Here is a collection of media that can be used to work with and engage students around a wide range of everyday problems. These videos all come from a pretty cool YouTube Channel called Watchwellcast. This is a part of a project focused on working with and engaging students in ways that help them make positive changes and/or informed choices in their lives.
I hope to add more content to this page. Please consider leaving a comment with your suggestions for more video, poetry, short stories, still images, quotes, music videos and lyrics, art and books.
Creating and protecting public services require a strong government that represents the people and our values of fairness, empathy, responsibility and equality.
The private marketplace filled with ethical entrepreneurs is an important part of a strong economy. Public education, universal health care, fire and police services are not markets -- they occupy a public, not private, space that is driven not by private profits but by public service.
Some corporations and their political friends want to turn our public goods that are for everyone into private interests that profit an elite and wealthy few.
Here is how they are doing it:
1. Deliberately underfund public services.
2. Taxes for the wealthiest people and corporations are cut in a way that government claims that we spend too much and as a result, we “all” must address the deficit together with higher fees and new health care premiums.
3. Lack of funding erodes the quality, availability and accessibility of services.
4. People get more frustrated and lose confidence in the services.
5. Corporations and their political friends say that privatization is the answer.
In many cases, privatization of public goods has a proven track record of lower quality, less service, higher costs and greater risks to public safety. Too often, privatization means that Albertans pay more and get less.
Privatizing our health, education and services for seniors often changes the bottom line. When a service remains public, people remain the bottom line. When we privatize and corporations take over the delivery of services, there is a shift and the bottom line becomes more focused on profits and less on the needs of people.
Some private-public partnerships may work but they can not only be held accountable to shareholders whose interest is on profits. A transparent government should be truly accountable to all Albertans and provide the best care for our health, education and seniors, without the threat of privatizing our public services.
The Alberta Party understands that Alberta's health and wealth requires a diversified economy, a commitment to the environment, a strong public sector, a balanced budget and a strong social conscience.
There's a big difference between learning something and then having a test, and learning something because you have a test.
Yes, we want to make sure that we have high standards for drivers, pilots, doctors, and engineers - both for their safety and ours. But we also want drivers, doctors and engineers who are passionate and caring about what they do for its own sake.
But our mania for testing and accountability has the same affect gambling and alcohol has on addicts. Just like the gambler who forgets about their loved one's while sitting at the Blackjack table, students, teachers and parents tend to forget about our love for learning when testsandgrades become the point of school.
1. Much of the material students are required to memorize is soon forgotten
The truth of this statement will be conceded (either willingly or reluctantly) by just about everyone who has spent time in school -- in other words, all of us. A few months, or sometimes even just a few days, after having committed a list of facts, dates, or definitions to memory, we couldn’t recall most of them if our lives depended on it. Everyone knows this, yet a substantial part of schooling – particularly in the most traditional schools – continues to consist of stuffing facts into students’ short-term memories.
The more closely we inspect this model of teaching and testing, the more problematic it reveals itself to be. First, there’s the question of what students are made to learn, which often is more oriented to factual material than to a deep understanding of ideas. Second, there’s the question of how students are taught, with a focus on passive absorption: listening to lectures, reading summaries in textbooks, and rehearsing material immediately before being required to cough it back up. Third, there’s the question of why a student has learned something: Knowledge is less likely to be retained if it has been acquired so that one will perform well on a test, as opposed to learning in the context of pursuing projects and solving problems that are personally meaningful.
Even without these layers of deficiencies with the status quo, and even if we grant that remembering some things can be useful, the fundamental question echoes like a shout down an endless school corridor: Why are kids still being forced to memorize so much stuff that we know they won’t remember?
The only difference between a child who studies relentlessly (if not obsessively) everyday all semester and the kid who studies only the night before, madly cramming information into their brain hours before the test - is that the crammer forgets everything 15 minutes beforethe test while the studier forgets everything 15 minutes afterward.
There's a big difference between preparing kids for a life of tests and the tests of life. The former may have kids worried about failing their classes without realizing such a misguided distraction is a recipe for failing at life.
