andrewce

This might not be a correct assumption, but the difficult part about it is defining "quality", and should there be a difference, identifying the culprit.

I suspect that the "back to the basics" ethos of NCLB has done more harm than good (it's amazing how quickly children learn to read when they're read to every day, rather than the current method which seems to involve lots of phonics instruction in spite of English's phonetic weirdness).

This is the same "back to the basics" ethos that was promoted shortly after Sputnik was launched, and the same ethos that was promoted after "A Nation at Risk" was published.

And when that ethos doesn't work, we generally pile even more on it. "Chidren not performing well enough at math? We'll do 2 hours instead of 1! We'll cut recess!"

I don't think I'm disagreeing with you here, but the only successful attempts I've seen to "improve education" have been the ones that offer more engagement and more freedom, with higher expectations placed on students (as well as a willingness to work around student learning, rather than forcing student learning to work around a pre-determined progress chart).

Everything else has been ham-handed, at best.

I worked with a teacher a few years back who would repeat the mantra "Learning is not fun. Learning is never fun. The only time you can have fun is after you are done learning."

But you're right; honest engagement with a discipline is a brilliant combination of fun and frustrating (and more importantly: the right kind of frustrating).

Seconded!

If you're working 19 hours a day, there aren't many hours when you're not working.

As such, there's no reason to put too many limits on when your 1st employee can work (so long as those 40 hours/week are met and stuff is getting done).

You may wish to consider allowing telecommuting, as well as to allow employees to save every hour over 40 they work per week as vacation time ("comp-time"?).

Another alternative: as the employee what type of schedule s/he would like to set, and make it a cooperative process rather than an autocratic process. Autonomy is a huge component of job satisfaction (along with complexity and a clear payoff between effort and reward), so the more autonomy you can give, the more likely it is that you'll keep this person happy enough to stay.

The last full-time job I worked, I was the only full-time employee, and was not allowed to set my own schedule, nor to choose my own tasks, and I was frequently required to work 10-20 hours per week of unpaid overtime. Needless to say, my happiness levels jumped significantly when I quit that job, in spite of the tenuous nature of substitute teaching and non-profit work.

Hopefully your first employee will have a much better experience.

I agree with the general premise of the article (that school's purpose should be to help children become adults who know their talents (and have talents)), and will ignore the notion of "discovering" purpose (as acknowledging it requires that we discuss whether purposes are created or found, which I don't care to discuss beyond this cursory treatment).

However, the pragmatics of it all are quite a bit messier.

Helping each individual student discover his/her individual talents and skills and passions requires that we restructure schools almost entirely.

1) The current system of 22+ students per class means that, in a 50 minute class period, each student can get a maximum of just over 2 minutes of personalized time, assuming a minimum of time wasted. Over the course of a school year (180 days), this works out to be about 6 hours. Hardly enough time for direct individual feedback or for solid relationships.

(I understand that there is a lot more to it than simple contact time, and also that small groups can be more efficient than 1-on-1 interaction). If all you are doing is lecturing, it does not matter how many people are in a room so long as their behavior is not disruptive (or so long as their behavior can be controlled). If you are hoping to deal with their ideas, though, there is a definite point beyond which it's impossible to do much meaningful work.

2) The school system, as it is, is mostly designed to get as many kids through as possible. Again, individualization plays only a cursory role, typically only with students who are "exceptionalities" (read: who have IEPs). Not the environment needed for the type of learning the author describes.

3) In order for the changes the author wants to see happen to actually happen, students (and teachers) will need a lot more autonomy. This means freedom to set one's own schedule to at least some amount, freedom to at least somewhat choose one's own learning, and access to all types of competent and caring adults and older peers who can help guide the student.

Personally, I'd love it if a student who was very talented in music was able to spend 4 or 5 hours a day practicing and learning those skills, and the other 3-4 hours per day doing the other bits of learning necessary to be a competent adult (literacy, numeracy, scientific and historical thinking, and so on, as well as reflective and metacognitive thinking).

Conclusion: the current system was built by people who see students as points of data and entries in a gradebook, and needs to be rehauled dramatically to provide the freedom and opportunity necessary for the type of individualized teaching the author suggests.

