My Response to Opinion Column from:
The New York Times:

"The Kids Are (Not) All Right"
By
 CHARLES M. BLOW

Published: April 17, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/opinion/blow-the-kids-are-not-all-right.html

These days, we rarely have a parent at home when the kids return from school.

No one is there to encourage them to get their homework done, then get out and exercise before the evening meal, leaving the pods, pads and phones behind. Making sure there's more home-prepared food than confected carbohydrates and fats.

Nor do we instill in our children a desire to learn and set goals in their lives, checking frequently on their progress, helping a little, but expecting the success to come from the child.

We have been sowing failures now for almost 50 years. Many of us have more than our parents ever had, but mostly in extrinsic non-essentials.

On the other hand, we have almost 90 million who have given up on looking for work, our safety nets meeting basic needs. What a Faustian bargain we have made.

Yes, we must take care of our poor and needy. But what are we doing to help the children ultimately help themselves. That's where the blooms will come from.

More and better parenting is part of the answer. More policies we do not need.

In Search of Commonsense: It's Far Less Common than It Once Was...

Having recently celebrated my Golden Anniversary as a teacher/educator in K12 and Higher-Ed, I find myself more puzzled than ever. You'd think experience and training would reduce my puzzlement, but for me, it's only added to the growing list of my unanswered questions.

Lately, I find myself a Popeye (if needed, you youngsters out there can Google it), wondering what to do about the blustering Blutos and irresponsibile Wimpys of the K12 world who still don't get it. 

The Man of Spinach was fond of saying when he had been forced to his limits, "That's alls I can take! I can't stands it no more!" I can't either. 

There is no free lunch, folks You have to earn it. If you want a hamburger tomorrow, you'd better work today.

Likewise, if we want skills we can use tomorrow, we need to learn them today. We are, each of us, responsible for earning our own education. 

I found this inspiring and insightful video courtesy of my Twitter colleagues this morning. Watch it. It's what we want our learners to be able to do instead of taking more standardized adieus about nothing.

If you can teach, you truly know it. No standardized test, no test, period, can ever show what learners know, better than the learners actually showing what they know. Listening helps a learner and so does watching. But nothing beats doing. When you do, you understand. Show us what you know.

Let's be clear: It's not about more testing of non-standard learners. It's not about trying to make students more standard by using useless bits from tests that are standardized. We are all different. Our needs are different. So are our goals.

Lack of learning is not the fault of parents, although they can help. It is not the fault of teachers, but they can assist us too. We all need to work today for what we want tomorrow.

The responsibility to learn falls first in the hands of the learners. Each and everyone of them needs to create, own, follow and report on their own personal learning plan. They need to tell us what they know (who knows better than they do?), what they don't know (repeat the last question) and what help they need to master their learning goals.

Mark Twain said, "Commonsense isn't near as common as most folks think." We've been looking in all the wrong places. If you want commonsense, or even uncommon sense tomorrow, you've got to start working on it today.