On NPR today I heard a piece about the Environmental Protection Agency and the future-looking new head of the department. He said that he sees a future where the EPA is less and less needed because humans will have learned how to use non toxic chemicals and chemicals mimicking natural compounds. He's even going so far as pushing for EPA's own scientists to come up with their own chemistry solutions to our cess pool of a system.
This got me relating this approach to education. What if teacher's were incentivised to take educational solutions into their own hands?
I take a further look at this approach. I think teachers, along with open source communities, co-op business through the lens of the internet, we can take educational solutions into our own hands. This approach gives me great hope. In the last 6 years, I have been routinely stupified by the beauracracy that runs our education system. To top it off, I am now seeing that the way we train teachers to work in our schools has it's own set of problems, disjointed from the education system itself.
I am going to become a credentialed teacher. That is, a publicly accepted member of the teaching community(I think I already am). I just think it is going to be in a whole new way than any solutions either bureaucracy-ladened system can dish up to save how we educate our youth.

thinking about the approach to developing the hands-on classroom development, I have been dwelling on the problem of how teachers will train for industrial and career/tech classrooms. The student demand is there, but even if most of the administrators wanted to open more "shop classes", there is a shortage of teachers properly trained to be safe and effective in a shop setting.
When the boomers leave public school shops, we need to take action now to capture the vast wealth of information and know-how these teachers are hard pressed to pass on for lack of administative support, and teacher training programs suitable for shop teachers to take their places.
It's a tough problem from any angle, but today I struck me that a good starting place for developing these shops is not at first building student demand, finding administrative support, or training teachers properly. It struck me that even if the perfect storm of all of these came together, the state of most public school shops is less that state of the art. In a lot of cases they are pretty dangerous places, with tons of old, out of tune, tools and machines. But it's nothing that can't be fixed and maintained.

Trying to get some TPA work done and it just keeps getting worse. The 3rd and 4th case study are about special needs students, adaptation, and modification.
What's messed up is that if I were to submit these with out having someone edit and review them, there is pretty much no chance I would ever pass these things. This is the worst area for me. I'm not a stellar writter to begin with, then I have to regurgitate textbook information, which is not exactly me forte either. I'm beginning to wonder if there is a modification for teacher-candidates(basically students) who have "learning disabilities", because I'm horribly disabled for these damn things.
Why isn't the teacher credentialing process rooted in the classroom. I can teach students how to build things and use machines. I would need some coaching to learn how to deal with all of the special needs in the classroom. This is a shining example where the teacher training methods need some help.

Received these in my inbox from a friend
thanks Carmelita Hinton

1. To work not for marks or badges, but to discover truth and to grow in knowledge of the universe and in the understanding of men, to treasure the hard stretching of oneself, to render service.

2. To learn to appreciate and participate in the creative arts where man gives expression to his struggle for communication of his inner life and for beauty, and to grant these arts great prestige.

3. To believe in manual labor, be glad to do one's share of it, and proud of the skills learned in the doing.

4. To play just as wholeheartedly as one works, but watching out a bit for the competitive angle, remembering that play is for recreation and an increased joy in living.

5. To want to lend a hand to the community at large, not to live in an "ivory tower."

6. To combat prejudices caused by differences in economic, political, racial, and religious backgrounds; to strive for a world outlook, putting oneself in others' places, no matter how far away or how remote.

7. To have old and young work together in a true comradeship relation, stressing the community and its need for the cooperation of all.

I'm moving forward on building my personal shop in our garage. It is tough to put time into building it when it is uncertain if we are going to live there in the future. But I have developed a design sense over the years of building with the possibility of removing(without a crowbar). I build with bolts in the attachment point to the structure so that things are easily removed and re-purposed. Even if we do stay at the house, I would be able to move parts of my shop; wood storage, table assemblies, etc., to a school shop with relative ease. And given the state of most school shops, if I am going to get up and running in a timely manner, this will be a crucial strategy.

I dug around taskstream a little more today. They house a huge body of educational standards in an asp framework which will make it a real bitch to scrape from the site. I managed to get TPA1 out of taskstream with a minimum of reformatting and onto my site. I'm not sure the best way to get standards into a drupal site, or how to structure them when they are there. They need to be able to be referenced and asscociated with users. would this be in a module? and different sets of standards can act through a common API or something?
I want to build the system so that the standards themselves are accessable to the community on a very wide scale.CTE standards can and should be able to link to municipal codes in an open manner.

I saw a wall space that was nicely framed and at the end of a public hallway. It seemed like a great place for a bulletin board. If I build one and put it there, I think community might be strengthened.

Saw this in a Maker magazine article. Definitely want to incorporate this into shop curriculum. It will be important in the future to have local shops that can fix things. Good design accounts for fixing. And Fixing incorporates a wide variety of skills that can be fostered early in education.
I plan on hanging these posters in my classroom. Now if I can only get a large format printed? Download posters in 6 languages and print your own locally!
http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto

Tonight I gave a good presentation on some of my reflections on Literacy and it's role in my area of focus, the hands-on, or industrial/tech ed. I hadn't finished my formal lesson plan for the presentation because honestly, I told them, my head was straying to other issues of sustainability/longevity for my area of focus. I have to bring something more than an IA credential to the schools, or the certainty of my job, and passion, might end up on the chopping block soon. I might find a nice job in a more affluent district that can support a shop program, but ultimately that wouldn't be in my best interest because reality is much larger than that, and shops are going away.
I improvised my way through my presentation tonight, which is always a good thing to practice once in a while. Especially because I am not in the classroom while I work on my credential, which should be a standard practice throughout. I'll go so far as to saying we need to include teacher training programs in more meaningful ways to real school settings where candidates can get to know their students, and watch first hand how teachers manage a classroom. Students who are interested in a possible teaching career should be able to start work towards this early on in their education, in small quantities at first, but connected and real to the student.

teacher-candidates need to be paid