Last fall, having finished my education coursework at Northern Michigan University, I went north to student teach in Big Bay at what must be about the nearest thing to a one-room schoolhouse still operating in this country. Thirty miles north of Marquette, Powell Township School serves local kids from kindergarten through eighth grade and houses about fifty students in all. My classroom held the combined seventh and eighth grades with a total of eleven students. Anyone at all familiar with education will know how unusual and how special this is.
I cannot enumerate all the things I saw being done right in this school; I'd have to write a book, and I'm sure I'd forget half of what ought to be included. But one of the things they do right is to make excellent use of their magnificent location to get kids out into the natural world and get them moving around in it physically, engaged, learning by doing.
For instance, each school day begins with a walk. Not just once 'round the school or some such pittance, but a mile-long walk--two laps around a big park in the center of town, then back to the school (the little kids do just one lap). Yes, it's time-consuming, and the students aren't being fed curriculum during this time. But they are seeing the shifting of the seasons day by day, the sunrise, the clouds, feeling the wind and weather (and complaining about it), interacting with each other and their teachers, improving their health, expending pent-up energy that can otherwise lead to disruptive behavior (ever seen the Dog Whisperer?), and generating some good blood flow to their brains to prepare for learning!
So that's one example. Then there was the 29th annual seventh- and eighth-grade class canoe trip, an all-day paddle down a little river to Lake Superior and back again, with a couple hours in the middle for picnic and play on the beach. And then, there was the hike.
In the midst of the exquisite U.P. fall colors, we went on an all-school hike. The entire school got on a bus, rode out to the base of a nearby mountain, and hiked to the top, all together. Each of my seventh and eighth graders was introduced to a very real, practical, human sort of responsibility by being assigned a little kid to hold hands with and keep track of on the hike--except for Kyle, who got two. Kyle sometimes struggles with his studies and can be a bit disruptive in the classroom, but in real-world situations he is alert, considerate, dependable, and great with kids. It thrills me that his teachers know him well enough to understand this. It thrills me that the school board entrust their students and staff with this responsibility, rather than shying away from such trips as so often happens in this age of fear and prudence and liability insurance. Better still, Kyle chose the students he would chaperon without a moment's hesitation and with utter confidence. It thrills me that he, in turn, knows the little kids in the school well enough to choose two who would be manageable together--one quiet and easily kept in hand, the other a wild child--a perfect pair.
You may have guessed I'm rather fond of this little school. So you can understand why, sitting alone in my room here in Mountain Village, I let out a very loud WHOOP when I heard the sitting U.S. President mention "Powell Township School in Big Bay" during a policy speech delivered in my favorite little city, Marquette.
See, Mr. Obama popped up to ye olde U.P. to give a talk furthering some aspects of his State of the Union Address. Among them was a proposed plan to provide high speed rail to most of the country within a couple of decades (good idea!) and a plan to provide the vast majority of people across the nation with access to wireless broadband internet within five years (another good idea!). The latter was the primary focus of his talk, and it was the reason he chose NMU as the location.
Northern has been issuing laptops to all students since the late nineties (lousy ones for the most part, but still) and every campus building had fast, effective wifi by the time I got there in 2008. In 2009 they made partnerships to blanket the entire community of Marquette, plus a few miles outside of town, with 'wimax' service--wireless broadband that has the reach of a cell phone signal. I'm told it is the equivalent of G4 cell service for smart phones. By last fall, when I first received a wimax-capable computer, they had added Negaunee, and although Northern's tech people warned it would be slower than the on-campus wifi, the service was still dramatically faster than my own DSL, so I wound up using the wimax at home instead of the AT&T service I was actually paying for. More than once last fall, with Siri fallen asleep in the car, I would park by the Lake and do school work, check email, or watch streaming TV on my laptop so she could get a good long nap.
The 'Laptop Initiative' has a bad, and pretty well-deserved, reputation around campus. The computers they issue have traditionally been cheap (in every way) and loaded with superfluous software that just slows them down. My understanding is that the university got into a long-term contract right off the bat with a manufacturer that didn't deliver a good product. My first laptop (you pay a lease and get a new one every two years while you're in school) was a hunk of junk, slow and full of bugs and glitches. However, I was issued a new one last fall, just in time for student teaching, and it was a huge improvement--not state of the art, but competent and practical. And being able to connect from anywhere in town was fantastic. To my mind, the wimax is an excellent service, and the new computers are much better than previous models, so perhaps it just took a while to get it right. In any event, this level of connectivity is not something that's being done at most universities, even fancy famous ones, and this is why the President decided to give his speech at Northern.
