“Are you with me now” A J Ryder
The week started off with Governor McKee and Angelica Infante-Green the Rhode Island Commissioner of Education visiting The Met to learn more about engaging students because attendance in Rhode Island public schools after COVID has dropped. It was a great visit with Met students talking about how they are engaged through their interests at The Met along with the personal attention they get in advisory. Nancy invited both the Governor and the Commissioner to the 30th Anniversary this summer.
Namahana
Right now I’m on Kauai about to have meetings with Kapua, her staff, students, parents and community. Today is the first day of student registration and it is exciting to be here for that even though registration is online. In other news about Namahana, they received a gift of over a million dollars from Walter and Marica Kortchak & Family and I’m helping the team place an article in Kappan that should be out this Spring. It is always great to be on island and there is always a ton to do. In the next few days, I’ll be meeting with a group of home school students who will enroll once Namahana opens and with Taeko Onishi Namahana’s new Director of Finance and Operations.
The Australian trip is coming together beautifully. This week invitees are responding to our outreach. We will be joined by educators from BPL schools, policy makers and foundation people. Viv and her team are doing the groundwork ensuring that this trip to Australia will be just an incredible experience where hopefully our work of New Ways, Forms and Measures gains more traction and influence all over.
I had a good meeting with Max Espinoza from The Gates Foundation on the work in CA and connected him to Robin Kramer who is Managing Director of the Smidt Family Foundation and was my initial contact to the Harbor Freight Tools for Schools Foundation. Just yesterday, Eric Smidt announced that he was giving an additional $5 million to support the relief efforts for the LA Fires with those funds also supporting youth who want to become skilled trades people. I met Eric a while back and he certainly has a big heart. His story is one that feels like a B-U youth who truly followed his passion for tools and made that into a multi-billion-dollar company supporting trades people and all those DIY folks out there.
And… connecting the LA Fires and the Australia trip is important in another context. Australia is always ablaze. They know how to deal with (as they call them) bush fires. They have loads of new ways, forms and measures that work that involve community participation. I’m hoping we can learn from both young and old are educated in fire prevention. More to come…
The Merging of Body and Machine in More Ways Than One
In recent Gallop polls it is noted that 65% of adults are disengaged at work. This data strongly correlates to the number of students disengaged in school. Hmmm?
I’ve always been interested in way more than career pathways, school to career, school to work or any of those other policies and terms that from the get-go are more about labor and workforce than each person finding meaningful work and living lives that matter. BPL work is more aligned to personal pathways because each one of us is unique. Aside from our own BPL work for years, I’ve collected studies and interviewed people who forged their life’s work figuring it out as they go. Isn’t that what we all do and once in a while we bump into school when we find it meaningful? In the last few weeks, I featured artist Marion Mullan and his wordless ways and now I’ve come across two more stories like this, one that David Gersten sent me about Steel Sculptress, Betsy Bower who is now working at Arts, Letters and Numbers in Craft 101 a new style B-Unbound hybrid among other things. and another about Hugh Herr who received a master’s degree in engineering and a PH.D. in biophysics. He and his team have invented brain-controlled prosthesis. As a teen-ager Herr had such a limited grasp of math that he couldn’t calculate 10% of a 100. He chose his high school classes to leave time for rock climbing which is his passion. Both started working with their hands in the world of work beyond school walls. Betsy in her father’s ornamental metal shop and Herr while working in the skilled trades with his family discovering mountain climbing where he discusses how bouldering is problem solving and “how what had been a climbing obsession became an academic obsession.” As you can see from the photo above Herr is missing his legs, or is he? Their stories lend credence to our work that no randomized control studies could ever do. It is our hope that among the many things that we do the IBPLC brings us closer to supporting youth on their personal pathways or whatever term we use.
Be well
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