“Are you with me now” A J Ryder
“Small size never limited our learning. It deepened it.” San Diego Met graduate
This morning I was at the San Diego Met graduation. There were many students who spoke at graduation and they all delivered a similar message in words that few schools would use. Students talked about advisories and advisors, internships and mentors, exhibitions and community. Our vision was for all schools to be small enough to know students well in all ways. After 20 years, the San Diego Met staff, students and community has been an example of where we need to go. These students are similar to all students in San Diego. They are dealing with the same issues and yet, students in most other schools don’t have the same just in time adult support in and outside of school. It was a great graduation and there’s still lots of work to be done but one thing for sure, this San Diego Met community is showing how each and every student needs a school like this no matter what and it is possible.
Going to graduations always reminds me, I’m still a student in the game. The game of life.
Forgetting and Memory – “We come to terms with the past in order to make sense of the present.” Charan Ranganath
Lots of people are big on remembering but I’ve always been equally as big on forgetting. In his new book, Why We Remember Charan Ranganath deals with among other things, how forgetting interacts with remembering that contributes to our identities. There’s loads of things in the book that affirm how what we do in schools to student’s day in and day out makes even less sense, given that our capacity to remember facts fades very quickly and that our capacity for ‘episodic memory’ is so strong. I’m attaching Forget It an article by Jerome Groopman about this book on the topic of remembering and forgetting. Given that the theme of Big Bang this year is: The Past is Present this book is very timely. It also coincides with yesterday’s unanimous guilty verdict delivered against Trump and why it is so hard to crush false narratives, “Once distortions creep into our shared narratives, they can be incredibly difficult to root out.” And there’s also implications for what A.I. can and cannot do re: making sense of information that are exceptions to the rule causing “catastrophic interference.”
As soon as I got home last week from Winnipeg, I binged the new documentary: STAX: Soulville USA This is partly because Casey and I will be taking our advisories to the Stax Museum but more importantly because this record label was my go-to for many years not only for its music but also for its role in the civil rights movement. There’s things I knew and things I didn’t know. For me, if you watch this documentary, you will be ready for Big Bang in Memphis. Right after our staff meeting on Friday the 7th if anyone wants to join in on a discussion about the 4-part documentary, let me know and I’ll add you to the Zoom list.
Next week, I’m in DC for a symposium at the Brookings Institute on Symposium on Family, School, and Community Engagement.
Be Well!
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