Last year we did a bunch of work with DreamBank, a collaborative giving platform aimed at reducing waste and giving people gifts that they really want. Last week I wrote aboutKickstarter, a way for creators to collecting funding for projects–a kind of collaborative investment in future art.
Today’s collaborative funding project (courtesy of Springwise) is GradeFund. From the article:
GradeFund lets students recruit sponsors—usually friends and family—who donate money for each good grade. Participating students upload their transcripts at the end of each term and GradeFund verifies them and then collects funds from the sponsors, who can set their own criteria such as sponsoring students from their alma mater or choosing specific grade levels to sponsor. They can determine donation amounts for each grade, from as low as USD 5.
It’s a nifty, if slightly warped, idea. Though I believe I benefited from such a scheme when I was in high school, I’m not a big fan of incentivizing childrens’ scholastic performance with cash.
The other factor that’s interesting in GradeFund’s case is that surely 100% of ’sponsors’ will be personally known to the student. That is, there’s no ‘fans’ or benevolent strangers funding the kid’s education. In this sense, the site is less essential than other collaborative funding projects I’ve seen. Surely the child’s family could just put a gradated score card up on the fridge and some money in a jar?
That’s the question posed by yet another great BBC radio documentary, entitled Top of the Class. There’s a ton of fascinating insights, some of them pretty counter-intuitive, into the devising an educational system that maps to a country’s social structure and policy. A few unexpected facts from the program:
Finnish students don’t start school until the age of seven.
There’s only a 4% difference in achievement between the students at the country’s best and worst schools.
Though it’s above-average, the Finns spend less on education than many other nations, including the US and South Korea.
I know I’ve mentioned a lot of these docs lately, but I’ve been really digging them. They’re exceptionally well done, and–at 22 minutes–an ideal length to listen to while, say, stretching, doing the dishes or sweeping the patio.
In high school, I loathed French. Every minute of it was agony, from grade 8 to 12. My perennial C-pluses in the class reflected my attitude. I wasn’t keen on the teachers, but I doubt it was their fault. According to educator Shannon Bourbonnais, the curriculum was probably to blame:
Students learn lists of nouns, such as “sports” or “clothes,” and then they learn rules like when to use the past perfect versus imperfect. But that’s not the way we speak. People communicate in sentences, and verbs are central to language. People communicate with statements like “I want,” “I can” or “I have to.” But because “want,” “can” and “must” are irregular verbs in French, they are usually not taught in the first few years of standard French programs.
Bourbonnais references an alternative method of learning which sounds like it would have worked a lot more effectively for me. It might have helped if, when I was in school, we’d started in grade two instead of grade 8.
Today over at The Conscious Earth, there’s a post about Heather Stillwell, hyper-conservative rabble rouser:
As Conscious Earth visitors read last month, free copies of An Inconvenient Truth were made available to every high school in British Columbia thanks to the charitable contribution of the Tides Canada Foundation. Now, Surrey school trustee Heather Stilwell wants the widely discredited mockumentary The Great Global Warming Swindle to be shown alongside Al Gore’s global warming documentary.
If you read on in that post (or this one or this one), you’ll see that Ms. Stillwell fancies the contrarian limelight (would that be the lemon light?). And why do all the conservative nutters seem to live in Surrey? Hmm…in truth, I guess there are a few in my childhood home of West Vancouver, too.
I should clarify my ambiguity in that last paragraph. All conservatives are not nutters, nor are all Surreyites (Surreyans? Surreydanavians?). However, it seems like all the Lower Mainland nutters who are conservative come from Surrey. Onward.
In circumstances like this, the Heather Stillwells of the world appeal to our rationalism by calling for ‘both sides of the story’ to be told in schools. That theory has always appealed to me, but obviously isn’t practical on every single issue we teach. Is smoking really bad for you? Was Shakespare actually a nobleman? Do muons really exist? High school would stretch into our early thirties.
Really, it’s a question of scientific consensus. I think that if there’s an academic consensus on a subject (say, gravity), then we should just teach it. Teachers ought to be open to debate on the subject, but they law shouldn’t require them to cover the Holocaust and moon landing deniers for every fact.
Like evolution (but unlike, say, the creation of the universe), I believe there’s a scientific consensus on climate change. The dissenting minority is loud but shrinking. So, I think it’s germaine germane that we show students “An Inconvenient Truth” or a similar film, and not feel obligated to dedicate another ninety minutes to the opposing viewpoint. They should probably discuss the political and public relations debate being carried out in the offline and online media around the world, but in this case they don’t need to give opposing viewpoints equal weight.
Schools must foster debate, but they have to pick their spots. I remember in Geography 12, Ryan Jaye, Albert Kaan and I made a kick-ass video about nuclear power. I believe we came out in favour of it, and got an A. I don’t recall if there was much debate or not.
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