And in that speech, he happened to mention that while at NMU he had been video conferencing with people at schools in a couple of nearby towns, one of which was Powell Township School! You see, one of the other things they are doing right there is investing considerably in technology. The students have a technology class each week, like music, art, and PE. Each student is issued a laptop, like at Northern, only with nicer machines; there is reliable, fast wifi in the school; and apparently there is now wimax in Big Bay! So my old crew got to chat with the President over the computer. Way cool.
Efficient wireless connectivity is a big deal even in a major city, and it's an even bigger deal in a remote town like Big Bay, but out here in the Bush it is positively transformational. Consider this: coming out here ten years ago, I would be spending three solid months without seeing the faces of my wife and daughter unless they sent me photos. We would have been restricted to an occasional, brief, expensive phone call. (Not to mention further back, without email, without phone, etc.) In practical terms, this means that ten years ago, I would not have made this trip. What made it doable for us as a family was simply this: I talk with Carrie nearly every day on skype, where I can look at her face and her growing belly, see and hear how Siri is developing, even lean in to the camera and pretend to eat a bite of cookie that she holds out to me, or reach my hand out and pretend to tickle her neck as she looks up at the ceiling in invitation. She always laughs obligingly.
Internet communications are giving students here, and all over the world, unprecedented access to places and cultures most will never see in person, which enables them to humanize even the most distant people in a way that has heretofore been possible only through wide travel or the most diligent study and imagination. No longer passing mere information, the internet can now facilitate a genuinely humanizing contact. One of my plans is to skype with my beloved students from Big Bay during the school day and let them talk with my Mountain Village students so that they can learn a little about each other's lives. My guess is that they'll see they have a lot in common.
I like to think of myself as a pragmatist and a skeptic. Political speeches, on the whole, do not move me. Well, that's not quite true; they usually move me to turn them off, and sometimes to heave. Maybe I'm softened by the thrill of someone famous being in 'my' town; maybe I'm a little giddy at hearing him mention 'my' school; or maybe it really was just a hell of an inspiring speech.
For instance, each school day begins with a walk. Not just once 'round the school or some such pittance, but a mile-long walk--two laps around a big park in the center of town, then back to the school (the little kids do just one lap). Yes, it's time-consuming, and the students aren't being fed curriculum during this time. But they are seeing the shifting of the seasons day by day, the sunrise, the clouds, feeling the wind and weather (and complaining about it), interacting with each other and their teachers, improving their health, expending pent-up energy that can otherwise lead to disruptive behavior (ever seen the Dog Whisperer?), and generating some good blood flow to their brains to prepare for learning!
So that's one example. Then there was the 29th annual seventh- and eighth-grade class canoe trip, an all-day paddle down a little river to Lake Superior and back again, with a couple hours in the middle for picnic and play on the beach. And then, there was the hike.
In the midst of the exquisite U.P. fall colors, we went on an all-school hike. The entire school got on a bus, rode out to the base of a nearby mountain, and hiked to the top, all together. Each of my seventh and eighth graders was introduced to a very real, practical, human sort of responsibility by being assigned a little kid to hold hands with and keep track of on the hike--except for Kyle, who got two. Kyle sometimes struggles with his studies and can be a bit disruptive in the classroom, but in real-world situations he is alert, considerate, dependable, and great with kids. It thrills me that his teachers know him well enough to understand this. It thrills me that the school board entrust their students and staff with this responsibility, rather than shying away from such trips as so often happens in this age of fear and prudence and liability insurance. Better still, Kyle chose the students he would chaperon without a moment's hesitation and with utter confidence. It thrills me that he, in turn, knows the little kids in the school well enough to choose two who would be manageable together--one quiet and easily kept in hand, the other a wild child--a perfect pair.
You may have guessed I'm rather fond of this little school. So you can understand why, sitting alone in my room here in Mountain Village, I let out a very loud WHOOP when I heard the sitting U.S. President mention "Powell Township School in Big Bay" during a policy speech delivered in my favorite little city, Marquette.
See, Mr. Obama popped up to ye olde U.P. to give a talk furthering some aspects of his State of the Union Address. Among them was a proposed plan to provide high speed rail to most of the country within a couple of decades (good idea!) and a plan to provide the vast majority of people across the nation with access to wireless broadband internet within five years (another good idea!). The latter was the primary focus of his talk, and it was the reason he chose NMU as the location.