Making students, teachers and parents focus intensely on test scores makes for a great bumper sticker and consumption for the six o'clock news, but it offers nothing but a hollow promise for those interested in real learning.
To This Day When I was a kid I used to think that pork chops and karate chops were the same thing I thought they were both pork chops and because my grandmother thought it was cute and because they were my favourite she let me keep doing it
not really a big deal
one day before I realized fat kids are not designed to climb trees I fell out of a tree and bruised the right side of my body
I didn’t want to tell my grandmother about it because I was afraid I’d get in trouble for playing somewhere that I shouldn’t have been
a few days later the gym teacher noticed the bruise and I got sent to the principal’s office from there I was sent to another small room with a really nice lady who asked me all kinds of questions about my life at home
I saw no reason to lie as far as I was concerned life was pretty good I told her “whenever I’m sad my grandmother gives me karate chops”
this led to a full scale investigation and I was removed from the house for three days until they finally decided to ask how I got the bruises
news of this silly little story quickly spread through the school and I earned my first nickname
pork chop
to this day I hate pork chops
I’m not the only kid who grew up this way surrounded by people who used to say that rhyme about sticks and stones as if broken bones hurt more than the names we got called and we got called them all so we grew up believing no one would ever fall in love with us that we’d be lonely forever that we’d never meet someone to make us feel like the sun was something they built for us in their tool shed so broken heart strings bled the blues as we tried to empty ourselves so we would feel nothing don’t tell me that hurts less than a broken bone that an ingrown life is something surgeons can cut away that there’s no way for it to metastasize
it does
she was eight years old our first day of grade three when she got called ugly we both got moved to the back of the class so we would stop get bombarded by spit balls but the school halls were a battleground where we found ourselves outnumbered day after wretched day we used to stay inside for recess because outside was worse outside we’d have to rehearse running away or learn to stay still like statues giving no clues that we were there in grade five they taped a sign to her desk that read beware of dog
to this day despite a loving husband she doesn’t think she’s beautiful because of a birthmark that takes up a little less than half of her face kids used to say she looks like a wrong answer that someone tried to erase but couldn’t quite get the job done and they’ll never understand that she’s raising two kids whose definition of beauty begins with the word mom because they see her heart before they see her skin that she’s only ever always been amazing
he was a broken branch grafted onto a different family tree adopted but not because his parents opted for a different destiny he was three when he became a mixed drink of one part left alone and two parts tragedy started therapy in 8th grade had a personality made up of tests and pills lived like the uphills were mountains and the downhills were cliffs four fifths suicidal a tidal wave of anti depressants and an adolescence of being called popper one part because of the pills and ninety nine parts because of the cruelty he tried to kill himself in grade ten when a kid who still had his mom and dad had the audacity to tell him “get over it” as if depression is something that can be remedied by any of the contents found in a first aid kit
to this day he is a stick on TNT lit from both ends could describe to you in detail the way the sky bends in the moments before it’s about to fall and despite an army of friends who all call him an inspiration he remains a conversation piece between people who can’t understand sometimes becoming drug free has less to do with addiction and more to do with sanity
we weren’t the only kids who grew up this way to this day kids are still being called names the classics were hey stupid hey spaz seems like each school has an arsenal of names getting updated every year and if a kid breaks in a school and no one around chooses to hear do they make a sound? are they just the background noise of a soundtrack stuck on repeat when people say things like kids can be cruel? every school was a big top circus tent and the pecking order went from acrobats to lion tamers from clowns to carnies all of these were miles ahead of who we were we were freaks lobster claw boys and bearded ladies oddities juggling depression and loneliness playing solitaire spin the bottle trying to kiss the wounded parts of ourselves and heal but at night while the others slept we kept walking the tightrope it was practice and yeah some of us fell
but I want to tell them that all of this shit is just debris leftover when we finally decide to smash all the things we thought we used to be and if you can’t see anything beautiful about yourself get a better mirror look a little closer stare a little longer because there’s something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit you built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself you signed it “they were wrong” because maybe you didn’t belong to a group or a click maybe they decided to pick you last for basketball or everything maybe you used to bring bruises and broken teeth to show and tell but never told because how can you hold your ground if everyone around you wants to bury you beneath it you have to believe that they were wrong
they have to be wrong
why else would we still be here? we grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them we stem from a root planted in the belief that we are not what we were called we are not abandoned cars stalled out and sitting empty on a highway and if in some way we are don’t worry we only got out to walk and get gas we are graduating members from the class of fuck off we made it not the faded echoes of voices crying out names will never hurt me
of course they did
but our lives will only ever always continue to be a balancing act that has less to do with pain and more to do with beauty.
