Elliot Washor's TGIF 08.15.2024

Are you with me now? A. J. Ryder

I got back from Kaua’i on Tuesday evening but not before stopping in at Namahana to say my alohas to all. There is a nice calmness to a school that is more outside than inside and what a difference that can make to everyone’s well-being. One of the last people I saw was Kumo/Advisor Makaela. Prior to working with middle schoolers, Makaela did ecotourism in Indonesia where she had VERY close encounters with really big sharks. Her last comment to me was like sharks, middle schoolers are misunderstood. You gotta love it. Her advisory is great and I was glad to be part of yet another first week at a BPL school, this time Namahana.

When I got home, one of my first meetings was with Eunice and once again she got me thinking about Ashé and Equity Fellows in different ways. After our talk, I was noodling with the notion of Fellows coming from the crafts and sciences who are educators in more informal learning environments and third spaces. Then sure enough, a story from Craftsman’s Magazine appears about,,,,

Freshly Unlocked: Black Artists Are Reshaping How We Think About American Ceramics

“Contemporary ceramicists are continuing a long legacy of Black Americans working in clay. As they find new ways to tell their stories, the art world is finally catching up.”  Kismet!

By Wednesday, I was in back-to-back zooms. An especially notable one was with Babak Movahed from Learner Studio about the Grammar of Learning Draft that is being passed around for comments. We had a great talk with follow-ups on the horizon. By Thursday, I was on the road again. This time to Los Angeles where I met with a number of former NBA players including Ralph Sampson, Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson about starting BPL schools and programs. They were in LA shooting, All the Smoke. As many of you already know this is an award-winning podcast hosted by Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. This time they were interviewing Ralph Sampson. It was a wild show and I learned a great deal about podcasting from being there that Shameka and I have already discussed for After Dark. BPL Board advisor Gary Reeves arranged meetings with Matt, Stephen and Ralph along with others including Jamie Foxx’s agent. Ralph’s work of creating Agri Hubs for regenerative farming and food distribution in rural Virginia and Napa can easily become B-Unbound sites. We’re in talks.

The currency of school and the coin of the realm

We all have lots to say about what standardized testing has done to students and how it controls what the content and currency of school that is used as a/the criteria of measurement for college and high school admissions but as Seymore Sarason used to say to me: “Just because the baby has a normal body temperature, it doesn’t mean that the baby is not sick.” Our IBPLC work is an antidote to this madness and quite frankly other forms of assessment don’t come close to what we are doing.

“To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” e.e. cummings

The people who think they just won the policy decisions on merit-based admissions to colleges using standardized testing, class rank and GPA’s look like cats that got the cream but what if these cats don’t really have the cream? Here’s a few examples that I feel are more prevalent than how they are presented as unicorns in the news. These two personal stories of young people make the case that even if you excel, the system wants you to play their game in their way. The first from Ireland where then 17 year old Liam Fuller took business calls from major tech companies in his school bathroom and was suspended for doing so. Liam raised $1.4 million in funding for a new business venture and is now living in Paris and left school. Just an aberration? Not the way I look at it. There are way too many examples of students leaving school because they are engaged where schools do not want to engage them in what they are engaged in. What’s a school to do? The other is Hannah Cairo who solved a major math mystery. At 17-years-old, Hannah solved a 40-year-old problem about how functions behave, called the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture. She was not finished with high school when she applied to Ph.D. programs thus by-passing an undergraduate degree but as it turns out all colleges except two wouldn’t accept her because she didn’t have a high school diploma or a college degree. Hannah was accepted by the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins in their doctoral programs. There’s a great deal more to these personal stories that are told in the articles. Turns out their stories fit many of the patterns that are part of our BPL and consequently the IBPLC design as well as research that looks at relationships, interests, meaning and what matters to you. The other issue uncovered is how difficult it is for school systems to do anything but what they normally do. I keep reminding myself that when you go to see the wizard you have to remember to bring Toto to reveal what is behind the curtain.

Next week, I’m in San Diego at meetings with workforce folks and then off to Denver for the same.

Presently reading:

Take it light and be well!