Sarah Wrote That

“If you had an amazing teacher who was talented and passionate and given the freedom and support to teach well [...] that was just 100 times more important than anything else.” →

- Deborah Kenny via Bob Herbert

Update: this and this

The Fascination Of What’s Difficult

Laura started a good discussion at Apt. 11D about Friedman’s take on the need for education reform.  The moustache of understanding Friedman thinks that education needs to focus on… well, on what Tom Friedman focuses on:

So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

(You might note the missing gerund in front of “entrepreneurship”—perhaps ‘teaching’ or ‘encouraging’?)  But, as Laura notes, it’s heartening simply to see education on the Times editorial page, and Friedman manages to avoid putting too many metaphors through his usual enhanced interrogation.

Is it useful, though, to draw the kind of distinctions the piece is about?  The idea of teaching creativity is more than the inadvertently ironic fodder for self-satisfied hipster smirking it initially seems. 

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