Hamilton International Scholars Program (HISP)

Last Thursday, Dr. Alston wrote Education Matters: Hamilton International Scholars Program (Proposal)

At the next Hamilton Board of Education meeting, March 10, 2016, I will present a proposal for the Hamilton Central School District to host tuition paying students from across the world. The title of this program is the Hamilton International Scholars Program (HISP). The Board of Education will seek input concerning HISP. ... The meeting will be held in the auditorium of the Hamilton Central School and begin at 6 PM...

And he says that the "model we are proposing" is seen at Great Work Stories: Newcomb School - YouTube

Published on Aug 28, 2013
How do you expand a shrinking public school in the middle of nowhere? When Skip Hults became superintendent of Newcomb Central School in the heart of Adirondack Park, he inherited a tradition of excellence, a talented faculty, a supportive community, and 55 kids to fill 350 seats. It was a case of grow or die. But how do you grow a school?

Yesterday Radio Free Hamilton reported Dr. Alston's announcement at HCS considers plan to attract foreign students Thursday, again with the August 2013 video. Hults started his program in 2006; it's still going on. It happens that in December 2013, I wrote about this as a possibility for HCS at HamiltonCentralOptions: International Students

No single proposal will solve any district's problems; we're looking for proposals which have helped other districts with low enrollment, both in and out of New York State. One is quite simple: it turns out that students from a variety of nations would like to spend a year or two of high school in the United States...

and among other links, I gave Rural Leader Buoys School With Foreign Students - Education Week

Recruiting tuition-paying international students has saved the school by bolstering its finances and population, and it's changed its culture by exposing Newcomb students to diverse heritages and languages. It's also redefined the meaning of "family" to the many residents who have hosted visiting international students.
"I believe this has the potential to become a rural norm," Hults says. "It's a win-win."

A few days later I wrote HamiltonCentralOptions: Appealing to International Students

I posted on the possibility that appealing to international students could have financial, academic, and cultural benefits for the school (and quite possibly for schools nearby, as one case where we might share benefits as well as costs). I'd like to say a little more about that.
One interesting question: why would students from China want to come to American schools?...

The following month I reported on a meeting where it was discussed, at HamiltonCentralOptions: 2014-15 Budget Process --- Join In!

Astrid brought this up at the meeting and Diana replied that HCS did indeed go through the "accreditation" process with Homeland Security so we are "SEVIS-certified"; indeed we are on page 108 of last June's official list at DHS and we can accept foreign students with "F" visas, although not "M" visas. See ...
And Clinton High School went through this in 2004 but may have dropped it, their website doesn't mention it....

That April, after another meeting, I wrote HamiltonCentralOptions: Pretty Good News from April 8 "Community Leaders/Fiscal" Meeting

Astonishingly, this could happen next year and could add another $70K--$100K to the budget. (The tuition may be less than the average cost of educating an HCS student, but is far more than the marginal cost; it's mostly "profit".) ...

Update: notes from other attendees: Susan Marafino adds

I mentioned that [Carolyn Hsu] would be a good person to be involved with the potential exchange student program...

All that is from late 2013 and early 2014, when Newcomb was in the news. There had of course been earlier reports and videos, including this Newcom February 2010 "welcome" video in Russian, showing a bit about how hard they were trying: A Newcomb Welcome.mpg - YouTube

A video introducing the Newcomb Central School community to our friends from Russia....

Then there was the Channel One report in 2011: Channel One News: Newcomb High School - YouTube

Oct 26, 2011
This New York school welcomes int'l students that enhance education.

Nowadays, the Newcomb School top page links to a USA Today story from the same period (February 2014): Public schools recruiting international high schoolers

Perhaps more significant for Newcomb: Students like Ipek have attracted more local kids, drawn by the prospect of a more comprehensive, global education. As a result, the school has doubled in size since 2007 to 109 students. Only 18 of those are international — the rest are local students who heard about the program and moved into the district to be part of it. They also were attracted by a partnership with local colleges that helps them earn credits before they graduate.

