My Attempt at Living a Life

 Disclaimer:  Here is my Genius Hour Project. I apologize that it just me writing about what I pursued over the last two weeks. I apologize again that I am not done. That is the great thing about good work, you never finish. The students I have started working with will continue doing good things. We will finish this work and go on to do much more. We have plans to try for a TreesCanada grant in the fall, and who knows where we will go from there.  What Is My Passion? That's the point of a Genius Hour - to work on something you are passionate about.  ( What Is 20 Percent Time? , 2014 ) "Imagine if someone told  you to take a whole day, once a week, to set your regular work aside and explore something you’re really passionate about. Want to learn to speak Italian? Go ahead. Always wished you could improve your photography? Get on it. Just think classic cars are really cool? Off you go, then." ( What Is 20 Percent Time? , 2014 ) I have pursued a variety of passions in my li

THE START: I’m a teacher and when I sit down to plan my year I always start with the curriculum and ask how I can engage students – through those outcomes -   to do meaningful work, creating meaningful products, or to solve real problems.   If we want to engage our students and grow their understanding. We need to be rooted in the curriculum and have an understanding of why it matters to our students and to the world at large. That set of skills and that content need to be framed in a way that is engaging, and meaningful. It must exist outside the wall of the school.   We need to create connections with students, working and learning alongside them. (Fullan & Langworthy, n.d.) We need to have the skills, the deep roots to help them grow. This will help us to develop deep learning in our clases. To extend this metaphor, we need to have deep roots. Peter Wohllenben’s book, The Hidden Life of Trees gives us an understanding of how these deep roots make connections between

Mr. Jones is on the left In my teaching practice, I always look for ways that will engage students in meaningful work. Creating things that matter in the world is an important part of what I do. Yong Zhao discusses this meaningful work in his talk, "World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students" at the Debate on Education, and event organized by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia) in 2013.  Zhao says that schools have been "sausage makers" in the past. Getting kids to do well on standardized tests, and trying to make them all into one thing, isn't working. And in that statement we can all find great truth. We know that our system is not working optimally.  Zhao says that we need to hyperspecialize. Testing a fish on how well it can climb a tree is wrong. And we can all agree with that statement too. But, there is a flaw in the logic. We aren't fish, and monkeys, and birds. We are humans. All of us. And we ha