an inconvenient truth...

Today in the Clear Spring School, my middle school students will be decorating objects they are making through the use of veneers and milk paints. My lower elementary school students will be working on wheeled objects. This evening my editor from Fine Woodworking will arrive for a photo shoot that will likely take all day tomorrow.

There is a temptation to believe that all new things, are good, particularly if we have to spend a lot of money on them. This is not always the case. Everything has a good side and a bad side, and while digital technologies including smart phones, have usefulness, they also have well documented adverse effect.

And yet parents are often ill equipped to navigate and make clear choices for their kids, and are unwilling to draw important lines as to appropriate use.

Students, if given a choice and an opportunity, know the difference between the real world and the artificial construct, and while it may seem convenient to buy their silence by putting digital technology in their hands, the wiser course is to empower them to create. It can be music, theater, or hammers and saws. But when kids do real things, real growth follows. T

My call is not that we take things away from our kids but that we give them real things to do. The inconvenient truth is that learning is messy, it makes noise, and has concrete consequences... unlike fingers sliding over glass, it has real effects.

Make, fix, create and increase the likelihood that others learn lifewise