That partnership aspect continues today: Paul Smith's, Newcomb team up | Paul Smith's College

Paul Smith's College is partnering with Newcomb Central School this fall on a new advanced studies program....

Of course HCS does have rather an advantage in the local-colleges department.

Share & Learn; iPad Usage Research

Science Daily reports on literacy testing of young technology users at Kindergartners who shared iPads in class scored higher on achievement tests -- ScienceDaily

a natural experiment where classrooms in one school had 1:1 iPads; classrooms in a second school had 23 iPads to share, where kids primarily used them in pairs; and classrooms in a third school had no iPads. She looked at the effect that using 1:1 iPads for one academic year (9 months), compared to the other two conditions, had on student literacy (as measured by the STAR Early Literacy Assessment).

Results showed that students in shared iPad classrooms significantly outscored their peers in 1:1 and non-iPad classrooms on the spring achievement test, even after controlling for baseline scores and student demographics. Blackwell found that shared iPad students scored approximately 30 points higher than 1:1 iPad students and non-iPad users.

Sometimes the best teacher is another kid -- and not necessarily an older kid, though it might be. I am reminded of some of what Sugata Mitra said in his TED talk at The child-driven education

In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching....

Yes, you do need grown-ups sometimes (that's why Mitra's later work has been on his plan to School in the Cloud with the "Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) toolkit". Mitra wants to involve professional educators as much as possible...but his most dramatic successes have been with kids together with raw materials, sometimes encouraged by a "granny" who may or may not be physically present and who may or may not be professional at all. I think we need more experiments on "self-supervised" sharing. (With a grown-up in the background. Usually.)

International Students

No single proposal will solve any district's problems; we're looking for proposals which have helped other districts with low enrollment, both in and out of New York State. One is quite simple: it turns out that students from a variety of nations would like to spend a year or two of high school in the United States. As the New York State School Boards Association (nyssba.org) put it a a couple of years ago, FRN12 Issue Brief: F-1 Visa (pdf)

There exists a serious educational issue for small rural schools in New York State. Currently, many such schools face the prospect of closing due to declining enrollment and insufficient state aid. The resulting impact on their communities would be devastating, given the vital nature of these schools as leading employers, as well as community, cultural and emergency centers. Just as importantly, many of these schools have no viable options for educating their children should their schools close. Geography makes transportation to surrounding districts too burdensome on small children.
One exciting way to keep these essential small schools in operation is to allow international students to spend their secondary education as students at these schools. There is an abundance of international students willing to pay tuition, which avoids any cost to local or state taxpayers. The cultural advantages to New York State students are significant as well...

That was written in support of Schumer's proposed "F-1 Visa" reform bill, which would have made it easier for the students to stay longer, and I believe that bill died in committee; not sure. Even so, the system works well enough to help a great many international students attend quite a few U.S. schools. Let's start in rural South Dakota, Spring 2012: Public schools sell empty classroom seats abroad | Reuters

Superintendent Grant Vander Vorst has an improbable plan to save his little school on the prairie - by turning it into a magnet for wealthy foreign students. This year, 11 students from China, Thailand, Germany and elsewhere account for nearly 20% of high school enrollment, bringing cash and a welcome splash of diversity to an isolated patch of the Great Plains.
Grant-Deuel is not alone. Across the United States, public high schools in struggling small towns are putting their empty classroom seats up for sale.
In Sharpsville, Pennsylvania, and Lake Placid, New York, in Lavaca, Arkansas, and Millinocket, Maine, administrators are aggressively recruiting international students.
They're wooing well-off families in China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and dozens of other countries, seeking teenagers who speak decent English, have a sense of adventure - and are willing to pay as much as $30,000 for a year in an American public school.
The end goal for foreign students: Admission to a U.S. college.

