Education Ideas

As a substitute teacher, I get a chance to see more classrooms than regular teachers do, and in most cases more than administrators do. I see what works, and what doesn’t, and I have strong feelings about schools and teaching. I believe that John Dewey laid out much of what we need to know about education over 100 years ago, but our schools systems have largely gone off the path he illuminated. He believed that a major purpose of schools was to produce good citizens, and that students developed citizenship skills by experiencing and practicing those skills rather than ingesting pre-determined knowledge.

Safe Routes to School Coordinator

And for yet another hat to wear, I’m the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) Coordinator for Carson City School District for the 2008-2009 school year. I’m actually contracting with Sierra Nevada Journeys for the work. Three schools received grants for engineering, education, encouragment, enforcement and evaluation (the 5Es) – Seeliger ES, Fremont ES, and Bordewich Bray ES, so those are the schools that I’ll be primarily working with, but to a lesser degree the other three elementary schools and the two middle schools. SRTS is a program that encourages kids to walk and bike to school, and to identify concerns of parents that prevent kids from walking and biking to school and to solve those concerns. I’ve created a website to keep track of the program at http://srts.raincloudpub.com/.