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.

I was not one of the millions who watched Obamas state of the union last night, but I did readthe state of the union soon afterwards. It was inspiring, but some of the policy insight was depressingly conventional. Instead of bitching, I'll offer some of my thoughts on redeveloping our nation. I like to focuss on my local situation, and how I can make the deepest impact, while remaining local and small. as I develop my business ideas and aspirations, I keep this in mind.
When redeveloping a house, a new community focus must be kept in mind. Development for walking to services and work. Development for inter-generational living. development with passive solar planning. development for education to mix with community surrounding school campuses. develop a new systems relationship between education and industry. development for locally sourced and built goods/fixing services. Development for terrestrial wireless gateway technology in the building system of each redeveloped structure.
This last one is something I want to focus on explaining a little more. It has been hiding out in the recesses of my brain for a while and it needs some attention.

Terrestrial wireless

Logged into taskstream today and was greeted with this. have to complete it before I can continue. Not sure why this is here. It says national is collecting data, but it seems like National should have all this data about me??

Thinking more about the notion that it costs a lot of money in the best of circumstances to become a teacher in the US. This is of course, nuts. it's part of what makes the job one of the least desirable. In California where cost of living is through the roof, especially the Bay Area, it makes almost no sense to become a teacher because it is very hard to live near a lot of the schools. Sure it's ok for the veterans making 80-100K per year, but what about the 10's of thousands of new teachers we need in the next 10 years as the boomers leave.
I see breakdown on a lot of levels in education, and I think it will take an entrepreneurial take on the system to get on a sustainable course. That is what I envision for plumbob