Remember the cool word "asymptotes" from your calculus days? Well, you might remember that an asymptote is sort of the calculus version of "banks on the river" as functions take off to infinity (think y = 1/x as x approaches 0 - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hyperbola_one_over_x.svg for what this looks like).
What are the asymptotes of education? Can educators imagine a day when we teach Tony Wagner's seven survival skills he illustrates in The Global Achievement Gap and not NCLB-driven, fact-based standards? What if NCLB went away, though? What would we do to hold ourselves accountable?
We complain about disjointed, discrete standards and accountability measures that do harm to kids, but what system would we design to go after the Global Acievement Gap if there were no limits?
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
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