Northern has been issuing laptops to all students since the late nineties (lousy ones for the most part, but still) and every campus building had fast, effective wifi by the time I got there in 2008. In 2009 they made partnerships to blanket the entire community of Marquette, plus a few miles outside of town, with 'wimax' service--wireless broadband that has the reach of a cell phone signal. I'm told it is the equivalent of G4 cell service for smart phones. By last fall, when I first received a wimax-capable computer, they had added Negaunee, and although Northern's tech people warned it would be slower than the on-campus wifi, the service was still dramatically faster than my own DSL, so I wound up using the wimax at home instead of the AT&T service I was actually paying for. More than once last fall, with Siri fallen asleep in the car, I would park by the Lake and do school work, check email, or watch streaming TV on my laptop so she could get a good long nap.
The 'Laptop Initiative' has a bad, and pretty well-deserved, reputation around campus. The computers they issue have traditionally been cheap (in every way) and loaded with superfluous software that just slows them down. My understanding is that the university got into a long-term contract right off the bat with a manufacturer that didn't deliver a good product. My first laptop (you pay a lease and get a new one every two years while you're in school) was a hunk of junk, slow and full of bugs and glitches. However, I was issued a new one last fall, just in time for student teaching, and it was a huge improvement--not state of the art, but competent and practical. And being able to connect from anywhere in town was fantastic. To my mind, the wimax is an excellent service, and the new computers are much better than previous models, so perhaps it just took a while to get it right. In any event, this level of connectivity is not something that's being done at most universities, even fancy famous ones, and this is why the President decided to give his speech at Northern.
And in that speech, he happened to mention that while at NMU he had been video conferencing with people at schools in a couple of nearby towns, one of which was Powell Township School! You see, one of the other things they are doing right there is investing considerably in technology. The students have a technology class each week, like music, art, and PE. Each student is issued a laptop, like at Northern, only with nicer machines; there is reliable, fast wifi in the school; and apparently there is now wimax in Big Bay! So my old crew got to chat with the President over the computer. Way cool.
Efficient wireless connectivity is a big deal even in a major city, and it's an even bigger deal in a remote town like Big Bay, but out here in the Bush it is positively transformational. Consider this: coming out here ten years ago, I would be spending three solid months without seeing the faces of my wife and daughter unless they sent me photos. We would have been restricted to an occasional, brief, expensive phone call. (Not to mention further back, without email, without phone, etc.) In practical terms, this means that ten years ago, I would not have made this trip. What made it doable for us as a family was simply this: I talk with Carrie nearly every day on skype, where I can look at her face and her growing belly, see and hear how Siri is developing, even lean in to the camera and pretend to eat a bite of cookie that she holds out to me, or reach my hand out and pretend to tickle her neck as she looks up at the ceiling in invitation. She always laughs obligingly.
Internet communications are giving students here, and all over the world, unprecedented access to places and cultures most will never see in person, which enables them to humanize even the most distant people in a way that has heretofore been possible only through wide travel or the most diligent study and imagination. No longer passing mere information, the internet can now facilitate a genuinely humanizing contact. One of my plans is to skype with my beloved students from Big Bay during the school day and let them talk with my Mountain Village students so that they can learn a little about each other's lives. My guess is that they'll see they have a lot in common.
I like to think of myself as a pragmatist and a skeptic. Political speeches, on the whole, do not move me. Well, that's not quite true; they usually move me to turn them off, and sometimes to heave. Maybe I'm softened by the thrill of someone famous being in 'my' town; maybe I'm a little giddy at hearing him mention 'my' school; or maybe it really was just a hell of an inspiring speech.
I agree about the speech Matt. I didn't turn it off until he got the "promises" part. That's where politicians promise more than they can deliver. But I wish him luck.
ReplyDeleteAs for the part about your teaching and your schools, they are lucky to have you.
Dad
Matt, your posts always end up making me cry! This one did, too. I love your passion for the kids. Keep up the good work--and keep us posted on your adventures!
ReplyDeleteMatt,
ReplyDeleteTruly an inspiring read. Very well-said. I share your enthusiasm about the future of wireless internet connections. However, there are a lot more problems with the world today that I don't think can be solved by any country, much less one man.
Scott