Pure Manaʻo

John McCarthy writes about Igniting Student Engagement , all things worthy of being pinned in my Teaching 101 Pinterest, but I just wanted to focus on one of his concepts, "be real," and "Hawaiian-ize" it for our community of students. He talks about connecting skills and content to students' interests and really that is the key. Content shouldn't happen until the teacher has created a true relationship with the student first. Creating a relationship with each student could take two months, and what is wrong with that? Other skills, expectations, content can happen, but by getting to know the students by understanding what family knowledge they come to school with, by humbling yourself, even if you are the teacher with all your degrees, so that you can learn from the students is the highest priority for the new school year and the best way to motivate students. When you can connect your content and skills to the knowledge and skills and interests of the...

Hilo Hotel I'm posting this late, but I wanted to make sure that I answered the question. I'd like to blog about the South Africa lessons I learned too, but it has been a while since I had access to a computer, so I wanted to talk about the question of what difference does place-based education make for our students (Tamara's question)? There are tons of scholarly articles on place-based education , and if you want to read more, I included a link, but on a gut level, do I think that place-based education makes a difference? Yes. From an indigenous point of view, students must know their "mo'o" before they truly know themselves. They need to understand their moʻokūauhau (their geneology), their mo'olelo (the stories of their 'ohana). In the same way, they also need to know the mo'olelo of their  one hānau (the sands of their birth). They should know the name of their mountain, the name of their wind, the name of their rain, the name of their wa...

Deborah Meiers, on her Edweek blog Bridging Differences writes about "test scores and reinforcing the wrong connections." We need more people willing to have a "conversation" on slow change and long-term solutions. Not everything can be fixed quickly. As long as we use test scores as our primary evidence for being poorly educated we reinforce the connection—and the bad teaching to which it leads. If by some course of action we could get everyone's score the same—even by cheating—I’d be for it, so we could get on to discussing the interactions that matter in classrooms and schools: between “I, Thou, and It.” I’ve spent 45 years trying, unsuccessfully, to shift the discussion to schools as sites for learning. Such a “conversation” might not produce economic miracles, but it would over time connect schooling to the kind of learning that can protect both democracy and our economy. Because that’s where schools are (or are not) powerful.

I'd have to recheck with my mom, but I'm pretty sure I was a good kid, even as a teenager. I never got detention except a few times in the hs dorms as a freshman until I figured out the system. I never got suspended and I definitely never had the principal calling my parents from school. In fact, I think I was quite angelic as a teenager, and the pride of my parents' eyes. I played sports, drove responsibly, made curfew, had honor roll grades, and was basically a gift. I'm only saying this because I just got a call from the principal and my son, a junior now, already has detention for his hair color. It's not that he's never had detention for his hair. He's quite a regular at the cafeteria for his hair being too long (bangs over his eyebrows, or touching his collar, or covering his ears, or color, etc.) The difference is that this is the FIRST day of school. OK, so I knew when I got the message from the principal that it would probably be his hair. See, I wo...