April+2013

Monday, April 15, 2013
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Creative people from the Barenaked Ladies to [|Solomon] have lamented at the cyclical nature of all things creative. It seems as though we are always looking for the new, newer, or newest thing, but it seems like the more //avant-garde// we get the more //banal// the result, to trot out a couple of well worn //mots Francaise//. Even though this is an old lament, and one that I perpetuate from time to time, I don't think it is true. New things do happen every day, and even old things are new to those who have never experienced them before. New things only seem old because we compare them to our previous knowledge and experiences. Sometimes the fit is so perfect the new thing just seems like the old thing, simple as that.

The first "new/old" thing that is invading my present is my Professional Learning Community (PLC) at Dakota Collegiate all about[| Ben Levin's] new book [|More High School Graduates]. The book is great- an easy 200 page read about practical steps that real people can take inside schools to retain students who might otherwise fall away. The new here: the system-wide improvements in the Ontario Education system that led to 20,000 more students graduating from high school in 2011 when compared to six years previous, in 2005. This is new, and big, and worth publishing books about. The old here: students need close and careful tracking, and more than anything else students will return to high school day after day all the way through to convocation if they truly sense that someone in the building really cares about them and knows them. High school is all about relationships, not iambic pentameter or isotopes. Students who sense that their teachers know them and care about their well-being are more likely to graduate, and this old finding cuts cross-grain to the factory school, cookie cutter mentality of grouping students in schools of 1000+ teens and graduating them in batches. However, I digress, and start to sound a bit like [|Sir Ken], so on to example number two.

The second "new/old" thing I have done recently is to apply to attend the upcoming [|TEDxManitoba] event on June 6th. Nobody can buy a ticket for this event: the audience of 100 or so is being hand-selected by a panel in order to bring together an interesting bunch of people. That idea is, in itself, rather old. I first read about that when I went through Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Building a party the same way one selects ingredients for a gourmet recipe is an exquisite idea. Blending the ingredients to make a wonderful event is something that Tolstoy understood completely. The new here: bringing people together to appreciate the idea of Play, which is the mono-syllabic and light hearted theme of the TEDxManitoba event. Funny how a simple theme like PLAY is so much easier to connect with than some of the other, rather lofty ideas that TEDxManitoba has pitched in the past. Keep it simple: an "new/old" adage that is working in favour of TEDxManitoba, in my humble opinion. Full disclosure: I truly wonder if ANYONE with decision power at TEDxManitoba will read this post. Hmmm...maybe.

A third example of a "new/old" thing worthy of note concerns a recent Google search on my part. For reasons I do not understand myself I was drawn, on a Saturday morning (and before my coffee), to do a quick Google search on "[|Piaget and Papert]". That I should be thinking about the pedagogical framework for everything technological and computer-ish on a Saturday morning is the subject for yet another post (or a therapy session). However, the result from the search was, at first, rather fruitful. As I expected from my previous knowledge there is a pedagogical connection between Piaget's Constructivism and Papert's Constructionism. This was old news to me on a Saturday morning, and it confirmed my previous understanding of the world. Only then, once to old was confirmed, did the "new" thing happen. I learned an old thing that was new to me. I learned something. Something new to me, that might not be new to you. [|I learned that Seymour Papert knew French]. He spoke the language. Furthermore, during the 1970's he studied with the flesh-and-blood Jean Piaget. I teach teenagers every working day of the week, and I have them log-in to their computers daily. If I ever wonder why I am doing this or about who may have gone part-way down this road before me I only need to go as far as a YouTube video posted from 1976 to realize that I am not alone. Others have traveled this territory before me, and they have left something of a map. (Some of you good readers will recognize the Korzybski reference in that last sentence. Again, old ideas. For those that do not know Korzybski, Google that last sentence to learn something new.) There is new learning for all of us to do. Currently there is a [|push to have more kids code] as a way to enhance STEM learning. Good. Papert was there a long time ago, and from my vantage point in our collective story I think Papert was on the right track.

The trick to making old things new is called learning. Spanish is an old language, but it is new to me. Euler figured out that 2.71828...is the base of the natural logarithms and started calling it "e" in the 1720's. By the way, Happy Birthday Leonhard Euler, and a [|Google doodle] to boot. Another "new/old" from a different Leonard is [|Leonard Cohen's] new tour and recording that he's dubbed "Old Ideas". Another funny "new/old" irony, given the currency of Cohen's songs. To sum up, imagining that everything is old and that there is nothing new is a back-handed way to suggest that you can't (or won't) learn anything any more. Old dogs don't learn new tricks. Those who refuse to learn have a bizarre way of working every new thing into their pre-existing worldview, and it breeds ignorance and inflexibility over time. This is where I need Euler to invent a formula to prove my conjecture I suppose. Since I can't do that, I'll keep looking for the new amidst the old. After all, if you just look around there really is something new (to you) every day. //Buenas Noches//.