At a recent conference a speaker suggested that choosing a school was akin to choosing a cell phone* – as soon as you’ve made the decision another brand seems to offer appealing options and you worry: Did I make the right choice? So – to cut through the confusion when it comes to school it’s … Read more
The American Flashlight, Game Boards, Quiz Shows, a Climbing Tree, Cop Car, Electric Robot and more. All at the Electricity Trade Show in the 3rd and 4th grade yesterday. Here are a few pictures. More on Flickr
We are experimenting with an additional way to help people keep in touch with what’s going on at PDS. If you twitter (twitter.com) consider following @PoughkeepsieDay. We are linking it to our Facebook account as another way to keep up with what’s happening. Let us know what you think. And of course we appreciate your … Read more
Seth Godin is a marketeer and prolific generator of ideas. His blog often has interesting nuggets about education. The purpose of school is to….here’s his first ten of 27 answers. Any you would like to add? Remove? (My personal favorite is number 23 – sandwiched in between the sublimely lofty and the tongue-in-cheek – Minimize … Read more
It’s day one of the second semester in the high school. That means the start of new high school courses. Here we are at the first meeting of Physics of Motion. The first experimental challenge: Find the relationship between the distance a ball runs down an incline and the time it takes to roll. Students … Read more
There’s another of those scary science stories in today’s NYTimes: Split Outcome in Texas Battle in Teaching Evolution. The real scary part is such ignorance is still alive and kicking, and not just in Texas. And when it comes to textbooks – as Texas goes, there goes the nation. Meanwhile next month we celebrate the … Read more
As if on cue, the moving truck with the new furniture or Kenyon House arrived right as the Peacemakers Assembly ended. A willing crew of high school students soon had it inside and assembled.
PDS marked the inauguration at its Peacemakers Assembly on Tuesday. Entitled “Stony the road we trod” the event began with the singing of James Weldon Johnson’s Lift Every Voice and Sing. In the collage you can see pictures of the participants from high school to lower school. Ater lunch everyone returned to the JEJ theater … Read more
More about our assembly later but here is a screenshot from the NYTimes website. The middle school Photo Journalism class previewed some of the pictures on the site. One student sent a picture. When the class noticed that it got published it sent another one. Picturing the Inauguration: The Readers’ Album PDS MAKES THE NY … Read more
There’s a rather nice set of photographs by Karl Rabe on- line at the Poughkeepsie Journal. This one shows the gym with it’s new maple hardwood sports floor, reinforced walls and retractable hoops. There’s also a gym divider to enable flexibility of use. It was taken last week during a boy’s varsity basketball game. The … Read more
The weather played havoc with the Winter Festival and instead of an all-school event it was presented in segments. We managed to celebrate with some beautiful music and dance nevertheless. Here are a few pictures from two events.
PDS has new science laboratories. Time for a poem from the Czech poet-scientist Miroslav Holub. In the Microscope Here too are the dreaming landscapes, lunar, derelict. Here too are the masses, tillers of the soil. And cells, fighters who lay down their lives for a song. Here too are cemeteries, fame and snow. And I … Read more
Question: What do you need to be creative and succeed in the future? Point number one: We want less formality in schools and more creativity in the classroom Here’s an interesting story from the UK: students from schools all over the country met at the Tate Modern to plan and design a manifesto for creativity. … Read more
In a new book, The Venturesome Economy Amar Bhidé challenges The World is Flat notion proposed by Thomas Friedman in his book of that name. Bhidé concludes that: a.) the world is not flat and b.) that the people he calls the “techno-nationalists”— have got it wrong. (At the very least we could agree that … Read more
