And we talked at length about what was the right thing to do? And to some degree, I think almost every school in the US has gone to some sort of distance learning, if not complete distance learning. So I wanted to check in and see how things are going and the reason I wanted to check in today over the course of this week, anecdotally, I have heard multiple stories about parents just learning that their Straight A student has not handed in a single thing yet
Greg Dickson
@ElasticBD · 4:50
My son was that he learned how he learns. I think I succeeded in that it was very much was not curriculum based. It was a curriculum failure. But one thing I think that was missing, that if I was to share with anybody now that asked is work on their mindset, work on their self image and self esteem, help them get clear about what they want to experience, because if they're not self driven, they won't be self learning, at least in my experience
Okay. A few caveats up front. I do not have any children. I do not have any nieces or nephews either. I have taught adults for a few years, but that was a long time ago. Anyway, I think think a few things. And that is that the education system and Greg sort of touched on this. It's designed for standardized testing, not necessarily to learn. It's designed for the industrial age. When we needed to pop out automatons
phil spade
@Phil · 0:27
Mainly human. I think the link has changed content. When I pull that up, I'm seeing a headline about years of research help for a speedy COVID recovery. And I'm not. I don't think that's what the story you meant to post to. So if it is, let me know if it isn't. I just wanted to make that aware to you
phil spade
@Phil · 3:43
And it's just some people are handling the shift and others aren't and really getting to the why, I think is what I'm wondering. But you're right. There has to be that shift. And I think about the accountability. Now the student shoulders a lot of that responsibility in making that shift
Listening to you, Phil, makes me wonder. It's almost as if students are being given a new level of independence that they haven't really experienced before, because there's usually a lot of structure. Right? And so then, like that kind of independence, independence they don't start to experience until the latter years of high school or sometimes afterward
Greg Dickson
@ElasticBD · 4:43
The teacher heard of that, and the teacher actually gave her marks, brought up her marks so she could actually probably have passed because of the effort she put into drawing the character. And this is a twelve year old girl drawing the character out characteristics kind of profiling the character. The teacher actually gave her marks for it. So absolutely, learning objectives have to change. There's no question in this remote learning environment you mentioned as well about not being able to handle the freedom
Greg Dickson
@ElasticBD · 3:48
There was no contingency plan in education for this kind of stuff. Zero. I'm pretty certain there's no contingency plan for schools not operating for having to do remote learning. And further to that, we've got remote working, remote learning. We're going to have remote everything. We're going to have remote play dates. I bet you they're happy already. Remote play. There's going to be remote parties. We all did it. A bunch of people did it at Thanksgiving
Greg Dickson
@ElasticBD · 3:41
I call it conversational leadership. It's something I teach business owners, and it'd be nice to teach more educators this, but there's an efficacy and an ethical issue. I believe that the type of thing, the type of intervention conversational interventions that I'm talking about would not likely be officially endorsed and approved by the educational governing bodies because I would think that they would expect post secondary students, especially probably high school junior high school students, to be more self directed
I can understand why some people would think it's not necessarily a good way to spend their time. That said, at one time, one of my former in laws worked in the funeral industry as well as doing annual education for members within that industry on the topic of grief. And they did work with the provincial health system and a few other entities to work on pandemic planning
Greg Dickson
@ElasticBD · 3:56
And who knows whether that knowledge base was lost or whether. But you make some great points. I guess the other thing that I was going to clarify is that you make your point about are there thought leaders in government and politics? Probably not. They're pretty rare. I guess my hope is to call them out. I think ultimately the responsibility for thought leadership lies with each and every one of us as individuals
phil spade
@Phil · 1:46
And I just saw this is kind of a trend that was creeping up, and it's not surprising that this is happening, but it's a little troubling. I'm going to look into this article. I'm going to read this, and I really appreciate you sending definitely something that I think is concerning and something we can strive to make better. So thank you very much for sending this