Original Website Blurb from 2011
Lesson number one: Conference calls with four people are difficult to follow.
Lesson two: Hit the record button first thing, before you get distracted.
Lesson three: It’s really hard to be topical and timely when you’re doing things part-time. It’s been over a month since this article came out. People have probably completely forgotten about the furor over it by now, where even NPR got into the act, much of it based on one five-letter word in the title.
If Mr. Marks had just removed the word “black” from that title, and written “If I Were a Poor Kid,” he would have generated no controversy. In fact, Americans love that story, the story of the poor kid who makes it. But it’s the precisely the rarity of that situation that makes it so compelling. If everyone succeeded it would be normal, and people would be bored with that story.
I personally went to an entirely white rural school system with a high dropout rate. I had three blood siblings, all of us raised in the same house. We all finished high school, but after that our paths diverged. My older brother dropped out of college and joined the army. My younger brother, who hated school, went straight into the work force as a welder. My sister started a family but still finished college in six years, became a teacher, and is working on her second degree twenty years later. I stayed in school almost continuously for a total of 23 years and ended up with a doctoral degree in neuroscience. If four people with mostly the same genes and mostly the same environment can have such wildly different trajectories through life, how are we ever going to get this social engineering thing right?
I think the answer is (sorry to burst the bubble) through sustained effort, a little at a time, like Japan's "kaizen" philosophy. In other words, through a science of education, that we take as seriously as we do our other sciences.
Tomorrow I'll post some more details about this week's guests and their work.
Updates from 2021
I’m realizing that I need to go back through these and update the links, because Substack seems to be automatically re-routing them through the WayBack Machine to the original website and then back out again, which is really inefficient. That’s time I don’t have right now (as if the almost complete lack of pictures weren’t clue enough), but hopefully I will in August after Governor’s School.
VSI Episode 30