Need to Know (Part 2 of 2)

How do educational leaders accomplish this difficult task of bringing students -- and even citizens -- out of their self-made caves of ignorance? How can they be brought to interact with different, even contrary ideas?

You tell me.

Need to Know (Part 1 of 2)

On May 7, 2010, PBS debuted a weekly news magazine with the title Need to Know. Within one minute, the mission and vision of the program was pronounced in crystal clarity.

Co-anchor Jon Meachem provided the context: “We live in an odd moment. Never before has there been so much access to so much information, but if you’re anything like us, inundation does not necessarily translate into insight.”

Yet the sentence that preceded his, spoken by co-anchor Alison Stewart, illuminated how the show would attempt just such a translation: “Our goal is to turn up the light, not the heat, on the topics that inflame passions on all sides.”

Game

**Seems only fitting that, for my first post in several weeks, I publish an entry that I actually started the night of December 1, 2010. I'm discussing a game we played in grad school on that night.

It gets harder for me, as I age, to find opportunities where I can genuinely learn – especially in a formal setting. Most of the workshops I’m required to attend leave me uninspired and often insulted. I’ve walked away from several classes and seminars believing that I not only knew everything presented, but I could have taught it to the same group in half the time with twice the buy-in.

Diversion - Hockey Talk

The turn of the new year always finds me desperately clinging to the last moments of waning holiday spirit before turning my attentions to the upcoming school days. To that end, this blog will be dedicated to my number one recreational pursuit: hockey.

No, I don’t play. I watch, cheer, follow, and adore the sport. Especially yesterday, when the National Hockey League staged its annual outdoor Winter Classic. The game has become a nationally televised New Year’s Day staple after just three years, and this year’s game at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh is accompanied by a riveting “24/7” miniseries on HBO. Towards the end of the month, the league will even attempt to build fan interest in a spectacle that almost every sports follower ignores: the All-Star Game.

For Grandma

My holidays were thrown into a topsy-turvy when my grandmother died just four days before Christmas. The last two days of shopping had an undertow of concern for my father, who had already been caring for her as the final phases of Alzheimer’s settled in. The joys of Christmas Eve and Day were succeeded by the lamentations of the casket viewing, funeral, and wake. Dad summed up this wacky calendar best: sad-sad-happy-happy-sad-sad. Lots of emotional gear-shifting.