As the Huffington Post put it in 2011: Public Schools Recruit Tuition-Paying International Students To Boost Revenue

It's a growing trend: Other schools are doing the same in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, Virginia and Washington, according to a student recruitment agency in San Francisco.
Next fall, Millinocket Superintendent Ken Smith hopes to have at least 60 Chinese students – each paying $13,000 in tuition and another $11,000 for room and board – at Stearns High School. Stearns at one time had close to 700 high school students, but enrollment has fallen over the years to under 200 this year.
The first-year batch is now being signed up, Smith said, with plans for more international students in the years ahead. Local students will benefit by being exposed to those from abroad, and Chinese students will gain from being immersed in the local culture, he said.
When Smith went on a recruiting trip to the cities of Shanghai, Beijing and Fuzhou last fall, students there had never heard of Maine. But they knew they wanted to come to America to enhance their chances of going to an American college or university.
"They didn't know where Maine was, but they knew where Harvard was," Smith said. "They all want to go to Harvard."

From Education Week last February, we see tiny Newcomb, NY: Education Week: Rural Leader Buoys School With Foreign Students

In its high school grades, the school has about 40 students; 18 are from other countries. That's a significant number, given that the town has only about 200 families.
"We've gotten to the point where we're turning students away," Hults says.
Over the years, Hults has learned the differences between various types of visas, and he says the type of visa the district now requires enables it to receive tuition and accept host-family living expenses.
Newcomb has earned a good reputation among international students, and it sells itself with its location in the heart of a 6-million-acre park and its strong academics, Hults says.
Hults also has established relationships with more than 10 agencies that help find foreign students who want to come to his district.
The district requires students to have a conversational level of English-speaking proficiency to ensure they can succeed. Any lesser ability would negatively affect the classroom experience for local students, Hults says.
"If it weren't benefiting our students, I wouldn't do this program," Hults explains. "It truly does benefit our students. It has opened their eyes. It has given them broad exposure to the world, and for the kids who come here, they remain a part of our community. I think they will forever."

I think it's important to emphasize that kind of thing, rather than just the federal certification requirement and the agencies to "recruit" foreign students and the opportunity for our Superintendent to travel to China or Germany or wherever. International Student Program Adds Zest to School Life | Adirondack Foundation

Each international student pays tuition, which covers the costs of academics, including English-as-a-Second-Language support. Each lives with a local family that has at least one child at Keene Central School. A small stipend from the program fee helps the host family with expenses.
The impact that this program is having on this school of 160 students, K-12, is profound. High school students speak of the value of having a different perspective in the classroom, especially classes like American History and Government. “I wish we had this program sooner,” said one senior.

Actually it might be a very good thing if M-ECS, MCS, and SVCS had such programs too, sharing costs, appealing to different though overlapping groups of international students, and so forth. Mainly, though, it seems to me that Colgate's proximity is likely to make this work out well, not only because of the option of taking a Colgate course or two as a junior or senior, but because some Colgate students studying country X or its language might benefit from interacting with kids from that country, and the benefit might be mutual. I'm imagining a grant application to pay some such students for practical and emotional support...


Or then again, maybe not. But we should be considering it.

Presentation by Diana Bowers, Superintendent of HCS, at Colgate University

Diana Bowers, Superintendent of HCS, gave a talk entitled "On the Potential Merger Between HCS and Morrisville-Eaton," held at Colgate University on 11/13.  This summary of the talk and Q&A was written by Heather Roller and edited by Astrid Helfant. If you attended this meeting as well, please post comments or additions.

Dr. Bowers used her same power point slides as in last week's PTO meeting. Of note was that Dr. Bowers brought up several points of contention from that community meeting, without any prodding from yesterday's Colgate University audience. 

For example: Dr. Bowers volunteered that sometimes state incentive money (used to promote mergers) came with increased GEA (Gap Elimination Adjustment - whereby the state takes back school aid in order to balance the state budget). What this means is that the state might give money with one hand while taking it away with the other.  She provided the example of a recent merger between the Canisteo and Greenwood Central School Districts in Steuben County, New York, in which the state gave incentive money but then required a higher GEA.

