By Tom
I found myself at a district technology workshop yesterday. I was sitting next to my friend Taylor, who teaches third grade across town. We spent the day planning ways to incorporate technology into our curriculum. Taylor’s a smart teacher and she had some great ideas. I learned a lot from her, and she might have learned a few things from me. Or maybe not. The point is, we came from different schools and spent the day sharing ideas and working together to improve our teaching practice. There was no competition. I may or may not have been helping Taylor’s students outperform mine, and I couldn’t care less.
From time to time, I checked the internet to see how things were going in Congress. That’s right; I was off-task. And as it turned out, Congress was in the process of letting the administration buy up lousy loans in an attempt to save the US economy.
I hope it works. But as I was switching back and forth between my curriculum and my country, I couldn’t help but notice something. We’re going to spend $700 billion bailing out a system that is supposed to deal with failure in a Darwinian fashion. And at the same time, many of the same clowns who ruined the very economy that they’re supposed to manage are trying to get public education to act more like private enterprise.
