Last weekend, my family and I headed off to the Discovery Children's Museum in Las Vegas. The main goal? Tire the kids out before we met up with friends for dinner. The secondary goal? Let them explore some pretty cool stuff and keep from beating each other up. I had been there as a kid, but wasn't quite prepared for what I saw:

That's my two hellians lifting a car - a FREAKIN' CAR! How on Earth did they do that?! Well, it's called a fulcrum. Wrapped around the amazing feat of lifting a car is a ton of science. My oldest son came up to me with a smile from ear to ear, asking if I was proud of him for being able to lift a car. More importantly, he was asking how that worked. 

Yes, son, I am, and not just because you could lift a car, but because you were curious as to how that could possibly happen. 
(let's get real here - he can barely lift his brother)

Somewhere else along the way, we talked about water. Not just talked about it, but played in it. And by we, I mean we. I got my hands into the water and started to build a dam that would ideally retain the water that was being brought into the basin. What were my kids doing? They were exploring. They were tinkering. They were learning. We talked about why the balls were floating and the LEGO pieces were sinking, talked about how the dam works, and talked about how the water pressure made it so that the ball could shoot up to the top of the structure.

One of the ladies who worked there was standing next to us at the water exhibit as I pulled out my "I want to build a school like this" ideology and she immediately thought it was cool. "Wow, if your son was learning about the Panama Canal, this dam would be a perfect way to make it meaningful." You're onto something here, kid. You really are.

There were thousands of interactive toys and gizmos and gadgets and demonstrations to mess with, but this one caught my eye. There was a design station where you build a parachute using only 3 objects. Another station was asking you to design a path for a ping pong ball to travel from A to B. The catch? There was a giant black obstruction that you couldn't go through. Yet another station was asking you to build a car that could make it down a ramp.

So why all of this? Why bother with showing pictures of my kids meandering through the Children's Museum? Because it wasn't just my half-humans who were intrigued. 10 year-olds were running around and exploring just as much, if not more, than the little ones. Teenagers, as cool and anti-fun as they seem to be when the media portrays them, were challenging each other to competitions and discovering new ideas throughout the entire museum. Not only that, but a 31 year-old dad, a 31 year-old mom, and an on-the-verge-of-senior-citizenship set of grandparents were having just as much fun as their grandkids, crawling through tunnels, engaging in the activities along the way.

While I'm fully aware that museums like these have deep-pocketed donors who help build and maintain these exhibits, we are wasting millions, no billions, of dollars every year on ridiculous intervention programs that have notoriously been proven ineffective in the long term. We have wasted millions, no billions, of dollars on teacher training to help differentiate an undifferentiatable classroom on a large scale. We keep throwing money at stuff we know doesn't work, tools that are just tools, and curriculum that is more rotten than the week-overdue milk I had to dump out after we got home.

My kids left the museum exhausted, scraped up, and angry with us that we had to leave for dinner. If we could've left them in there for another 4 hours, they would have happily obliged. I would've loved to have seen a station next to each exhibit that allowed the kids to play around with the what and learn about the why of each station, but that's not the purpose of a museum like this. Instead, we send them to school for the why and forget to have them play around with the what.

I'm working on building a school. This is a huge inspiration. In the meantime, take your kids to a museum and watch as their eyes, hearts, and imagination grow.

Rather than teaching kids to play school, why aren't we teaching kids to play as a form of school?

Happy "Come Home With Rugburns and Wide Eyes" Fishing

I'll spare the abundant shout-outs of gratitutde for the weekend that was just CUE 2015 in Palm Springs, California. Every year that I've been fortunate to attend, I walk away with something useful. Early on, it was a tool, or a whole pile of them, to try out in my classroom. Now more than ever, I don't go for tools - I attend conferences to connect with smart people. And to dance (Thanks Jennie).

Two of those people, Karl Lindgren-Streicher and Victoria Olson, posed an incredibly interesting question in a Voxer channel that we are all a part of. That question was this:

Who did we meet this year that we didn't know before who does mad cool stuff? Which one of those people are you going to reach out to and say that you're going to submit a session on that thing?

Challenge Accepted

The first person I want to ask to present with is a student, Alex Bockert. Her Instagram post that showcased a pile of paper as a sum of her year's work has evolved into a couple of on-stage presentations about school from a student's desk and I believe that her message needs to gain traction. If Alex is willing, I'd like to go in with her and facilitate a session that is centered on asking attendees to discuss and share how you, the teacher, can improve my, the student, learning. THAT would be a solid session.

The second person I want to ask to present with is Cindy Bak, a program specialist and doctoral candidate. With the outpouring of technology in districts, there has been an influx of technology coaches and TOSA positions to support them. But who supports us? Who coaches the coaches? I loved her enthusiasm and insight during the session that we were in and would love to build a CUE16 proposal with Cindy on what we can do to support each other, thereby supporting our teachers and students.

The third person I want to ask to present with is Heidi Shimamoto, a teacher in Oxnard. While in our Rockstar Jam Session for La Cucina Matematica, Heidi was overjoyed with all of the great resources that the MTBoS has provided for free, but it wasn't just a giddy and gone type of excitement. She was driven to find ways to infuse these new ideas into her classroom. At the end of the session, we asked each person to share what they've learned at CUE in an interesting way, and this is her work below. Heidi, I hope you'll put in a session with me about giving students choice:

Happy "New Connections Are Always Meaningful" Fishing