I had a calc teacher in high school who did the "recommended homework" thing.

It was amazing, as I could devote however much time I needed in order to be able to identify and then efficiently and effectively solve a given problem type.

This was still at the level where it was a lot closer to arithmetic than actual math (even the most complicated problems rested on just one or two methods which we already knew, and all had an objective, known solution), but the flexibility that it offered me was very useful, given the busy-ness of my schedule that year.

When I taught, I was working 10-12 hour days (some of this was due to my own inefficiency, and some of it was due to the massive inefficiency of the school in which I taught) and pulled in about $30k/year. Our salary schedule was such that the most I could earn without a doctorate was about $38k (after 20 years of experience).

That said, there are plenty of grant programs within schools. At least two of the districts in the city in which I live now have foundations set aside for things like this.

I run a non-profit organization; we aren't yet in position to need much in the way of software, but when we get there, it's gonna be open-source all the way unless it's clear that doing otherwise is in the best interest of the organization.

Non-profit pricing is nice, but my general approach is that if I'm not willing to pay full price, I'm probably also not willing to pay the non-profit price.

Conversely, if I'm willing to pay the non-profit price, then I'm also usually willing to pay the full price. If not, I make do with free alternatives.

It should be noted that 30-50% of teachers leave the profession within the first 5 years.

I make my living by substitute teaching right now, as well as running creative writing workshops for K-12 students in the state in which I live (I'm in the midwest). In the last calendar year, I've been roughly 25 different schools. In addition to this, I do research with a former professor of education, and maintain a pretty wide network of friends and professional contacts who are teachers.

And, depending on the grade and on the school, it is like this.

The professor whom I work with has this as one of her primary research areas, and has told me story after story of going into elementary schools (particularly on the western, less populated half of our state) in which teacher-student interactions are scripted down to the minute, and teachers are evaluated based on whether or not they follow the script.

The major high school across the street from where I live (~1500 students) has a science department where none of the teachers have written their own lesson plans in about 3 years; they use the lesson plans in the district binder (I've taught from those lesson plans; they're barely rigorous, and conflate superficial knowledge memorization with actual learning).

A friend of mine is a language and communication arts teacher in a middle school; if he wants to deviate from the lesson plan binder, he has to submit a proposal for the new unit (there can't just be one lesson) during the summer, at which point it's at the mercy of the committee.

While I was teaching in Kansas, my lesson plans were written for me, and I was punished any time I went away from them, even when it was clear that my students needed more time with something before they understood it ("If you were a good teacher, and if they were paying attention, they'd get it the first time. Make them come in during lunch.").

There are plenty of holdouts, thankfully; schools which serve mostly affluent students (particularly schools with strong enough test results that they can get away with it) seem to have done well. Additionally, there are a lot of more urban schools which serve students who are not quite so affluent and which have managed to hold out, though I suspect some of this is an accident of the difficulties of administrating a big school in which math is the least of most students' worries.

I'll gladly concede that getting rid of incompetent teachers (or otherwise having some ability with which to help those who want to improve improve), or at least securing the ability to do so, is an extremely necessary start.

Particularly with teachers who are committing actual crimes, though in fairness, I think that difficulty is overstated (point of note: I'm in the midwest, where the unions are not as strong, so that colours my perceptions a bit).

That said, though, I don't think we have any way of determing who is/isn't a good teacher if we haven't yet determined what good teaching looks like (in turn, we can't determine that until we figure out what we actually want out of school).

As a teacher, I've been on all sides of this; while working in a large public school, I've had lots of freedom and leeway (so long as I could justify it to my administrators, who were either down with it or completely and totally indifferent).

I've also worked in a small school where the "system" I was expected to carry out was complete and utter rubbish ("Students should not write at all until at least their junior year. They should spend the time prior to this diagramming sentences and memorizing the parts of speech, so that they understand what good sentences look like. They may only begin writing AFTER they have mastered identifying these patterns.")

When you couple that with an authoritarian administration, I was a "bad teacher" in the latter system, and had I not resigned I'd have likely been the first to go when budget cuts rolled around the summer after I left (as it was, my successor was let go instead).

