Just the other day I heard it again- “I love to learn.”  Variations on it pepper my recent past, as students love to profess their love of learning to those tasked with teaching them.  Love of learning has become a personal trait of sorts, one that schools try to cultivate in students because it serves them well in school.…

It started innocently enough – the first email to our brand new group of seniors. Really it was just a test to make sure our Google platform was working properly. The email began this way: “Hey Workers…”

There are a couple of things about that choice of words that are worth noting.…

I used to argue with my pre-service teachers about a book I used for many years. C’mon, now, of course it’s important to listen to your students…you really need a whole book about it?

I was thinking about those conversations today as I wandered around our building watching kids work on various projects.…

Our router hasn’t been working the way it was supposed to. We are a paperless school. That is a problem.

But what kind of problem is it?

It’s partly technical: figuring out whether the router has capacity to do what we need it to do, and whether it’s configured correctly. This is mostly beyond our (and our students’) capacity to solve.…

(reflections from week 2 at the SW 9/16/11)

We had an amazing first two weeks at the Sustainability Workshop.  Since communicating complex emotion through written word is not my strength, I’ll give you the math guy equivalent – the first week was something like a triple integral over a Gaussian surface.…

(reflections from the first week at the Sustainability Workshop 9/9/11)

I’m not sure how many times in life we get the opportunity to realize a dream – a big dream.  I can still remember the first time it happened to me as a teacher.  Thirteen years ago my students won the Philadelphia Science Fair.  They were from West Philly – they weren’t supposed to win.  But this win did something strange to us – it gave us the freedom to dream bigger – and so we did.  Together we dreamt of an electric car – a competition vehicle that we could enter in the countries largest green “race”.  It was quite a project and over the course of the year, we worked and struggled to create this road worthy electric car.…

Tuesday was our first day at the Workshop. The weather didn’t exactly cooperate but we got off to a great start. This is largely due to our students, who brought a great attitude and energy to their first day with us.

It is way too early to pretend to have any real handle on how this will all shake out, but it was both fun and fascinating to listen to (and participate in) our initial conversations.…

This is a story of two dinners.

One evening about nine years ago, Simon, Mike, Aiden and I met up at a Vietnamese restaurant in Chinatown. We’d become friends over the previous five years, working in various capacities at West Philly High. Somewhere in the midst of swapping gossip, storytelling, and generally giving each other a hard time the conversation turned more idealistic, driven by a simple question: if we could start with a totally clean slate and build from the ground up, what would high school look like?…