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Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes. We need gigantic monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That’s my position. I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet.

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—	Sam Seaborn, The West Wing (via theaccidentaloptimist)

explosionsoflife:

Remoras, also known as shark suckers, are a family of eight species of fish that have sucker disks positioned above their heads that let them attach to moving objects to hitch a ride. They attach to sharks, turtles, ships, divers, and just about anything they can latch onto. Scientists have now discovered that the sucker disks of remoras are actually highly modified dorsal fins that expands during their development.

(Photo © Dave Johnson)(Source)

Life in the Woods.: List Of Students On Tumblr. »

fluorescentink:

I want to commend the tumblr editors. Since I mentioned the lack of students in the #education tag- there has been an incredible upsweep of student involvement.

GWLAP and PPT have done an excellent job building this tag. Adventures In Learning, more than any other editor, understands the need for student voices. His movement, imagining learning, is exactly what I advocated. It’s so good to know that there are people out there who are taking real world steps to amend this fault.

Hitherto , David, PPT and all the other educators who personally contacted me- thank you for listening.

If you’re not on this list: either re-blog or message me and I’ll edit you in. I may publish this list on my education blog just to make connections easier. If you would like your blog to be on this list- message me.

Eclectic Blogs That Publish Content From High Schoolers

1. How To Drop Out Of School: All content is written by high school students.

2. EdZedOmega: Very cool project.

High School Unschoolers/Homeschoolers Who Write About Education

1. www.soulfully.tumblr.com
2. j0nathancran3.tumblr.com
3. rockogirl.tumblr.com
4. samflynn.tumblr.com
6. http://undisclothed.tumblr.com/
7. http://fluorescentink.tumblr.com/
8. http://reborn-pure.tumblr.com/ (FOLLOW HER)
9. http://anglo-chief.tumblr.com/
10. http://spudzine.tumblr.com/
11. http://so-elegantly-disheveled.tumblr.com/
12. http://swallowtailskies.tumblr.com/ (FOLLOW HER!)
13. http://queer-fish.tumblr.com/

A quick note to editors and students: More students contribute under the #homeschooling and #unschooling tag. Unschool students- tag your posts with #education.

Other Teens Who Write About Education

1. http://claretaylormorgan.tumblr.com/
2. http://norarosie.tumblr.com/
3. http://lizabethdavis.tumblr.com/
4. http://remixursydae.tumblr.com/
5. http://always-andforever.tumblr.com/

Students need to write more about education. Teachers need to direct more posts to students. The tag should be a place not only for teachers to connect with teachers, but for students to connect with students. And, of course, for teachers and students to talk about fixing education.

jtotheizzoe:

“If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.” - Niels Bohr

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Take a tour through the Big Questions of the origin, arrangement and future of the universe with these talks by Sean Carroll, Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene

Creativity is nurtured by freedom and stifled by the continuous monitoring, evaluation, adult-direction, and pressure to conform that restrict children’s lives today. In the real world few questions have one right answer, few problems have one right solution; that’s why creativity is crucial to success in the real world. But more and more we are subjecting children to an educational system that assumes one right answer to every question and one correct solution to every problem, a system that punishes children (and their teachers too) for daring to try different routes.

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—	As Children’s Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity \| Psychology Today

Adventures in Learning: As Children’s Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity »

adventuresinlearning:

This great article written by Peter Grey provides the argument for more freedom in our classrooms and for less tests with finite answers.

“Creativity is nurtured by freedom and stifled by the continuous monitoring, evaluation, adult-direction, and pressure to conform that restrict children’s…

archiemcphee:

From the Department of Awesome Natural Wonders come these mysterious patterns on the ocean floor off the southern coast of Japan. Japanese scuba diver and photographer Yoji Ookata, who has spent the last 50 years exploring and documenting his underwater discoveries off the coast of Japan, spotted these beautiful and puzzling patterns in the sand, nearly six feet in diameter and 80 feet below sea level, during a dive near Amami Oshima at the southern tip of the country.

So what happened next? Are these rippling geometric patterns the equivalent of crop circles on the seafloor? Not quite, but the answer is still a good one. Colossal explains:

“He soon returned with colleagues and a television crew from the nature program NHK to document the origins what he dubbed the “mystery circle.”

Using underwater cameras the team discovered the artist is a small puffer fish only a few inches in length that swims tirelessly through the day and night to create these vast organic sculptures using the gesture of a single fin. Through careful observation the team found the circles serve a variety of crucial ecological functions, the most important of which is to attract mates. Apparently the female fish are attracted to the hills and valleys within the sand and traverse them carefully to discover the male fish where the pair eventually lay eggs at the circle’s center, the grooves later acting as a natural buffer to ocean currents that protect the delicate offspring. Scientists also learned that the more ridges contained within the sculpture resulted in a much greater likelihood of the fish pairing. To learn more about the circles check out the full scoop over on Spoon and Tamago, and you can see two high resolution desktop photos courtesy of NHK here.”

Busy little pufferfish boys wooing potential mates by sculpting the sand with their bodies. As far as we’re concerned, that’s pretty awesome!

[via Colossal]

bookspaperscissors:

Brains, Ear, Nose, Knee Joint, Sacrum and other anatomical curios in felt by yourorgangrinder in Brisbane, Australia.

Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill their promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

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—	Sir Charles Chaplin, Final speech in “The Great Dictator” inspired by Krishnamurti (via urbangladiator)

When School Goes Against Your Very Nature. »

independently-my-own:

I was born severely allergic to school. Not to learning, but to school.
There is just no other way to put it. Sitting in those little chairs when my whole being wanted to move, sharing the teacher with so many other children, being told to color inside the lines when I was wired to think outside the box: all of this and much more, just seemed to stifle my indomitably wild and creative nature.

School seemed to be a place that had obviously omitted my kind from its design considerations.

“Why aren’t more of the children resisting this?”, I thought. “Am I the only one who doesn’t feel entirely welcomed here?”

Some of my earliest memories are of my three-year-old-self screaming and kicking, and reaching out to my mother with tears in my eyes, as she handed me over to my kindergarten teacher every morning.

Stuck in a room filled with other children my age and only one adult to tend to us felt so unnatural to me. I wanted my mother’s undivided attention back. I missed her. School seemed to be telling me that heartbreak was acceptable, even necessary [more…]