Also, Dr. Bowers acknowledged that the location of the high school was the major bone of contention during the Community Advisory Committee meetings between Hamilton and Morrisville. And although she continued to stress that the short timeline for the newly merged board would mean that they would surely stick to the recommended school configurations (the "high school will be here"), Dr. Bowers did say that it might only be kept that way for the first year or so.  Several members of the audience hammered this point home -- that it would be up to the new board, yet to be elected, with a possible Morrisville majority.  One person said he was doubtful that future boards (a few years down the line) would preserve the vision of the original districts; they might only look for short-term gains, and someone would have to lose out:  "If we were the bigger district, this would be a much more optimistic moment."  Dr. Bowers then acknowledged that elementary schools in Earlville and Oriskany Falls have closed, despite original plans to keep them open.  (For a review of recent merger outcomes in the state, see https://sites.google.com/site/hamiltoncentraloptions/home/school-mergers-in-ny-state)

The issue of transportation came up mostly in the Q&A.  One person put it this way: we would be transferring our money from one pot (teachers/staff) to another pot (transportation), and that is something she does not support -- longer times on buses, more pollution, etc.

The issue of teacher layoffs also came up.  Dr. Bowers indicated that the SES Study Team's suggestions for reducing staff would not be the ones she would follow, if she were superintendent. There was a lot of talk about what she would do if she became the superintendent of the new district. It was pointed out that this was uncertain. Dr. Bowers tried to be reassuring by stating that the current superintendent at MECS shares a similar philosophy when it comes to which teacher positions should be cut and which programs should be expanded once districts are merged.  She noted that the three men who conducted the SES study would not be applying for the new superintendent position of the merged school district! As evident from their report, these retired superintendents acted like businessmen, not like educators with the best in mind for our students.

Another issue had to do with the data on the slides, which mainly covered the bleak years of 2006-2010.  A good question was raised as to whether we are "riding out a cycle here," and whether things are going to improve (or already have improved, but we just don't have the data yet).

Dr. Bowers mentioned past conversations with Colgate administrators (Joanne Borfitz, David Hale, Jeff Herbst) about how Colgate could help support the school district. One way in which Colgate has been able to support is through the additional $300,000 (on top of its yearly contribution of $200,000), which is being used to pay off debt. This amount was strategic in the sense that once Colgate completes its 3-year commitment to this extra amount, this debt will have been paid off and HCS won't necessarily notice the subsequent reduction in Colgate's support back down to $200,000 per year. 

In general, however, Dr. Bowers seemed pessimistic about audience proposals for more local partnerships in lieu of the merger as "we've been doing out-of-the-box thinking for the past 5 years."  One such proposal was for HCS to offer fewer than its current 9 AP classes as students could simply take these at Colgate. Dr. Bowers countered this with the fact that the school had changed its schedule a few years back so as to enable high school students to take more Colgate classes. However, she had received feedback from HCS students who said that they prefer to take such advanced classes in house. Astrid Helfant argued in favor of maintaining AP classes at the high school, as the students get an incredible amount of guidance from their teacher due to the daily classes and lab sessions every other day (in the case of AP science classes) as opposed to the 14-week semester at Colgate during which classes meet 2-3 times per week with a once per week lab session for science.

Another audience member noted the "nightmare scenario" of not getting the promised incentive money and having lost control over school:  "It's so surprising that you would be doing this on the grounds of state promises," he said, that you acknowledge have been broken in the past.  Dr. Bowers' response, in a nutshell, was that she does not want us to blame her later for not at least considering the merger option, despite these reasonable concerns.  And if we vote the merger down on Dec. 10th, we should still engage in a conversation about how to deal with HCS's very real financial constraints.

Related to this was the issue of dependence on state aid.  Dr. Bowers acknowledged that we would be far more dependent on state aid as a merged district.  She thought that HCS debt was "about the same" as Morrisville's; several audience members tried to set the record straight on this, but we didn't come up with the actual numbers (that Morrisville has about 70% more school debt than we do) until she had moved on to other topics.

Students Against the Merger

Radio Free Hamilton presents news on the proposed Merger: Students Present Petition Opposing It

Two HCS girls -- fifth grader Ava Robertson and sixth grader Molly Stahl -- last week presented the Board of Education with a petition bearing the signatures of 56 of their classmates. The kids added their names to the list of people opposed to the two districts becoming one.
Here's why:

• Class size
• Transportation
• Familiarity of schools.

