Daley Forever!

Did you see any of these?

Dramatic Cuts for DPS

Wowza - class sizes of 60?! Detroit Public Schools is no stranger to bureaucratic insanity, but I will be definitely be keeping up on how this one plays out.

In light of our mayoral situation . . .

Here is a compelling case study of John Fetterman, the controversial and innovative mayor of a blighted post-industrial town outside of Pittsburgh. While the workings of Braddock, PA (pop. 2,700) are on a very different scale from Chicago, there is certainly wisdom we can glean from his examples of dramatic urban renewal initiatives; just as we aim for arts education to cultivate diverse perspectives and creative problem-solving, the lessons of this town can be a jumping-off point as we consider how we'd like our new leadership to proceed.

Notably, Fetterman's programming places heavy priority on the arts and education and social justice. That said, he has done a lot of his work by side-stepping community accountability and creating projects through his own nonprofit, which has become a major landowner in Braddock.

It's kind of lengthy, but worth a read.

Education Week Article

I really enjoyed Emily's article selection: "The Skills Connection Between the Arts and 21st-Century Learning," by Bruce D. Taylor. For the most part, the ideas discussed are not new to me, but the language functions really well to articulate a lot of complex points that often have me tripping over my words and running my mouth. Not having gone to art school for undergrad, many of the arguments Taylor makes for contemporary arts education echo my motivations to pursue a career in this field (I'm pretty sure there were some similar sentences in grad school essays). Further, I often find myself in education-related conversations with friends in which I have a lot of trouble clearly communicating my positions on current issues or even what I'm doing in this program and am always interested in articles like this which synthesize and articulate my points much better than I do.

Found on Facebook

I realize that I find a lot of good articles, sources, etc. via my 'friends'' posts on Facebook. I imagine that if I was utilizing more online forums (Twitter, etc.), this would be coming from more places, but as of now I suppose I have enough resources to keep me occupied. There are a lot of people who I 'hide' from my newsfeed (for various reasons, but mostly because they aren't actually friends and they post a lot of stuff I don't care to read), but on the flip side, there are a handful people who I'm not in contact with, but leave up only because they post interesting links.

I came across this article on a quick peek, and it prompted me to start taking note of how much internet information I am receiving from just a few places.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/02/15/133748476/bees-who-work-for-the-police?sc=fb&cc=fp

Personal issues aside, this article is worth a quick read.

Blogging Break-Ice

I've actually been thinking about this class and this blog a lot since last week, and have come up with about four different things I've meant to blog (articles, technology frustration), but here it is on Tuesday...and I've procrastinated again. While this does reflect bad habits that permeate my everyday life, it also speaks to the unique relationships I've had while becoming acquainted with new technologies, which I will attempt to delineate at a later time.

For now, so I can get this blog rolling, here is a link:

http://www.isacs.org/resources/calendar/detail.asp?id=194

This is a conference one of my aunts (a middle school art teacher at a private school near Detroit) is attending this Thursday, here in Chicago. It's a 'diversity summit' for an association of independent schools (ISACS) that I don't know anything about, but the topics sound really interesting--particularly because it's concerning how these issues are being discussed in the world of private schools, which I don't know as much about.

My Most Relied Upon Internet Site

Seeing as I'm not great at the internet yet, my primary go-to resource is nytimes.com; seeing as I mostly only read about food, my bookmarked site is:

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/dining/index.html