“Are you with me now” A J Ryder
First off the press is a T-shirt designed for the upcoming BPL Conference in The Netherlands by Saul, a student at Big Picture College and Career Academy in Denver. If that ain’t international what is? It is a pretty nice modelling job as well.
Now that we’ve expanded Harbor Freight Fellows to BPLiving Fellows all under B-U, the Fellows work is serving as a way all students in any schools can focus on their interests and passions in real-world settings while also receiving funding. Below is Octavian with his mom Tiffany at the recent Harbor Freight Fellows conference in Greenville and a segment from the article.
Mom's Hard Work Serves a Shining Example
“Tiffany McKnight wakes up every weekday at 3:30am to start her first of two full-time jobs. Her son, Octavian, credits his mom’s hard work for inspiring him to participate in the Harbor Freight Fellows Initiative, earn a HVAC certification and a full-time position as a HVAC technician with McLeod Health in Florence, South Carolina.” This conference generated loads of press and lots of follow-up from districts, businesses, industry and politicians from both sides of the aisle. Here’s another article that came out as well. South Carolina Youth Skilled Trades Summit Celebrates Harbor Freight Fellows with a surprise cameo of Sonn Sam in attendance.
And…
This week I received an email from BPLiving Fellow Jessie Brine who is at The Met in Newport, RI. The video he sent about his trip to Australia to study regenerative farming is fantastic and is well worth a watch for all.
Just one more provocation from Frank Wilson, Seymore Sarason, Carlos and Dean Ashendon
I’m always thinking about my choice of words and how to correct myself and choose better ones that more accurately fit what I mean. Last year I pushed myself on the use of personalization to personal because learning is personal and personalizing learning implies way more mechanistic language at play. After reading Caring and Compassion in Clinical Practice again, one thing I never noticed before was how Sarason played with the word supervision to mean super vision. After all that is where the word comes from and as Carlos points out, doesn’t it take super vision to do our work. Sarason loved BPL because we were on the cusp of moving on this issue of making staff more caring and compassionate practitioners. Always remember, the Children Are Watching!
We hold these truths to be self-evident…. and then ‘we’ ask for an evidence base. Shish! Why? Is this about power, accounting, control, bureaucracy, greater knowledge, better practice? In another article from Australia The Trickle Down Theory of Schooling author Dean Ashenden deals with the faults of how evidence based research and continuous improvement strategies have hurt youth. These are the same issues and people that give us SAT’s, AP Classes and other standardized approaches to how students are smart and how teachers become technocrats. Dean’s article is well worth a read by everyone at BPL as we go through the Growth Capital and Impact Campaign process.
One more thing….
Sally Rooney’s review of the world’s greatest snooker player’s book Unbreakable by Ronnie O’Sullivan has lots of implications for our work focused around, How do you do? And How do you know? Ronnie makes incredible shots without really knowing how he knows. The math here is incredibly complex. Snooker is not pool and is not chess. Computers can beat people in chess but not in snooker. It is way more complicated and difficult. And, to quote Sally Rooney:
“How is it possible for a snooker player to predict the outcomes of complex interactions in physics, with millimeter-level precision without appearing to perform any calculations at all?” And what does that mean for so many young people who just know but can’t say it when schools demand a written or spoken explanation. That’s tacit learning. There’s way too much here for this TGIF so, to be continued, Can anyone say IBPLC?
“What jeeps you up late at night and wakes you up early in the morning?” Shameka and I continue to refine Shameka and El After Dark into a podcast.
Be well!
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