Unschooling Outcomes in the 'Real World'

"So, How do you measure outcomes?"

The engineer meant well, when she asked the question and, to be fair, she'd never heard of unschooling. Still, I had to double-clutch several times as the gears in my mind shifted to traditional schooling terminology.

The kids and I were at a small company in San Francisco where they were testing a new game package that was supposed to teach coding. While the kids were testing, another engineer was asking me about the coding work we did at home. I mentioned that the kids had been working through Google's CSFirst for the last several months. This inspired the outcomes question.

I went with the not so elegant, but oh so pragmatic initial response of, "What...?" Buying myself some time while I boggled at what the hell an outcome was... Wait, I had it! That's right, other schooling methodologies measure what's 'taught' by 'testing' what the kid has learned compared to 'the expected outcome.' Oh God.

I half-suppressed a giggle. I grinned. "Uh, yeah... Let's see... How do we measure outcomes?" meanwhile, my mind was racing again. OK, first things first, I need to come up with an expected outcome. Stat! Well, it's nice when the kids don't get mad at each other while doing something, and it's nice when they stay interested.

"Well... I could see they were having fun doing it, and they weren't screaming at each other, so... that was a nice outcome."

And now the very kind, yet increasingly confused engineer is staring at me with a bit of an incredulous look. Nuts, that wasn't the answer!

Then, it finally hit me! "Well, when we're standing near an automatic door with a big blue button you push to open it, the oldest kid will say, 'Look at this. There's probably a microcontroller in there. It has a program running on it with a loop and an if block that says if the button is pushed, send a signal, (probably with a wire), to a motor up there, that opens the door.' Yup, that's how I knew we had a good outcome." In my mind I'm doing air quotes around 'good outcome' since that's not what I mean by that phrase at all.

And, the engineer's smiling again. It's a beleaguered smile, but she's smiling. Finally, I got it right!

Unschooling conversations, for me, are struggles through context. I frequently have to step way back to figure out what we're even talking about since the conversation is typically with people immersed in a completely different model of schooling.

To me, unschooling outcomes are radically different things than the 'outcomes' of traditional schooling. Were the kids happy doing a thing? Do they need something they can't get, (knowledge, equipment, a sounding board), to do the thing? Do they know the big world context for the thing they're learning?

The outcomes of 'did the kid learn?' aren't nearly as much my concern. If the kid actually wanted to know the thing, I'll bet they do. If they don't know the thing yet, I'm sure they will learn the thing when they decide they really need it. The only real outcome to unschooling the way I see it is 'are the kids going to continue learning?' Beyond that, I'm confident they can lead themselves to the outcomes they need.

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in concept very sim

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog