Live what you learn and learn what you live

This week we indulged ourselves into the principles and the ideas of the Sabertooth Curriculum.  The book had to do with how the education has evolved through the ever changing perils of human society.  What started as a basic idea of extending knowledge to the young so that they were better than the generations before, led to manipulation and greed.  It turns out that instead of education changing with the times, we actually do nothing to change it, we just add more to the curriculum and keep the old ideas.  Businesses and government have made up reasons of why we need the old information even if it is not pertinent to our skills and advances as a society.

For example.  In the book, they hold on to the teaching of Sabertooth scaring, horse clubbing, and fish grabbing because there is a historical, "magic" reason for us to know it.  Some say it is because it builds the other skills to be able to do the more advanced things, but truly we have no purpose for it.  So what does society do in the book?  They add bear trapping, fish netting, and horse roping to the curriculum.  It ends up that these courses are required in the highest of learning later on and if you were to question why, you were nearly killed.  People grew up where all of this knowledge was needed.  Because of entrepeunerialship and specialized industries that didn't need a ton of people to get the job done, many had no work and were unemployed.  This led to society just randomly moving around without purpose.  The book ended with an outside society getting ready to take over through war.  It simply came down to the idea that no one cared because they had no purpose for their education.

I know I see a lot of parallels with the system today.  All the way up to the top of the government.  "Let's get our education" everyone says.  No one says why.  You need this subject and that and you need all of them, but you'll know why later.   Some of the stuff you'll never use, but you'll figure that out when you have a purpose or a job.  A society without a purpose, but to "get smarter".

In class we focused on 6 different types of story lines for society.

• DECLINING (Sabertooth Curriculum Base)
• CIRCULAR 
• SPIRAL (which I thought was society in the book)
• PENDULAR (seems I am stuck in this with my teaching.  Do I teach the whole of the curriculum or do I dive deeper into the subject matter?  A question no one has the answer to.)
• PROGRESS
• CHALLENGE & RESPONSE (Norton Favorite)

We produced a rap that summarized the main ideas of the book.  This really helped us collaborate the idea of the book and synthesize what it was about without feeling like we were on the spot with a yes or no response.

Some favorites that I pulled from the discussion were:

1.  that the author (Pediwell), thought that the U.S. was in danger because people weren't educated enough to defend themselves nor did they care.
2. An educated person "knows what their community is doing & has the will and the energy to do it"
3. Live what you Learn & Learn what you Live
4. My favorite:  Don't TEACH................EDUCATE.

1. ACTS

• Authentic Problem (has to be a real idea)
• Clear Outcome
• Thinking Skills Needed (if you want them to compare, make sure they understand compare)
• Software Skills

1. SSCC

• Search - the correct info
• Sort - the info
• Create something
• Communicate about your info

Class concluded with us searching for information in a computer program.  We were read a story that helped engage us into the lesson.  Once our information was discovered, we wrote a letter back to the person who supposedly wrote us a letter inquiring some answers through our research.  This particular activity was fun because it involved multiple skills of research, analyzing what we were looking at, and then articulating our answers in the form of a letter rather than a formal summary.