PHOTO: Pagosa Peak Open School 4th graders visit the Southern Ute Cultural Center, October 2023.
My granddaughter Simone stayed home from school on Wednesday. She asked me to tell her if her tonsils looked swollen. They did.
Mom and dad were at the gym, so we decided to work on math for a while.
We practiced calculating ‘common denominators’ for fractions, and she seemed to be understanding the general idea. But after about an hour, she lost interest rather suddenly, and could no longer come up with the correct answers. We moved on, and spent some time looking through a copy of the Southern Ute Drum newspaper, and discussing the upcoming Tribal Council elections. She picked out the candidates she would likely want to vote for, if she were tribal member, based on the candidates’ photographs and who looked the most “friendly”.
Her 4th grade class at Pagosa Peak Open School (PPOS) is studying Ute culture and history, as described in Emily Murphy’s illustrated Daily Post article on Wednesday.
Simone and her classmates will no doubt end up knowing more about Southern Ute culture than most of us adults in Pagosa Springs.
A presentation of the class’ research and artwork around Ute culture was on display yesterday evening at the PPOS ‘Fall Showcase Night’, where all of the classrooms shared evidence of their first ‘Projects’ of the 2023-2024 school year. Much of the instruction at PPOS is centered on multi-disciplinary ‘Project Based Learning’ where math, science, reading, writing, art, and social studies are combined into a course of study. Typically, the ‘Projects’ also involve collaboration and teamwork.
In my humble opinion, it’s an overall benefit to society, for Pagosa students to learn about ‘foreign’ cultures, especially a resilient culture that exists in a community located a few miles to the southwest of Pagosa Springs.
Here is Simone, pointing out the places in Colorado that are named after famous Ute leaders or using Ute words.
By design, ‘Project Based Learning’ (PBL) reflects the ways adults generally pick up new skills and knowledge, once they have left the ‘education system’. As adults, we learn new skills based on personal motivation, and often, in collaborative situations, where we depend on a team of people, and teamwork, to move a project forward. (The Daily Post, for example, would be impractical without collaboration and teamwork.)
Although the ‘Projects’ at PPOS are designed to address Colorado state standards at each grade level, this is not your standard “open the textbook to page 1 and do the exercises on page 5” type of learning process. The direction of the learning is meant to incorporate input from the students themselves, guided by their individual interests and abilities.
My older granddaughter, Amelie, is an 8th grader at PPOS; her class ‘Project’ is focused on how the use of smartphones and computers may be impacting the brain development of teenagers.
Disclosure: I currently serve as a volunteer on the Pagosa Peak Open School board of directors, but this editorial series reflects only my own personal opinions, and not necessarily those of the PPOS board as a whole.
Schooling provides an opportunity to promote so many useful skills and character traits.
Initiative, perseverance, generosity, cooperation, empathetic listening… for example.
Or how about:
Creativity.
Public speaking.
Civic engagement.
Nutritional awareness.
Food preparation.
Animal husbandry.
Logic and reasoning.
Debate and rhetoric.
Media production.
Networking.
Tax preparation.
Business fundamentals.
Welding.
Carpentry.
Basic electronics.
Basic home repairs.
Basic auto maintenance.
Balancing a checkbook.
Successful negotiating.
Coding.
Care of children.
Schools could help to instill well-accepted social behaviors, like treating your neighbor as you would wish to be treated. Schools could help children to become functional adults, in so many various and important ways.
The Colorado Department of Education, however, believes that the skills and character traits, mentioned above, need not be considered when CDE ranks schools.
We know this, because the CDE ranks schools on three skills. Reading, writing, and math, as assessed through a computerized test.
A school that chooses to spend valuable class time on something like understanding the Ute culture, or exploring how social media and smartphones affect teenage brains, is spending valuable time on useless skills and information, if they wish to be a highly-ranked school… to judge by Colorado’s CMAS testing history.
Many of the skills I listed above are crucially important in a functional society. Why do they get so little attention by the bureaucrats who run the CDE?
But this attitude might be changing. Certainly, to judge from the comments I shared earlier in this editorial series, from School Board candidates Bob Lynch and Christa Laos, our school district will be giving more attention to ‘CTE’ — Career and Technical Education — in the coming years. Certainly, there is a growing recognition here in Archuleta County, that many students — perhaps most students — will benefit more from learning practical skills… employable skills… than from learning how to solve math problems like the one I shared earlier.
Hypersensitivity reactions are classified by type, which are characterized by immune system response. The four most common hypersensitivity reaction types are type I, type II, type III and type IV, which occur in both males (M) and females (F). A study was conducted in which each participant experienced a single reaction. The table above shows the distribution of hypersensitivity reaction type and gender for the participants. If one participation who is female is chosen at random, the probability that the participant experienced a type IV hypersensitivity reaction is 1/3.
What is the value of ‘y’?
A couple of Daily Post readers wrote me, suggesting that the correct answer is “4”. That’s the answer I would have chosen.
It’s an ‘answer’ — to a question that is, in all practicality, meaningless to nearly everyone who might be asked to answer it.
It’s an answer, but it’s not a ‘solution’.
The ‘solution’ is for CDE to stop ranking schools based on CMAS scores and SAT scores, and find a way to encourage our kids to explore the skills and knowledge to which they feel the most affinity.