Note, by the way, that in a merged school (if it did merge according to the plan) this collaboration probably wouldn't happen -- it would certainly be harder. That's because the sixth grader would be physically going each day to a different school, and spending a chunk of her non-school time on the bus between. One advantage HCS has always had is the chance for older and younger kids to interact, and to develop habits of interaction that last through childhood. The proposed merger plan wouldn't destroy all of this, but would certainly hinder it.
Long-term readers may remember that I've suggested a possible later "merger" plan, if enrolment declines far enough: a plan in which Andrews Elementary would be closed and sold, Morrisville & Eaton elementary and middle students would go a few miles north to the current main building, but at least their last few grades would come to Hamilton, possibly the whole high school. That would leave Hamilton's inter-grade interactions intact; Morrisville already gave them up.
Or then again, that might not work either.

Networks of Imagination

Ken Bausch mentioned this last December; The Global One-Room Schoolhouse: John Seely Brown | DMLcentral

In this video, which contains the highlights of his “Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner” keynote at the 2012 Digital Media and Learning conference in San Francisco, he introduces the fascinating notion of “a global one-room schoolhouse through networks of imagination.”

It seems to me that this is quite compatible with Sal Khan's vision (and book) that I've mentioned a few times, but it's an interestingly different point of view. I'm inclined to see it as a mix of Khan with some of Yong Zhao's World Class Learners, but that oversimplifies as usual. I do see him as detecting and approving a trend towards tools like Scoot & Doodle | Get Creative Together, which has just received fairly major support from Pearson among others.

Google+ Hangout App Scoot & Doodle Raises $2.25M Seed, From Valley Angels & Pearson, To Get More Kids Learning Through Play | TechCrunch

Well, maybe not just kids, or just play; I'll add some emphasis in a quote from the GeekDad report on Scoot & Doodle: Makes Google Hangouts a Collaborative Playspace | GeekDad | Wired.com

essentially, it is an app that works with Google+Hangouts and lets you type, draw and engage in a visual and tactile way – as well as through video and voice. In my use of it I have found it to be really stable and offer a fluid and worthwhile experience whether with my kids or with business colleagues. Like many startups there appears to be more potential applications than you can imagine; however, kudos for both the Scoot & Doodle team and Pearson for seeing the potential of this in the education and learning space.

And I certainly approve of the idea that education works off study groups that fit in a Google+ Hangout. That works.

Or then again, maybe not.

Incentives v. Grading

Academic grading is usually not questioned; it's the way we do things. When it is questioned, there are two common answers: grades as credentials for future work, and grades as incentives. A psychology professor (best known for self-experimentation) thinks about the way we depend on others in our groups to develop whatever expertise we lack, and asks What Happens If I Stop Grading?

My theory of human evolution says we changed in many ways to facilitate trading. ... The more diverse the expertise within a group, the more members of the group can benefit from trade. Following this logic, mechanisms evolved to increase diversity of expertise among people living in the same place with the same genes. ... The theory implies that there is something inside every student that pushes them toward expertise — they want to learn — but they are being pushed in many different directions — what they want to learn varies greatly. If you accommodate the latter (diversity in what students want to learn), you can take advantage of the former (an inner drive to learn).
... Human nature: People who are the same want to be different. Formal education: People who are different should be the same. At Berkeley, most professors appeared to have little idea of the diversity of their students. (At least I didn’t, until I gave assignments that revealed it.) Almost all classes treated all students in a class the same: same lectures, same assignments, same tests, same grading scheme. ... The more freedom I gave them, the more they learned. ...
The more freedom I gave my students, the more difficult it became to grade them.... I had an idea: no grading. Maybe other sources of motivation, would be enough.
... The students’s work was the highest quality I have ever seen...
I think several things caused students to learn a lot:

• 1. The material was interesting.
• 2. To some extent — far more than in other classes — they could choose what they wanted to learn, especially during the second half of the class.
• 3. Peer pressure. They wanted to look good in front of their peers. It would have been embarrassing to not be able to do a presentation when called upon.
• 4. The instinct of workmanship. Thorstein Veblen wrote a book called The Instinct of Workmanship. People inherently want to do a good job, said Veblen. I agree.
• 5. Doing is fun.

