post workshop thoughts

Warning: This is going to be a way random post and I am not really sure what I am talking about on half of the issues.

Today I went to an all day workshop entitled, "Preparing Children for an Changed World". Most education workshops SUCK! The presenters are old, retired people who like to make money off of staff development where they provide no real meat or application to their thoughts. Today's was totally different. It was really amazing and thought provoking and I am a REALLY tough audience. Anyway, the speaker William Daggett Ed.D. was incredible. He is a former teacher, administer, parent of 5, and he was the Secretary of Education for the state of New York. (shout out to Ken Murray) He has been a paid consultant for the state of TX for the past few years and is a renowned speaker in the education realm.

Anyway, he talked about the next 5-10 years a lot today and it really got my brain moving. Keep in mind, I know nothing about Social Security because neither Cody nor I contribute to it because teachers and fireman have their own retirement systems. Dr. Daggett was giving these alarming stats about how the baby boomers who are about to retire averaged a birth rate of 4.6 for every one female and our generation X has a birth rate of 1.3. So basically the boomers are about to bust the system and we Gen Xers don't have enough warm bodies to contribute to it. Plus the average length of life is increasing and increasing. All of a sudden I was having a panic attack about the financial status of our world.

Then he talked about the semantic level (for the noneducation people, basically it is the level of difficulty that you can read with 75% accuracy) of high school graduates today. People, it is below a user manual for a DVD player. It was unbelievable. CRAZY!

Finally he said that America is the only nation that pushes English in the form of prose on kids to the extent that we do. The majority of communication in the world is now electronic (i.e. websites, emails, blogs) and that in Eastern countries, their high school literature classes are not on Shakespeare and poetry, but on being able to comprehend and write effective and efficient document literacy instead of prose. He said, "Schools are museums and administrators are the curators." We are perfecting educational and technology trends from the 70's and lying to kids that this will make them successful in the changing world. It blew my mind.

Anyway, we was great and had lots of amazing thoughts even though he stepped on my comfort zone. This is a way random blog, so I'll try to write one more suitable for pop culture tomorrow! :)