There was one other writing project for which I deserve very little credit but am very proud: my sister’s new book, Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and What it Will Take for a Woman to Win. My love of learning leads to a strong affinity for research and I have often said that the best thing about graduate school was having the full time job of reading interesting and provocative things about the world all day and then writing about them. Well, for a short time last year, it was my job again, as I researched and annotated a global perspective of women in presidential and executive politics. It was fascinating to dive deep into the case studies of “Iron Ladies” like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Angela Merckel, and Michelle Bachelet, as well as less well known politicians like Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir of Iceland and Laura Chinchilla, who recently was elected Costa Rica’s first woman president. The truly interesting stuff in the final product are the myriad insights on American politics and gender. Yes, of course, I’m doubly biased in recommending this book. But, as an avid non-fiction reader with a 21st century attention span, let me just state that, if the place at which many books on my shelves are dog-eared counts as evidence, about 95% percent of the books I read are one-third longer than they need to be. Notes was the rare book that I read cover-to-cover, and seriously…not just because I worked on it. With the midterm elections later this year and 2012 already on the horizon, we have lessons to learn.

And then I thought, what if the Qwitter developer had instead built a Twitter application that helped to solve world hunger? Or helped Twitter users keep their angst in check and redirected them toward taking some type of action?

There’s a good reason that idea popped into my head, and it’s called the Change the Web Challenge. And good news, world! Now there are 35 ideas submitted in that spirit to the project gallery. I’ve been volunteering with Change the Web for the past couple months, helping to spread the word about this innovative concept to take the Social Actions API, get developers to build great things with it, and lower the barrier to people changing the world as part of their everyday Internet use. It has been a lot of fun, and in the process I’ve met the great people behind Social Actions and deepened my own thinking about online activism, learning/behavior change, and civic engagement. Twitter itself is where I first found out about the volunteer opportunity, and the whole experience has helped to make my professional use of that tool more meaningful.

So now, the best part is the voting that has been going on all week, and there’s only 48 hours left! If you have even the slightest interest in social issues, activism, civic engagement, and/or the interweb, you need to check out these brilliant ideas, leave comments for their creators, and vote for your favorites. Read the primer Joe Solomon wrote if you feel pressed for time. Just get moving so your vote can be counted to help the top 20 finalists move on to the judges, who will select three winners to receive cash prizes.






*For the record, I interchangeably say “solve world hunger” or “create world peace” or “cure cancer” — no bias when it comes to which causes people choose to redirect their negative energy.

I was refreshed by Noguera when I tried to listen from the perspective of that particular audience – primarily educators and policymakers who are reimagining school through the lens of global education. It is of massive importance that we don’t reserve global learning as such a precious thing that only the rich kids get to participate in and benefit from it.

So, here they are, with a few of my own reflections in italics:
* 50% of African American males in NYC are unemployed (in what age group, though?)
* anti-immigration sentiment in US means that many teachers are working with students whose parents are treated like fugitives
* most secondary teachers confuse teaching with talking, and are bad teachers because they imitate the worst teachers of all: college professors. Teachers think if they’ve covered it, therefore the kids learned it, not based on what the kids can do (band and shop teachers know this)

* most of what kids learn in school they will forget, except what they continue to use
* what matters most is how well you have learned to learn and solve problems and process information; need to prepare students for the creativity and innovation sector of the economy
* how can education cultivate imagination?
* soft bigotry of low expectations: Bush is right that this is a problem with schools (even if he doesn’t know what it means)
* the education of poor children is approached based on what will be on the test (art and music aren’t integral to learning for ‘those kids”)
* we”ve forgotten that Dewey was writing about the whole child 100 years ago; Gardner: through the 1960s, most kindergarten teachers knew how to play the piano and had one in the classroom
* why do kids say school is boring? Because it is.
* research shows that interactive learning is good for retention of knowledge. It is traditions and low expectations that keep us from changing pedagogy.
* suburban schools are more diverse than urban schools, but are segregated from within
* the gatekeepers deny “low expectation” kids opportunities for rigorous learning
* algebra as predictor for going to college
* all the countries that are “ahead of us” in international test scores do things we don’t do: they provide universal access to health care (“you can’t teach kids to read if they can’t see”), to preschool
* Montessori schools were founded for poor children in Italy but are usually exclusive to affluent children in the US
* school system lacks a sense of trust in children
* schools and teaching still assume that intelligence is innate and the function of schools is to sort and rate based on intelligence — we need a new paradigm that cultivates all kinds of talent in all children. Need to reorganize our schools and our expectations.
* need to honestly ask how strong a predictor race and socioeconomic status are on academic success (in the current paradigm)?
* what happens to kids who have no adult advocates in schools? The kids who don’t know they have rights?
* confidence + competence = resilience. kids need the chance to actually get good at things (this means we have to give them space to be bad at things at first, and then get better)
* discipline needs to mean cultivating character, not weeding out bad kids (because now “discipline and punish” happens due to unmet needs and we don’t acknowledge that)
* ASCD Commission for the Whole Child (“ASCD”…can never remember what that stands for”) — seems like a common sense idea, but “common sense isn’t all that common”
* how do we challenge the conventional wisdom of the old paradigm?
* PS 138 in the Bronx has the only museum of the history of the Bronx — striking that historical artifacts are within reach of children who could destroy them, but students have pride and ownership over the museum so it would never occur to them to do anything but respect it — school culture is one of respect and leadership
* if you let race and class be predictors of student success, that is the school’s problem, not the kids”.
* for most gifted children in urban environments, their “gift” is having parents who advocate for them and make sure they”re prepped to pass the tests that get them into gifted programs.
* one way to close the achievement gap is to speak out against the known ways that students are prevented from learning, and against the underlying conditions of inequity.