Your second brain swirl is, of course, true. For too many kids, school is the safest place they go in the course of a day and it provides nourishing meals. And for all the working parents out there (myself included) it provides babysitting.

So, the next thing in the edusphere should build understanding and provide safety.

I have to believe that’s doable — and to be a happy camper, I think I need to focus on how to build those structures with the rich resources that will become available as we move forward.

That’s intentionally ambiguous — hopefully I’ll flesh that out in a coming post.
Cheers,
Don

I’m not sure I’m ready to say everything that’s been swirling around in my brain, but I will say two things that are in the forefront.

One – I’m still dealing with the horror of deciding to stay in teaching because its the best job for me right now. There are still days I love it, but I find them further apart. And I have to agree that teaching is fundamentally a bad idea.

Two – What if schools still work? Not at educating people, but at providing childcare. I was hit over the head with the idea by a parent, who told me she didn’t care how well her student was doing as long as she knew where he was while she was working.

Okay, so those are my uplifting thoughts for the morning.

I hope to come back to this with the more optimistic thoughts that are still coalescing.

But, more helpfully, you go to one of the central difficulties of developing the database for virtualfieldwork.org. I initially thought I’d hit on a simple solution when I found dabbledb.com and their Creative Commons licensing. But now I think it’s not sophisticated enough to work in ways like a dichotomous key.

And I don’t think it’s a contradiction to note that something isn’t sophisticated enough to be simple.

Thanks,
Don

Probably more questions than answers, but my 2 cents anyway.