schoolyard subversion

2001-01-10 [< * >]

The power of the Internet never ceases to amaze me. In my piece on mobile schools I described Moboc: The Mobile Open Classroom, saying that:

[T]he author takes his students for a day in the park. Playing among the trees, the students soon try and find ways to measure them. In the process they make an amazing discovery: the magic number Pi. As the author says, "...[F]or those...kids...Pi is something real; it "lives" in trees and telephone polls."

The amazing part is that I recently received an email from Michael England, one of the original Moboc students. He tells me that he was one of the students in the park that day and he still remembers the experience today. His wife homeschools their children because she feels that they weren't learning in school -- they were "UNlearning".

Michael emailed me as part of his quest to get in touch with Chuck Rusch, the UCLA professor who started Moboc. He wrote that:

Moboc was not simply a dabbling enterprise by a professor on sabbatical. As I recall, Chuck had us taking standardized tests a number of times each year to assess our education progress. It would be easy to project that kids would learn more about baking or power production by visiting a bakery or a power plant. More difficult was projecting how we might advance in reading, spelling, math, and other "standard" topics.

...As I recall (though 30 years of haze), all of the kids in Moboc were progressing faster than "expected" based on these tests. In a calendar year, each of us would progress at least one year forward in the standardized tests and often times 2+ years.

Mobile schools worked.

I am certain that they did and still will.

Now the question is: can we start another?

I sure hope so.

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