The question isn't whether public education can be improved -- rather, it's how can it be improved. But before we implement a solution, we need to be clear about the real problems that are plaguing public education and, more generally, society.
The problem with Public Education is not low test scores. Poverty is the single largest problem that plagues most education systems.
First of all, although Finland can show the United States what equal opportunity looks like, Americans cannot achieve equity without first implementing fundamental changes in their school system. The following three issues require particular attention.
Funding of schools:
Finnish schools are funded based on a formula guaranteeing equal allocation of resources to each school regardless of location or wealth of its community.
Well-being of children:
All children in Finland have, by law, access to childcare, comprehensive health care, and pre-school in their own communities. Every school must have a welfare team to advance child happiness in school.
Education as a human right:
All education from preschool to university is free of charge for anybody living in Finland. This makes higher education affordable and accessible for all.
As long as these conditions don’t exist, the Finnish equality-based model bears little relevance in the United States.
Inequality has an enormous influence on US performance. White and Asian students score just above the average for the European OECD nations in each subject area, but African-American and Hispanic students score so much lower that the national average plummets to the bottom tier. The United States is also among the nations where socioeconomic background most affects student outcomes. This is because of greater income inequality and because the United States spends much more educating affluent children than poor children, with wealthy suburbs often spending twice what central cities do, and three times what poor rural areas can afford.
Talking about American education is like talking about the quality of American air. It depends where you are standing. The rich areas of this country do very, very well in comparison to people in any other part of the globe -- assuming you want to use test scores as your criteria. The reason we have problems on those rankings is mostly because the U.S has more poor children than almost any other industrial country. And in the poorer areas, the kids are in desperate trouble... The issues of inequity of a gap cannot be defined in terms of a gap in test scores, because when you try and correct that by pushing up the test scores in the inner cities, you make their education worse because the tests measure what matters least.
If we are not careful, we risk misinterpreting the data. Instead of waging war on poverty, we end up waging war on teachers and schools. The shadow industries that have been stalking public education for a very long time need the public as an accomplice. Profiteers like Joel Klein and Organization's like Michelle Rhee's Students First are:
promoting an agenda that many educators see as de-legitimizing the teaching profession; making standardized tests a holy grail of assessing students, teachers and schools, allowing private foundations to set the education agenda; and inviting for-profit companies to come into the public sector with programs that are designed primarily to make money for investors, not help kids.
You'll notice that the likes of Michelle Rhee and her minions at Students First never mention poverty.
As long as we continue to misidentify the problem as low scores on standardized tests, and ignore the real problem of poverty, we will continue to apply solutions that actually make the problem worse. It's important to note that the United States has never done well on these international tests so to claim they are some how falling behind in the test score race is a lie.
People who say poverty is no excuse are making excuses about doing nothing about poverty. Children never choose to live in poverty, but we can choose to provide all children with a more equitable education system.
If we want to make school and the world a better place for our children, we need to be better informed. And to get you started, here are but a few people and organizations you should familiarize yourself with in order to stay properly informed:
Diane Ravitch blog - twitter
Yong Zhao blog - twitter
Deborah Meier blog - twitter
Susan Ohanian blog - twitter
Stephen Krashen website - twitter
Alfie Kohn website - twitter
Valerie Strauss blog
Anthony Cody blog - twitter
Pasi Sahlberg blog - twitter
Will Richardson blog - twitter
Phil McRae website - twitter
Carol Burris twitter
Paul Thomas blog - twitter
Gary Stager blog - twitter
Fairtest website - twitter
Schools Matter blog
Alberta Teachers' Association website - twitter
Here's a cool video by John Spencer on Personalized Learning and the kinds of shifts we need to make from our traditional, industrialized model of School.
