BBC’s Radio 4 first tweet for 2014 was a thrush with a bright blue sky background and a quotation from The Darkling Thrush – a poem that Thomas Hardy dated December 31st, 1900. It’s all rather grim and gloomy. The poem records the desolation of winter, the dregs of the day and the end of the century. This is no…
What is more discouraging in history than the way in which, again and again, the human spirit is freed from its shackles only to be more tightly bound by its liberators? – Opening sentence of The Technique of Progressive Education A. Gordon Melvin 1932. 1932 – two years before the founding of Poughkeepsie Day School and a time…
Cross-posted from Josie’s Blog Did you know that Poughkeepsie Day School now has a Fab Lab? It’s short for fabrication laboratory – a place where people tinker, design, code, create, re-purpose, mess about, invent, make and play with stuff. It’s right off the Chapman Room. It’s in the pilot and prototype stage but we are already seeing results. Do you…
Most Wednesday mornings the lower school assembles in the Chapman Room and parents are welcome. It’s usually a showcase for the work of the classroom and often includes the opportunity to sing. First the Hokey-Pokey On a recent Wednesday a seventh grader led children, parents and teachers in singing and dancing the hokey–pokey. It was music, movement and a great…
“So the children of a democracy learn to take their place in the world of tomorrow.” The British Council has made its film collection public. What a wonderful gift. Take for example Learning to Live. Made in 1941 it presents: A typical school day for the three children of the Brown family at Nursery, Junior, and Senior Schools, and the…
Wonderful pictures of what looks like a creative classroom in a pre-Plowden primary school. Look at the desk arrangements. From the Imperial War Museum collection.
Thanks to my Twitter feed I saw this short BBC news piece about recently discover aerial photographs of the battlefields of the western front. Watch it if you can. Taken from an airship in 1919, the scale of the devastation is revealed in new and astonishing ways: Shattered towns and villages, the shell-holes and the thousands of miles of trenches…
The coffee houses of the Enlightenment; the Paris salons of Modernism – two examples of the spaces conducive to innovation and new ideas. Here’s Steven Johnson on how good ideas happen to good minds and how they are incubated over time and in spaces where intellectual diversity thrives and connection happens. Could classrooms be like that? Faculty meetings? Admin meetings?…
Part two of: The Age of Bricolage: School in the Change Blender: Technology is always disruptive: Think of the introduction of the printing press, or the combine harvester, or the typewriter. Think of the mechanical looms and the factory system of the industrial revolution that destroyed a way of life for cottage industry weavers. Some of them took to frame…
If blogging is supposed to have an element of timeliness then I have given up on that ideal. After all – I am still writing about stuff from the NAIS annual conference in February. Fess Parker died in March and while my mind went instantly to the Davy Crockett craze of my childhood, it’s only now that I have found…
The Art History class took off for Italy last week. It’s well over 4,000 miles from Poughkeepsie to Zurich and on to Florence but here’s the extra mile: Wayne created these books – in Florentine red – one for every student. It’s for notes,sketches and reference on the trip. The sleeve at the back has a map of the city…
With google now declared the word of the decade, tweet the word of the year and unfriend now officially in the OED, the English language is clearly still on the move. When it comes to brand name eponyms some make it, some don’t. In the UK at least hoover is a familiar verb but here is one that did not…
On the last day of the year, time to show an affirming flame as another low dishonest decade ends. I’ll leave all the best and worst and top ten lists to others, but merely remark – that for all the base mendacity in the real world, life in school remains a place of joy and possibility. The words and phrases…
From the Poughkeepsie New Yorker (Over 78,000 Read-Round-the-Clock 35 Cents Weekly) December 1941 came this news item about Poughkeepsie Day School. It was the annual Christmas Festival “with many of the school’s alumni present, as well as parents and friends.” It was a community event. There were student made decorations including a clay figures and ornaments that were donated to…
This summer I visited the quite wonderful Hancock Shaker Village. It’s where in craft and design, form meets function with simplicity and beauty. So many interesting things to see and pay attention to. Of course – I had to visit the schoolhouse, now separated from the main buildings by a busy highway. The school room was bright and well lit…