Today I came across this Washington Post opinion piece by Ezra Klein, entitled “Wall Street Steps in When Ivy Leave Fails” and I think he really hit a nail on the head.

To make this short: We live our K-12 lives waiting for college. Junior year is a whirl of SAT’s, ACT’s, AP’s, followed by the crazy fall of senior year where everyone is applying to their schools (sometimes upwards of 12 applications) and the calm of spring after everyone has been accepted. Your parents and family are so proud. You graduate and everyone is so excited… you feel like you’ve accomplished the hardest challenge of your life.

Then you go to school and learn some really neat things, meet awesome people and learn to be yourself. Is it valuable? Yes. Does it leave you feeling confident that you will excel in the work force? (oh right, that’s why we went to college isn’t it?) Not really.

So why are Wall Street and Teach for America (polar opposities of one another) able to get most of this new Ivy League talent?  It’s because both of these positions have something extremely important in common: they give college students what they know best. An application to fill out, and interview and the promise that you will learn the skills you need to be successful and will finish off their two year commitments able to do anything you want.

Wait…an application to a program with the promise to provide skills for future careers? That sounds a lot like college, right?

Exactly, it’s all we know and it’s [almost]  all we were taught.

I’ve been reading a lot of education blogs lately, especially blogs that discuss technology in education. It has brought a lot of ideas to the front of my head; some new, some I’ve already thought but I have just forgotten about over the past few months. This is a list of some of my beliefs. I’m not going to go in depth to describe them. These are thoughts and there are definitely some generalizations in here. If you wanted to talk with me further about something that would be awesome, feel free to do so in the comments.

The average student in a public school today is often bored during the school day. 

Much of the content being taught in an average public school does not properly reflect what many Americans do when they graduate and eventually go out into the “real world”.

Our public schools do not put enough focus on what students are interested in. 

There is no incentive  for a teacher to go outside of the comfort zone of typical structured lessons based on core standards and test prep. This is what the administration and eventually our students expect of them.

A teacher that does try to step out of this comfort zone, in order to engage or challenge the students, will not necessarily be supported or praised for this decision. It is very unlikely they would receive increased benefits or a higher salary. 

Technology is a valuable tool in schools. But technology could never replace strong instruction and student support from a guiding teacher.

Technology is not going to be used in innovative, modern ways if you don’t have someone innovative and modern there to use the technology. Because of that there is no point in shoving  technology down each teachers throat. But make sure you do have innovative people in your school. They will be the ones that use technology effectively, and will slowly help other teachers grow fond of the possibilities technology offers their classrooms. 

Teachers should not have more than 20 children per class until college. I think class sizes should be even smaller than that before Middle School. Around 10-15 students per class. 

Standards and curriculum should focus more on skills and less on content. Creative thinking, problem soloving, writing skills, critical thinking skills, reading comprehension, logic, organization, time management, etc. SKILLS are what we are judged on when we go into the workforce. I do not need to remember what moles were in Chemistry (what are they?) I do not need to remember the quadratic formula. We don’t need to know what the last battle of the Revolutionary War was. 

High School should have a career resource center similar to colleges to help students prepare for internships, part time jobs, and give students someone to talk to when they start considering their future. There is a life other than/after college, but you wouldn’t know that if you walked into many high schools today. 

High schools are not in touch with the current job market. You can be “anything you want” in this country, but you probably don’t even know most of the careers you can have when you leave K-12 school.

I realize these are all negative. Nobody likes someone who complains about a problem but has no solution. I plan to write another, more positive list like this suggesting some solutions in the future.

I’m getting a kindle in the mail on monday because books are too bulky for my commute. One reason it has taken me so long to get a kindle is I don’t buy books, I rent them from the library. Once I get my kindle I want to try out the e-book service my local library has. I have no idea how that works but I’m excited to try it out.

I started thinking about what’s going to happen to libraries in the next decade. Sure, now everyone claims that they still want paper books. Right now we still need them. But in 10 years…so much can happen with technology in 10 years, and I really feel that books are going to be a dying art. Even with an e-book rental system, soon enough we are all going to realize we shouldn’t have to go to the actual library to rent an e-book. But libraries are a great resource to a community. They host important community events and they are a safe, quite and friendly place to learn and do research. I love libraries and I would hate to seem them die out along with paper books.

That’s why I am making the analogy that libraries need to become the new MTV. MTV, which stands for Music Television, devotes maybe 8% of its airtime to music videos and music related content. They realized they can get much higher ratings when they show bizarrely addictive reality television shows about guidos and teen moms. Music television may be a dying art, but MTV isn’t dying with it.

I want to see libraries remain just as strong. I’m obviously not saying libraries need Snooki and JWow to stay current. But instead of devoting most of their energy to books, I hope libraries are able to realized what is most valuable to their communities and focus on that. Libraries can offer their community state of the art technology, valuable classes and programs, kindle rentals, e-book clubs. Paper books will always have a certain niche… children’s books for example really are best in paper form. (What is childhood without a few books on the shelf with bite marks from when you were two? You can’t do that to an iPad!) And I’m sure a library will always embrace paper books. But I hope they can change with the times and create a new system for themselves so they stay a timeless and valuable part of our society long after paper books are removed from the shelves. It might seem weird for a library to focus on technology more than books, but MTV is doing just fine with little focus on music.

Sheryl Sandberg is the COO of Facebook. She has made big headlines this week with the IPO of Facebook, making her  the “1.6 billion dollar woman.” I say good for her and good for Facebook in general. I’m sure everyone has different opinions but you cannot deny the powerful influence Facebook has on so many people in the USA and in the world. It’s a big deal.

Not sure if this is an embarrassing confession, but I hadn’t heard of Sandberg until this week. She is a big supporter of getting more women to pursue those top management positions in companies. Her talks are well known and they have even been included in the syllabi of some business classes at Harvard and Stanford. I just watched this talk, from December 2010, for the first time this morning. I loved it and thought it was worth sharing for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet.

The video speaks for itself. The only thing I would mention is Sandberg discusses how her generation will never have a 50/50 balance of women to men in leadership positions. Sandberg is just a few years younger than my parents. I would love to see my generation be the one that creates that balance. We’ll see!