Elliot Washor's TGIF 10.02.2026
Are You With Me Now? — AJ Ryder
"Just Be You" – Met Student
The Educational Accountability Remade (EAR) website was launched this week. Lots of groups from all over the country are involved, led by our friends at Fairtest and the Center for Innovation in Education. Innovation in Education. I’m an advisor to this group and commented on the five papers they put out on Community Trust, Legal Sufficiency, Comparability, Capacity and Evidence of Learning. This is a collective work that has been in progress over the last 30 years. They are asking good questions and trying to influence the mainstream.
Here’s some points off of the mission:
Test-based accountability is past its sell-by date. And it's time to replace it.
More democracy in accountability; more reality in assessment.
Accountability that works for learning that matters.
“Old school,” Dr. Willoughby said. “This is like biology I don’t do.”
I love it when the world catches me by surprise and makes me bite my tongue.
Years ago, when we first started the Met and Big Picture Learning, I used to make a point about why students needed to get out of school and into the real world. I would say that too often, students were working with outdated equipment in school labs and shops, while outside of school—in hospitals, research labs, manufacturing plants, and workplaces—they would encounter the newest technologies.
My example was always something like this: while students in a school lab might still be using pipettes to move DNA samples around, our students would be out there working alongside professionals using the latest equipment.
Well, along comes a story that turns my world back around.
A small group of scientists discovered two new species of a single-celled organism called Paulinella—a scaly, grenade-shaped microbe with sausage-shaped green lumps inside. But what caught my attention wasn't only what they discovered. It was how they discovered it.
They had lost their NSF funding. But instead of giving up on the research, they improvised.
One of their scientific instruments was made by supergluing toothbrush bristles onto colored pencils so they could move microbes around. Another was an old-fashioned mouth pipette. They literally sucked on the end of a tube, like a straw, to separate a rare Paulinella specimen from what was described as “the surrounding stew of life.”
Dr. Burns’s bespoke colored pencil/brush instrument. Credit...John Burns
A toothbrush. A colored pencil. Some superglue. A tube. And human beings who weren't going to let the lack of funding—or the lack of the latest technology—get in the way of their curiosity.
Of course, I love this.
I love it when people refuse to let circumstances get in the way of doing work that matters. I love it when old tools and old ways of knowing lead to new discoveries. And I especially love being reminded that the newest technology isn't always what produces the newest thinking.
It also leaves me wondering something else: Did working with these simpler, more physical tools allow these scientists to see their work differently?
What did their hands notice that a machine might have hidden? What did slowing down allow them to see? What did they learn because they had to improvise, muddle through, and pay closer attention?
Maybe the lesson isn't that I was wrong all those years ago about getting young people out into the real world. Maybe the lesson is that the real world isn't simply where you find the newest tools.
It's where you learn what to do when you don't have them.
On another note about the past becoming the present, Dr. Joe Cruz, who heads philosophy at Williams College, wrote an op-ed about the value of writing that, in an interesting way, actually shortens the distance we usually put between writing and thinking.
He writes, “Most college professors I know believe that students learn to think — critically, creatively, reflectively, tenaciously — only by writing.” Then he asks, “But what if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought?”
That took me right back to the early days of The Met.
Den and I were very clear with advisors and students about exhibitions. Students should not get up and read a speech. They should prepare. They should plan. They should have a few notes. But they should not read their exhibition.
The point was to get up, talk through what you had learned, explain your thinking, and then be challenged on the spot. You had to know your work well enough to have a real conversation about it.
Ahh! From Dr. Cruz’s lips to our ears.
That is what exhibitions have always been about for us.
Later in the article, Cruz takes on AI as well. He argues for allowing students to use AI in writing because writing itself can become too fixed, too finished, too stagnant. The real creativity and collaboration often happen in informal conversation, mostly without protocols, where people think aloud together, change their minds, push one another, and allow new ideas to emerge into the collective.
I loved his position on all of this, including the way he used data to question some of our assumptions about the relationship between writing and thinking.
And all of this feels especially relevant to the work in front of us right now.
Next week, we have our one-hour finalist interview for the $12.1 million LA Futures award, which would support 6,000 paid internships in Los Angeles. Our partners in this work are Linked Learning and the Center for Powerful Schools.
At the same time, we are getting ready for our demonstration site visits in San Diego, preparing for our San Diego County convening, and continuing to develop our skilled trades work connected to the shipyards.
Different places. Different projects. But in many ways, the same idea keeps showing up: learning gets deeper when people have to do something real, talk about what they are doing, defend their thinking, and learn alongside other people.
Carlos - Si tu vois ma mère - Sidney Bechet
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