the difficulties that our students and their families are facing, and while those challenges have implications that can affect not only this academic year but also stretch far into the future, we have yet to focus on what it’s like to teach students during this time of extreme hardship. So, today, we’ll venture back into the classroom, but instead of sitting in one of the student’s desks, we’re going to explore what it means to be a teacher, to be responsible for student learning while managing personal and professional insecurities in the time of Covid. Today, we ask the question: how long can our nation’s teachers keep this up?