Welcome (back). Let's get this class year started!

Leading off
So after a crazy week of arrivals, followed by a crazy week of long falls, we're about to kick the class year. Everybody get psyched! I have a craptonne to say, but before I begin, I want to say welcome to all the new students, and welcome back to all the returning students! For those of you who haven't met me yet, I'm Asa Rosenfield, and I'm one of your elected representatives for the Educational Programs Committee (EPC) (the other is Gabe Lurz). "What's EPC?" you ask. Good question. EPC is the educational programs committee. We are a large committee composed mostly of faculty and staff that help determine the way education works at the Putney School. Since a central tenant of progressive education is that everything is education, EPC has big picture control of nearly everything that happens at the Putney School. Currently we're working on the long term project of revamping the graduation requirements. It's still a work in progress, but I'm hoping to share them with the greater school community soon. If you have thoughts/comments/concerns about the Putney curriculum, feel free to email them to me or Gabe, and we'd be happy to work with our colleagues in EPC to see what we can implement. Remember, Putney wants you to take the reins in your own education,* so, talk talk to you teachers, talk to your friends, and talk to us, and we'll make Putney Work for you!

Your weekly reading
Moving on, I've decided to create a weekly reading feature. Every week, I'll post an interesting article about the changing face of education, and solicit your comments in response, feel free to email me, tweet me, or contact me in person, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. This weeks article comes from mother Jones, and is about the growing test opt out movement in standard classrooms and possible progressive alternatives to help all Americans succeed. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/opt-out-standardized-testing-overload

Graduation reqs update 
I don't have anything to report this week, but I'll definitely have a call for community input in the coming weeks, and I'm also going to try to have a panel discussion about the new graduation requirements at some point later in the trimester.

A pet project
So this has less to do directly with EPC, and more to do with Putney leadership positions in general. Throughout the year I'm hoping to push for instant runoff elections in leadership positions that aren't standards. If you don't know what that is, here's a primer:

 

 Note that we would use a modified STV without districts 

for positions where candidates are elected separately

The long and short of this is that it creates a more democratic process by eliminating strategic votes and split tickets. As far as I can tell, this is a move that wouldn't necessarily require a change to the Putney constitution and wouldn't create that much more work for those administering the elections. I plan to post more about this as we get the year rolling, but what do y'all think? Is STV a good choice for the Putney community?

Signoff 
Thanks everyone, new and old for reading. As always, any questions can be directed to me or Gabe, in person or via email, you can also use the comments section on the blog. More information can be found in the contact us link on the left sidebar. Thanks again, and have a great week!

*someone please make this tagline into a retro propaganda poster. I believe in you Putney community. plz deliver.

Some Articles

Hey everyone, both new and returning. I hope your summer has been great! There's a lot I want to talk to everyone about, but it's late, and I don't have time for a full writeup. Instead, I have these two recent articles from NPR. One is about a high schooler in Colorado leaving a traditional classroom to explore independent learning, the other is about creatively redesigning the classroom space. I encourage you to read these articles and share your thoughts with me. I'll write up another post with my own thoughts and some other important stuff in the next few days!

Enjoy the last few days of summer and I look forward to seeing y'all!

Welcome back: the past three weeks and some thoughts on standardized testing

Hello again. I haven't been posting for the last few weeks for a very simple reason: there hasn't been much to post about. Two of the past three weeks haven't even had an EPC meeting, the department heads instead electing to meet privately.* Anyway, we did meet last Thursday, and we're all just trying to hammer out the graduation requirements. I continue to look forward to sharing those with y'all when they're ready.

In other news: standardized tests! If you're a Junior, you've been dealing with the SAT and ACT over the past few weeks. These are a pain, I know, but at least you don't have it as bad as students in public schools, who have to take an average of 117 standardized tests in their school careers:

Talking. Pineapples.
It's amazing how many of our nation's problems can be traced back to monied interests. All of this is, thankfully, not a major issue at the Putney School, but it's always nice to have a reminder of how good we have it. As your EPC representative I promise not to allow standardized-style testing to incur any further onto the Putney curriculum, except, perhaps an option for the school to help facilitate prep for the SAT and ACT (possibly, depending on circumstances), which I think have slightly more value than multiple standardized tests a year for kindergarteners. Either way, I think Putney should look at trying to stop purchasing Big 2 textbooks (Pearson & McGraw-Hill). 

