Andrew Ordover's Blog: Scenes from a Broken Hand, page 20

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Going Solo

Institutions and I don't seem to get along. I don't know why.I don't think of myself as a troublemaker, or an agitator, or an anarchist, but somehow, time and again, I find myself alienated from whatever organization or structure I'm trying to be a part of--cast out or abandoned or just annoyed enough to go it alone.It happened to me in high school, when my small cadre of friends and I got fed up

Sugar Candy Mountain

I believe in the promise of online education. I really do. I think it has the potential to radically transform the way we teach and learn, by knocking down the walls of time and space and challenging every assumption we have about how schooling must be done.

However...

When Michael Horn talks about how online teaching can change the role of the teacher and liberate her from a wide range of

Outsourcing Trivia

The alarmists are all atwitter about this idea of "outsourcing memory" to the Internet, as detailed in this report published in Science. We won't know anything anymore! We'll lose our ability to remember anything! We'll Google knowledge forever!Well. Maybe we will. We have the ability to be profoundly stupid, after all. But call it a possible result, not a necessary one. It all depends on what

The Threat of Influence

Intrigued by a tweet, I clicked over to this article on "The Most Influential Educator in America." The list of nominees is not, in itself, controversial--although clearly, some people are confusing the word "influential" with "beneficial." Apparently, a person can't be influential if you think she's wrong.What I found interesting was the dialogue below the article, in "comments." Someone disses

"Should we kill the liberal arts major?"

No.Unless you're talking about one particular liberal arts major who's done something horrible and deserving of death. In which case: Maybe. But if you're talking about the major in general, concpetual terms, then No.This question is the basis for an article in Salon. It includes many, many face-slappable moments. Or, at the very least, moments where you want to hit your own head against a

One Way or Another

The never-ending tug-of-war over education reform continues, with the Common Core side digging in its heels to avoid getting pulled into the mud pit by newly energized small-government types. It's the usual policital arguments over regulation-vs-trust-the-professionals and activist-federal-government-vs-state-sovereignty. And as with all the other areas of life over which these dichotomies have

Laws for Thee But Not for Me

I've been renting a room here in the DC area while looking for a larger place for the family, who will join me this summer. The woman from whom I'm renting has been unemployed and out of luck for a long time, and cannot pay her own rent without filling up all of the beds in the apartment. So she rents out my little room, and she rents out the master bedroom, and she sleeps on the sofa. It's not

Tuesday Morning Rumblings

A colleague at work put his wife and children on a plane this morning; they're off to see family for a week. People at the office joke with him about enjoying the bachelor life while they're away. He stands by my desk and tells me this, slumping a little. "You know," he says, "I got married for a reason."Five years ago, when The Wife left me behind in New York to pack boxes and get the house sold