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.

Saw this on boingboing
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-myth-of-the-panicking_b_83...
This except makes me happy. I always tend to focus on how bad things are in disaster situations. And why shouldn't I if that's all the news media focuses on. But this article is saying that those are isolated incidents and that the majority of the surviving communities of disaster are strong and even become stronger in new and interesting ways.
With the current happenings on the other side of the globe in Africa and the Middle East, it is easy to see that there are signs of a large scale unraveling. It's not just Libya, or the country of the week. Read deeper and it's happening all over the place over there. I think these events are dominoes tipping with lots more to come over the next year.
The point of this post is to remind myself that in hard times and even disaster, earthquake or war or anything else, the good side of humans does prevail, and hopefully like this article says, more often than not. I have a renewed drive to make myself better physically and mentally. In emergent situations our best ally is going to be health. The healthier we are of mind and body, the better we can act in emergent situations with calm and with respect for the people in our immediate community.

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

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.