Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame, and friend to all of us in vocational education, has a scholarship program that has a little twist to it. He makes all recipients sign the SWEAT pledge. You can get all the details at his Profoundly Disconnected website, and I strongly urge you to check it out, but the following quote gives you an idea of where Mr. Rowe is coming from:
"We're lending money we don't have, to students who can't pay it back, to educate them for jobs that no longer exist. That's nuts."
He's definitely right on the money with that. He and John Ratzenburger are probably two of the most influential people in "hands-on" education these days. It's a shame there aren't more like them out there. Probably the real shame is the fact that the big muckity-mucks have lost sight of the real value of vocational education and apprenticeships in creating wealth for our country and rewarding careers for its citizens. Profoundly disconnected, indeed. Also, to complete the hands-on hat trick, if you haven't checked out The Wisdom of The Hands blog recently, Doug Stowe has a couple of interesting posts about Milton Bradley along with all his usual good stuff. Games and education go hand in hand it seems. Definitely no disconnect there. Unless you're one of the knuckleheads who feels that recess needs to be discontinued in order to leave more time for testing. Then it's more games with education.
Since it's getting cold out and there's not much worth watching on television, you might want to attend a local school board meeting to find out just what is going on with your local school. After a couple of meetings, it'll be pretty easy to see the value, or lack there of, that is placed on vocational education. We need to make our voices heard.
2 comments:
Love this. Ordered his poster, AND- hows this for ironic. I had a student mentor come in today after school and write "Work Harder, NOT smarter" on my board. When I finally noticed it, we sat the entire group down, showed them the Work Harder AND Smarter poster, and had a good little discussion about what that meant and how it related to our robotics club. Really like his ideas and its nice to see some support for the "Industrial Arts" programs out there.
Mike Rowe spoke in our area a few years ago but I wasn't able to take my students to the presentation due to a really asinine bus policy they had just established. Apparently those in charge never got to the work smarter part of the equation.
I'm definitely a big fan of Mr. Rowe. He's a guy who in spite of his success still has he feet on the ground and is committed to helping the cause. Your little discussion alone was probably worth the price of the poster. It sure helps to know that there are people of his caliber out there who know and appreciate what we do every day.
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