Category: Learnings

“One of the things that I do appreciate about it is, for the most part, nearly every adolescent in America right now has access to some kind of digital wireless device connected to the internet. And in some ways, if we think expansively about what it means, we are probably one of the most literate…

I’m a big Brian Eno fan. Eno has produced seminal albums for U2, David Bowie, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson and Cold Play. A new documentary on Eno has just been released. I especially enjoy learning about art and creativity from Brian Eno. Recently, Ezra Klein from The New York Times interviewed Eno. Here are some…

I’m a big Willie Nelson fan. So when I saw this group in Des Moines was going to celebrate Willie’s 90th birthday, I was there. The group was the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI). They earned national media attention back in the 1980’s, when they, along with Willie Nelson, focused on the number…

A long time ago, when I was a kid, there was something known as a variety/sketch comedy show. One of the more popular variety show was The Carol Burnett Show. It came on CBS on Saturday nights, and my family rarely missed it. While on the air for 11 seasons, the show won 25 prime…

This might be a reason kids have stopped reading books – at least in Houston, Texas. It seems Houston Independent School District elementary teachers have been forced to sneak chapter reading into their instructional day, since the district’s curriculum department is requiring learning time to be focused on other types of reading designed to prepare…

Kids have stopped reading. Adults have stopped reading. According to some experts, we are living in a reading crisis. Unless we’re not. Some believe young people and older people might be reading more today than ever. They’re just not reading the way we’ve read over the past 1,000 years. But one thing we know for…

I’m not a big fan of startups that, well, remain startups. We have too many examples of small learning organizations within the public space that do well in terms of getting kids to become smarter and stronger but never scale beyond what might be called a “boutique” enterprise. Recently, Education Reimagined published a report titled…

I’ve posted nearly 650 articles on the ABPTL website (along with Facebook and LinkedIn postings). Most of those articles have been critical of our present K-12 teaching and learning system. And, admittedly, I haven’t gained the readership I expected when I started writing the column over three years ago. But, believe it or not, I’m…

A long-time friend (he was best man in our wedding) is a conservative. One night I was opining that Donald Trump would go down in history as our worst president. My friend came back that America was going down the drain because of Nancy Pelosi and her fellow liberal Democrats. We stopped talking about politics…