Saturday, July 07, 2012

Box Making, Day one, Eliot School...

Today is my first day of box making at the Eliot School in Jamaica Plain. The school, founded in 1676, has a rich history, and now, besides classes to children and adults offers an arts and woodworking outreach program to Boston Schools.

I will have 12 students in my class, and will take a few photos, but am having trouble loading photos to the blog. I will be busier than usual for the next two days and may not get much written before I get back to Arkansas on Monday. Tonight I meet for a potluck with a group of MIT educators forming a new charter school, sprout based on project based learning.

As we contemplate our return of woodworking to Boston Schools, I want to thank Glen Gurner for a paper he sent researching the history of Educational Sloyd at the North Bennet St. School. From it, I share the following quote from Pauline Aggasiz Shaw:
“The whole boy should be sent to school and not just part of him; it is not enough to train the intellect alone...but the eye and the hand are together the most trustworthy leaders of the brain.”
Make, fix and create...

2 comments:

  1. I would like to know more about the Sprout, Inc. meeting- what are they working on,etc?

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  2. Sprout is attempting to form a charter school, and is applying for approval. They are very much interested in hands-on learning and are inspired by projects including robotics, having students build their own bikes. They have a maker lab including 3-D printers. Also have folks working in biological cultures and other areas of exploration. I would be interested in seeing their proposal. I had made the assumption that they were advocating project based learning, but that is only part of their philosophy. Their website is http://thesprouts.org/

    I think this could serve as their mission statement:

    sprout is a community education and research organization devoted to creating and supporting the community-driven learning, teaching, and investigation of science. We're united by a passion to reclaim science as a richly personal and creative craft.

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