What do you think, what are your experiences with standardized testing? Should we be trying to move away from paying big ed (who honestly rip us off anyway)? Respond in the comments, or you can email or tweet me your answers.

See you all next week!

*I have met this blatant attempt to exclude the student voice from the educational forum of the school with brave resistance, and I invite you all to join me in the fight against the corrupt, power-hungry adults of this school with the American spirit of resistance. For justice for FREEDOM!**

**Please note: Sarcasm

First Meeting(s)

I've had a busy week, and I'm still sort of riding the high of the election (thank you all again). It's pretty difficult to summarize all I've learned, but I would be remiss not to try.

This weekend was busy, I was with family over passover, and I spent the weekend telling anybody who would listen (and some who wouldn't) about how excited I am to be serving my friends and community, building this blog and writing the first post, and communicating with Gabe and Emily via email about entering our new positions. Emily wanted to meet with us to tell us about what EPC does and the projects they are currently working on. We scheduled an appointment for Monday during conference block.

During the meeting, Emily introduced us to the functions of EPC. Most of you probably already know generally how EPC works, but I'll summarize for you: EPC is the committee charged with running the curriculum of this school. This being Putney, though, curriculum doesn't just mean academics. In addition to the daytime classes EPC also has a hand in overseeing the Evening Arts, Afternoon Activities, and Residential life programs. In fact, there are very few programs (notably alumni relations, finances, and admissions) that EPC doesn't help run. Because it handles so many facets of our community, EPC is massive, with around fifteen people working with the committee at any given time.* The committee usually divides into smaller groups to get things done, both working in long term, permanent groups managing things like exhibitions and tutorials, and short term, ad-hoc groups working on specific projects.

Speaking of specific projects, Emily brought us up to date on the current massive undertaking of EPC: rewriting the Graduation Requirements. They've been rebuilding the requirements from the ground up, digging down and asking, "What should high school really be about?" The new system is massive, and really drafty right now, but I look forward to sharing it with you and getting your input further down the line.

So finally (whew) we're at Thursday. We arrive in Library 1 ready to work and we're greeted by all of the current members of EPC. We exchange formalities, and then dive right in. First task is to choose what committees we're on. That goes by without a hitch, and we move on to wordsmithing the graduation requirements. It took a while. We split off into small groups and worked on parts of the graduation requirements. It took my group one and a half hours to decide on four sentences. To be fair, I get it. Those four sentences are pretty important, and we need to be clear and concise, and I actually enjoyed really thinking about how we want Putney students to be able to communicate. That said, I can see why it's already taken two and a half years to write what we have so far, and it's probably going to take another two years to finish.

So, in all, a pretty good first week on EPC, I'm looking forward to working with the wonderful people on the committee, and I'll share again with y'all next week!

-Asa

*For those of you who want to know, the usual makeup is: The Head of School, All the Department Heads, The Residential Life Coordinator (who is always the dean of students),  The Afternoon Activities/Work Program Head, The College Counselor, The Dean of Faculty, Two Student Representatives, and a Partridge in a Pear Tree.

Thank You and Hello

Hi! Asa here.

I want to start of by thanking you all for electing me to EPC. Student EPC representative is a position of great trust, and I'll do my best to live up to that trust. A standing committee like EPC tends to have some bureaucratic inertia, so change isn't going to come quickly, but as I take office I'm going to be working hard to shape the discussion to the educational ideals of you, the student body, while also making EPC more transparent and open to direct input. This blog is a first step towards that goal.

Now, for the Nitty Gritty stuff. I'm going to try and update this blog, either with text or with video, and sometimes with both every weekend that school is in session. These will be the detail posts, talking about what EPC is working on, and calling for your input. In addition, I'll occasionally post over the week and when school is out. These posts are more likely to be about interesting educational research and my own personal thoughts on what progressive education means.  On top of regular posting, this site will also have a contact page, where you can contact us through all the regular and irregular methods, a page dedicated to what EPC is and does, for those of you who asked me before the elections, and a page on current EPC projects, so the wonks out there can stay in the loop on Putney educational policy (I'm not the only one, right? right?).  [Please note that these pages aren't finished yet and probably won't be for at least another week or so.] Oh, and one more thing, as the sidebar says, I might be holding conference block if interest is high enough, but for now, just feel free to shout me out whenever you see me, and I'd be happy to talk (granted that I'm not headed somewhere urgent).

That's all for now folks. I'll see you on campus Monday, and I look forward to serving you.

-Asa