What did I learn? I learned that I can stop grading and things get much better, not worse. I learned that motivations other than grades are plenty powerful.

I'm inclined to focus on 3, peer pressure, but I'm not going to deny the value of the others. And my own experience tends to support his; I went to the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe)

While traditional (A through F) grades are given, the culture of the school de-emphasizes their importance and grades are released only at the request of the student.

It seemed to me that we were working harder than any of the conventional classes I'd been in, or those I taught later, but I learned my grades when I needed them for graduate-school applications -- in effect, as credentials of my ability to do well with an academic workload. Incentives? We had plenty. I suspect that an online experience with student group structure, one which let peer pressure work (to a schedule), would also be fine in this particular regard.


Or then again, maybe not.

update: Of course K-12 is different in many ways, and some may think that younger-than-college kids are immune to peer pressure, don't feel any urge to please the teacher (or other adults), don't think "doing is fun", don't want to learn interesting stuff for its own sake... Hmm. Well, experiences vary.

Social Network and GPA

Science Daily reports that GPA may be contagious in high-school social networks

The researchers then mapped how students performed in school relative to their peer group, and correlated their social network with the change of their academic performance over time.
They found that students' whose friends were performing better academically were more likely to improve their own scores over time. The opposite effect was also seen: When their friends' GPA were lower, a given student's GPA was more likely to decrease as well.

Okay, so being exposed to success has a tendency to push you towards success. Sure. Common sense, in a way. More specifically it fits into the general framework of Harris' findings which I hereby oversimplify: peers are more important to kids than parents or teachers. It's an obvious support to all the parents who try to get their kids to disengage from bad influences, I suppose. It's not obvious that it can be used in a conventional school setting to raise academic performance: it tends to pull people towards the mean of some group, which may not be the whole school but each one who is pulled up is presumably exerting some slight downwards influence on the rest.

Still, I think that in the world of the Khan Academy and Salman Khan's Ideal Classroom, there may be a way to use this. Khan doesn't really have a notion of GPA: there are topics you've mastered, and others which you haven't. If each kid sees what his friends (online and offline, just nodes in his social network) have mastered, then he is being exposed to their successes. Accenting the positive, so to speak, is automatic; the negative is what isn't there. I don't know that this could be as simple as I'm now thinking, but it seems that it could help a lot.


(Or then again, maybe not.)

Smartphone education

Alex Tabarrok, co-creator of online Marginal Revolution University, reports on something that offline courses might consider using. New Teaching Tools

Instead of prohibiting smart phones in class, we require them …We then automatically deliver to their device a difficult conceptual question. We then give students a few minutes without discussion to reflect on the question and to indicate their answer on their device.
…Next, our system automatically puts students into groups of 2–5 [the system tells the students which other students to talk with and where to move in the classroom to find their group...

It's easy to think of lots of variations on the idea, but this is a version that does seem to be working. It appeals to me in part because it works via using new tech to facilitate a very very old tech: the study group, and I suspect that this is crucial; the teach-yourself books and teaching machines of decades past might have done much better if they hadn't focused so much on the (already) independent learner.
Or then again, maybe not.

Once Upon a School

 A couple of days ago my exercise-TED was Dave Eggers' wish: Once Upon a School, in which he tells the story of his attempt to start a volunteer tutor service in which his writer friends would be available to students...but the students didn't come, until "826 Valencia" also became the Pirate Supply House. And clever energetic people did clever energetic things, building up a volunteer list of people in the community who would come in for an hour or many hours each month, and it really seemed to help a lot of kids. Now there are a bunch of somewhat similar groups with a variety of themes, and there's onceuponaschool.org which, on its front page, suggests that you sign up by putting in your zip code...Hmmm, I see when I put in the Hamilton Central zipcode I get

We found 18 Opportunities

Volunteering Opportunities within 20 miles of Hamilton, NY 13346, US
Results 1-18 | Sort by: | Search Again
opportunity	location	great for
1. Mentor High School Exchange Students in Sherburne, NY and Surrounding Areas!	Sherburne and Surrounding Areas, NY	55+
2. Run the Exchange Student Program in Eaton, NY or surrounding areas!	Eaton or surrounding areas, NY	55+
3. ...

