Once Upon a College: Energy for Me

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Energy for Me

This video was shot by students from Isleboro School under the tutelage of the Island Institute at last year's Energy for ME conference held at Schoodic SERC.

(Islesboro is an island in Penobscot Bay, Maine.)

Energy for ME (a pun on maine's zip code denominator "ME") is an excellent organization, run by Island Institute and the partner teachers and schools, and they do stellar work with their various programs, including this program of energy education for island and shore-town high school students, their teachers, and parents. I'm very pleased and proud to be able to help them out, and also to involve our own students in this whenever I can.

For, as one of our own students mentioned in class yesterday, it's going to take a lot of this kind of education before people begin to figure out what to do to fix our current climate and energy crisis.

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What this is about

A long time ago, in an educational universe far away and almost certain never to return, the professors of a certain small college experimented with experiential learning and taught their students not just to "read, write, think, and figure", but also to do practical things with that learning. Educational theory and research results from Kurt Hahn to modern scholars suggests strongly that experiential learning works better, particularly for active young people. It also matters greatly that young people have the physical and mental confidence to do something positive with their learning, particularly to make social and environmental change, in other words, to lead. This kind of confidence comes with physical challenge and being made to defend your ideas out loud, among other things. The small college was built around these ideas, deliberately, by a group of determined and innovative educators. With this success, along came the inevitable bean-counters who believed such a valuable education was way too expensive for those students. Wanting to keep more of the students' money (to pay their six figure salaries, of course), they cut the programs the first chance they got and went all-online where the teaching help is way cheaper and less demanding of budgets for tools and materials. I happen to think it was well worth the investment for any student who really engaged with the opportunity, but... bean counters gonna count beans. So the college is, for all useful purposes, gone, or at least changed beyond all recognition and not any good at teaching anyone anything practical at all. But the memories remain. And, despite the best efforts of the new administrators to erase them, so does quite a bit of open-source computer data to remind us of those memories, in the form of this and several other blogs and video pages online. In the case of this blog, the blog data were mine, not the college's, all along, even though they tried many times to get their cold dead bean-counter hands on them. So fuck 'em. Oh, and yes, this particular professor cusses more now that I don't have to worry about pointy-headed supervisors. Fuck them too. Enjoy. And remember, llegitimi non carborundum. If you're one of our former students and looking for stories you wrote or photographs or records of projects you worked on, just use the keyword search function or the chronological record to find your projects. They're all still here. Drop me a line using the comments section. I'd love to hear from you.

Once Upon a College

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Energy for Me

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What this is about

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