Betting on the future, pt 1: Career guidance is more valuable than Huck Finn

In this two-part post I'll argue for why it isn't sufficient to just prepare kids for college. We also must guide them toward careers that have some hope of surviving and thriving in the 21st-century.

When my seniors wrapped up their college application essays I figured it would be a good time to talk to them about the realities of 21st-century careers. Which careers will survive? Which will die out in the next 10-15 years? Not the typical lesson plan for an English teacher, but most English teachers don't have nine years of experience in high-tech startups.

To get their thought processes started I argued that pharmacists won't survive. Awkwardly, a number of my students were planning on pursuing pharmacy in college. They were not pleased.

Betting on the future, pt2: Why pharmacists are doomed

In part 2 we explore why pharmacists are doomed in the 21st-century and in doing so get some clues for how to predict if a career is likely to survive the coming decades.

Previous: Part 1: Career guidance is more valuable than Huck Finn

Pharmacists are doomed. Well, at least in the United States. Rather than take my word for it, take a look at an article that was just published by Slate's primary technology writer, Farhad Manjoo: "Will robots steal your job?"

In it Manjoo argues that "Pharmacists will be some of the first highly skilled professionals who'll lose their jobs to machines." What I thought would be 5-10 years down the line already seems to be here; the pharmacists that he interviewed said "that the computers keep getting better, and that today's best robotic pharmacists are faster and less prone to error than the best human pharmacists." Whatever technology hurdles there are--hardware pill picking robots; reliable, exhaustive drug interaction databases--seem to have already been solved.

What is it about pharmacy or any other profession that makes it vulnerable? Manjoo articulates the factors quite well:

Musings on Education: Technology vs Innovation

Educators are struggling to integrate technology into their classrooms, but we're losing sight of something much more important: Innovation.

The words "Technology" and "Innovation" are inextricably interrelated to the point where people tend to think of the two as being synonymous. I know I do. I mean if someone really asked us to articulate the difference between the two, we could come up with something reasonable. But, whatever--it's just a matter of semantics, right? Or so I thought.

I've just realized--and I mean "just" as in ten minutes ago--that if you really take the time to think about "Technology" vs "Innovation", there are huge, fundamental differences between the two terms. Fine, but why should you care? Here's my modest claim:

Understanding the difference between "Technology" and "Innovation" is what will save America.

Intrigued now?

BitmapButton: A custom-skinnable ActionScript button

Source code for a simple, skinnable ActionScript button class that includes a really handy arbitrary data field.

Now that I'm a whole 20 days into learning how to code in Flash's ActionScript language, I'm getting pretty dang good.

Yesterday I needed to create a button for the Flash grading app, but I didn't want to use the default fl.controls.Button class that resembles standard HTML form buttons.

I wanted to be able to skin the button with my own Bitmaps that I would generate in Flash. I figured that the easiest way to do this would be to build my own custom button class. So I did:

Musings on Education: Last year's seniors begin college!

It's odd to refer to my seniors as being from "last year," considering that it was only three months ago! But most of them are now in their first couple of weeks of college and a number of them have been kind enough to tell me how my class helped them get ready--which was my #1 goal for their Senior English experience.

This is me beaming with pride--in myself as a teacher, but really for my students. As I told them in the last week of class, their lives, their successes, are my legacy. Whatever small role I played in leading them toward success is my contribution to this planet, what makes my life and my time here worthwhile.

"omg so i'm apologizing right now because i always complained when we had to do all that stuff with creating a thesis but today it actually paid off in my com class! my professor was so impressed with my example thesis! haha so i take back all those dirty looks!"
-Brianna W.

And, by the way, Brianna was the student who would tweet about how boring (or occasionally interesting?! Maybe?) my classes were!

Musings on Education: A different response to Brill's article on education reform

In my previous post I introduced Steven Brill's article about education reform and pointed out a minor flaw in Brill's argument. That post served as the jumping-off point for a great discussion in the post's comments. I feel like Jack and I made more progress in that discussion than I've heard in the education reform debate in the last five years! Check it out!

Here in part two we turn to an excellent piece by Shantanu Sinha, the President and COO of the amazing Khan Academy. I'm proud to say that Shantanu also happens to be a friend and a former roommate of mine!

Shantanu's response:
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/08/25/america-must-break-the-machine-of-industrial-era-education/

The first thing that jumped out at me from Shantanu's article was:

"I think the entire conversation has been hi-jacked by issues surrounding the adults and little has been done to address the needs of students.  If we spent more time thinking about what the students are actually experiencing, we would realize that we designed a very impersonal system that horribly misses their individual needs."

I think every teacher feels this tension. This lack of individualization is most obvious and apparent in the math and sciences, which is the area that Khan Academy is focusing on improving. And it isn't that teachers don't care enough to provide the individual-focused attention that's required, it's that it simply isn't possible given the complexity of the skills involved and the practical realities of the time and energy such organization and remediation would require.

Helping solve part of this problem is a big part of my motivation for creating EssayTagger.com.

Musings on Education: Nit-picking Steven Brill's article on education reform

Here's an interesting exchange that I just caught wind of off of my Twitter feed:

First there's Steven Brill's article, "The School Reform Deniers". In it he argues that the problems with America's public education system are "un-debatable" based on the facts that he has uncovered. His main criticism is with teachers' unions and he claims that they are, primarily, self-serving entities that are disingenuous about improving education. Read the article for yourself and decide the merits of his argument; I'll remain silent on that one.

But as an English teacher, I do have to point out one flaw in his argument. He states, as an example of the "un-debatable" power of fact:

I have now worked my way through a fog of claims that give new meaning to the notion that if you repeat something that is plainly untrue enough times it starts to seem true, or at least becomes part of the debate. For example, there’s the refrain from the deniers, including [Diane] Ravitch, that charter schools skim only the best students in a community. Some may, but not the best ones like those in the KIPP or Success Academies networks, where students are admitted by lottery and which teach the same ratio of learning disabled students as the traditional public schools. Those are facts.

Indeed, this is a fact that I completely accept. But there's a key phrase in his statement that he does not examine closely enough: "students are admitted by lottery." This is a fact. He's doing a good job stating it clearly. But what does that mean, to be admitted by lottery? Well, for starters, it means that the family had to apply for this education lottery. That is obvious. That is a fact.

But here's where a bit of subtlety and insight comes in: do all families in the neighborhood apply for this lottery? Doubtful. I'd be shocked if even half the families applied. Application to the lottery is a self-selecting filter. The significance of this cannot be underestimated.