There are a number of volunteer "opportunities" associated with schools nearby, but it doesn't seem that my own school has signed up with any of the organizations in question. I wonder if a bet is being missed.

"If You Eat, You're In"

The "Edible Landscape" project is one item that might help local schools, businesses, farms, etc; here's a 13 minute TED talk by Pamela Warhurst.

Warhurst sees this as community activism, community art, sustainability, and I guess being a locavore; most of that leaves me feeling "well, okay," but I'm in favor of things that make school "real" in the sense that the grading ultimately comes from something outside, where agriculture certainly qualifies. (So does robotics. Art sometimes yes, sometimes no. Math definitely yes for people like me, but definitely no for many others and I may have been born this way--certainly I saw it that way before heading off to Epsom Chapel Nursery School. (Simple math, anyway -- I never really got a proper grip on category theory.))

Coursera TED talk--Daphne Koller

Lately I watch TED talks on a tablet, a Nexus 7, in the morning while walking quickly up and down stairs; it's 20 minutes of reasonable exercise for body and mind, and all that. This morning I watched That's Stanford CS prof Daphne Koller's talk on Coursera. Of course Coursera is higher education, but the techniques can certainly be applied to K-12.

• she wants to have lectures by the very best lecturers, broken into 8-12 minute conceptual units with students having to answer a question or two at the end of each unit (sounds like KhanAcademy or TED-Ed, so far).
• She wants personalized lectures, at least in providing optional units
• She also wants to have actual course scheduling, with tests and deadlines
• She wants peer grading, which apparently correlates extraordinarily well with teacher grading except that it's faster (22 minutes??), and it scales for huge courses
• She wants students to (usually) form study groups, both virtual and physical

She notes that personalization in this context can in several ways go farther than a physical classroom can offer, and it's not just choice of options; if 2% of your students share a misconception that causes them to get the same two test questions wrong in the same way, then as a classroom lecturer you'll never know, but as a MOOC (massive open online course) lecturer with 100,000 students, you'll see 2,000 students as one point on a graph and you can cause them to be automatically directed to the same extra units.

She also talks about the 2-sigma difference between (A) students who try to learn just from lectures, versus (B) students given individual tutoring. 98% of group B are "above average", if the average is set by looking at A. She thinks that personalized courses can come closer to B than to A.

I don't see anything there that doesn't work for K-12, except that you need to provide more physical supervision/security. (Well, I've known some small kids I would trust alone or even, maybe, in a group, more than some college-age students, but usually you need to provide more physical supervision/security.

Bigger Screens

Since my own image of the School of the Future includes lots of computer screen space (so that kids collaborate with workgroups and tutors who are sitting at the same table, but not in the same state), I'm intrigued by the latest on molybdenum disulphide, a graphene-like (2-dimensional) material with a bandgap so it can be used in circuitry more easily than graphene: One-molecule-thick material has big advantages

Palacios says one potential application of the new material is large-screen displays such as television sets and computer monitors, where a separate transistor controls each pixel of the display. Because the material is just one molecule thick -- unlike the highly purified silicon that is used for conventional transistors and must be millions of atoms thick -- even a very large display would use only an infinitesimal quantity of the raw materials. This could potentially reduce cost and weight and improve energy efficiency.
In the future, it could also enable entirely new kinds of devices. The material could be used, in combination with other 2-D materials, to make light-emitting devices. Instead of producing a point source of light from one bulb, an entire wall could be made to glow, producing softer, less glaring light.

Well, maybe nothing whatever will come of molybdenum disulphide. But new things will happen. The HCS classroom of 2032 should be further from the classroom of 2012 than 2012 is from 1912. Yes, really.