WonderingThoughts

How many infomercials are we going to see about diet, workouts, food to eat, to not eat….  Our whole lives, nutrition bytes have been thrown at us at school, on the tv, and in the restaurants.  Yet,.. for me, my first thoughts on nutrition began in 7th in the home ec’ class with the food pyramid. So, as a child I was taught the food pyramid was the way to eat. And, then years later my kids said they learned something better and I was out of date.  Apparently, there are new ideas about how we should be eating which improve old ideas. So, I’ll have to admit I lost faith in the principle as presented to me, and started to rethink my nutrition. Well, this blip is not about nutrition. Recently, I experienced a moment of motivational shut-down.  Not one of my students shutting down.  Me.  Considering myself a high functioning adult, who likes to run with other over achievers, these are (thankfully) rare experiences.  Many weekends and months passed evaluating what happened.  It was love /

My disclosure. If you have followed this blog, you should have picked up on two ideas.  Two models. As a science guy, here is the disclosure moment: Hypothesis, theory, law, and model.  What is being discussed in my blog, is a model.  We live in a time where people seem to be confused by what each of these mean. In education, it can be a bit worse.  When we look at development in education, happening by teachers within their own classrooms, it is not  a very scientific process.  If it were scientific, there would be control sets of students.  Students would be selected by random for various subsets.  While universities may run scientific studies on students, it is a process most teachers (in my humble opinion) consider too slow and unfair. What I mean is, if a teacher thinks she has a good idea, and it is showing progress in her classroom, she is not going to stop and decide which kids are going to be in the control.  She is not likely to ask the teacher next door if he would consider