Elizabeth's Fish Boxes

This week I want to show you something my daughter, Elizabeth, came up with for Valentine’s Day. I think these are amazing, but then, I’m her papa. You’ll have to judge for yourselves. Just as there is a family resemblance, it would seem there might also be artistic resemblances in families. She admits to being inspired by the St. Nicholas Boxes that I made while she was growing up.

She has gone into much more detail and has made use of some pretty fancy computer programs to refine her work. She designed them, did the art work, experimented a bit and then had the materials printed up. She says the boxes take about 15 minutes to assemble and then fill with her treats. These boxes she then gave away to her friends and is saving the ones she made for our family when we next see her.

You can see that she used the fish theme and the Valentine’s Day charm and wit she has printed on the boxes reflect the aspects of a Valentine’s Day card. I really like what she did with the fish on the lid. She had them printed on plastic and had to cut each one of them out and glue them down.

Anyway, I am enchanted by her ability, very proud of her creativity, and I thought I’d share these with you.

Okey Takes a Bride

Happy Valentine's Day!

Reflections on e2020 essay writing

Because I was speaking off-the-cuff in the video, there are a few things I should explain about the high school where I work. While it is a kind of a cyber school, it would be better to call it more of a hybrid between a high school and a cyber school. I like this combination and I feel it has very real possibilities for the future of education. Certainly it is very effective for our students, traditionally called alternative education students. Our school is based on E2020 which is an online program that offers a great many classes for high school students. Up until now it has been used by traditional high schools as a credit recovery program for students who fall behind, or has been run as a program for a handful of students in a room or wing of a traditional high school for various needs.

Our program is the first, perhaps only, program to build an entire high school around e2020 course work. The result has been something very unique. Imagine a school where there are no text books, no paper, no photocopying, and no classrooms. Imagine never having to pace herds of students to a chronological curriculum that must be followed in lock-step order. Imagine students working at their own pace at whatever subject they want, when they want to. Imagine going to a school where students never have to run from biology class to English class on a set daily schedule! Imagine a school where every student gets individual attention.

As a student, I was bad at math—especially algebra. I quickly fell behind my classmates and could never catch up. I failed algebra because I simply couldn’t go at the same speed as my fellow students. But what If I could have gone at my own pace? What if, when I struggled with something, a teacher could come and talk to me, see my specific need, and sit down a while and just work with me on one concept till I understood it. What if that teacher wasn’t in the middle of a class and not ‘sacrificing the needs of the many’ because he wasn’t exactly in a classroom following the tyranny of a chronological curriculum for that day? I think I might have had success.

That imaginary school is my school. To be fair, e2020 isn’t perfect. It is still a struggle to get our students to really do all of the work they are supposed to do, and clever students can find innumerable ways to subvert the program. But we have tweaked things over the last few years to improve the quality of the program, and done our best to ensure that the students learn. And that is the most important thing to note about this program: it is well-staffed with people who care about quality and about the students we take in. We do our best to make sure that e2020 works for our needs, not the needs of e2020.

Here’s how it works: we have five labs that are overseen by lab assistants who keep watch over the students to help keep them on task and assist them with some of the problems the students may face. We also have four certified teachers in the area of Math, Science, Social Studies and English. We have between 180 to 200 students enrolled with about 125 students on a daily basis. We have a fantastic principal who is a team builder; a site supervisor, an academic counselor, a school nurse, a social worker and a special education worker.

Students sit at their computers and work on the course work of their choosing and are on task most of the time (a fact that actually surprised me. I had expected them to be constantly distracted by gizmos on the computers). If a student needs to see a teacher, they sign up for one at the lab instructor’s desk. We have a Reserve-a-Teacher Google doc at all the teacher stations and at each lab. Teachers check this all day long and go from lab to lab helping students when they need it. In the video, I have covered part of what I do. Essays are unique to the English courses. I am the only teacher in the school who actually does some grading. The e2020 program does all the rest based on multiple choice quizzes and test questions.

We have several in-school activities that help the students to get away from their computers for a while. Some of these are run by community groups and volunteers. A sewing class, choir, and several support and talk groups work with our students and there are a few other activities they may be involved in. A PE teacher comes over from the high school in the afternoons for those students who need a PE credit, Tom Parker, our Social Studies teacher likes to show a content related movie on Fridays. The point here is that we try to get the students to take breaks from the tedium of on-line work, refresh their brains and have some participation in school life.

Finally I want underscore the importance of the need to make a human connection between staff and student. Years ago, when I imagined a cyber school, I was very fearful of losing the need for a student-teacher relationship. I was fearful that the human and social connections I had in a traditional classroom would be lost as students worked in some kind of cyberspace virtual reality. I can see now that that isn’t the direction this will take. At our school, the teacher-student relationship is much better than ever. (Keep in mind I am talking from my perspective of alternative education.) I no longer have to manage a classroom, trying to protect the students who want to learn from the students who cause trouble. I don’t have thirty students in a classroom whose individual needs are impossible to met. I meet one on one with a student who needs me. I see their face. I see their need. I don’t have to worry about rushing. I can spend twenty minutes going over their essay, if I need to. This happens because essays come when they come. I don’t get scores of them thrown on my desk on a due date. I may grade between six to ten essays a day. I enjoy sitting next to the student and helping them, sometimes just talking to them about things that have happened to them. The essays make me consider their world; I take and interest in them and they respond to that. And generally the essays get a little longer, and a little better as they go—even from students who hated writing them when we first sat down to work on one.