I agree that incompentent teachers are a problem, but there's more to it than just that. Frankly, so many things have been screwy for so long (William Pinar, out of the U of British Columbia, places it at about 4 decades) that I'm amazed that anything gets done.

It's not just being able to fire/reward teachers (depending on quality).

The definition of "good teacher" they seem to be using is some variant of the "value-added" model, by which teachers are evaluated based on how much the test scores of their students improve. However, the tests are only barely valid (if at all), and don't measure much (if anything) worth measuring.

Meanwhile, the reading and writing go by the wayside in favour of multiple-choice "comprehension" questions, math becomes an exercise in gaming in the arithmetic, and science (held up so high in theory and so low in practice) becomes a glorified exercise in vocabulary memorization.

This isn't even beginning to mention the arts.

I'd have more faith in Superman if I thought schools knew what they wanted to do, or if there were a cohesive and coherent philosophical approach.

As it is now, there is a system which reduces good teachers, protects bad teachers, and hamstrings learning in favour of that which can be easily measured and that which can be taught with only a modicum of thoughtfulness required.

Wake me up when "education" is something other than scripts delivered to teachers by bureaucrats and specialists who haven't ever felt what it's like to actually teach.

Frankly, either will do you some good. The key thing to take away from this is not the course matter itself, but the implicit, generalizable lessons from it.

In both, you learn how to put words in their best order. It is just that each genre has its own conventions (multiple sets of conventions, in fact) regarding what "best order" actually is.

I've heard the same thing about "The Da Vinci Code". Doesn't necessarily mean that a majority of people hold such a view (that said: a sizable enough minority is not too far from being a majority).

" I'd be fine with showing some scenes from the Wire in a course on urban inequality, but I'd really hate to give students the impression that the Wire is the final authority on what life in Baltimore is like."

Hopefully, students will be smart enough to realize that "The Wire" is a work of fiction (as you and others have pointed out). However, the difficult thing about teaching just from research and theory is that it is extremely difficult to gain a concrete understanding without a concrete presentation.

When I was going through the teacher education program in college, we read a lot of (what I thought were very compelling) scholarly articles explaining how current practices (regarding instruction, assessment, and so on) were flawed and then proposing better practices.

The discussions we had were often of the "Okay, I see what the author is saying" variety, but ended up with very little actionable follow-through. I remember getting in trouble for trying to heed the advice of the research ("I don't care what the research says, we're doing it this way and that's final.")

What I am trying to say is that research and statistics are all fine and dandy, but the students at Harvard are mostly white and mostly from reasonably affluent families who live near other reasonably affluent families. Ideally, we could study those realities directly via fieldwork, but that's simply not a possibility for most. So, in lieu of giving these students a completely abstract understanding without any lived experience (even if it is vicarious and fictional), "The Wire" comes in.

For communicative purposes, rhetoric is an amazing field of study. Many of the texts I used in college were crap, but Jay Heinrich's "Thank You For Arguing" is pretty phenomenal as far as being a quick and accessible primer to rhetorically-charged language.

I'd also suggest a good creative writing course (I'd pick prose over poetry, but they're your classes now); the workshopping process did a lot for me as far as developing a critical eye toward language. One could only hope that it would do the same for you.

I worked in a similar situation, though with a group of people who wanted to form an arts venue in the largest city in my state (I'm in the midwest).

When I agreed to come on (after leaving teaching), there was promise of salary. The salary never materialized, and so I was putting in 80-100 hours of free labor per week, and paying for my own expenses while doing so.

Meanwhile, the project ballooned from $250k to $2.7mil, and our investor (who is one of only 2 or 3 people I've ever actively disliked) bailed when he realized that the fellow I worked for was trying to extract quite a bit of money out of him.

I left after 7 months, and will never be reimbursed for the 2,000+ hours I put into reading, researching, writing, and networking. They still have exactly no money.

This isn't exactly analogous, but similar enough. Sometimes the boat's going to sink (to use your captain metaphor). Given that you don't own part of the company, and that your employers seem to think of you as replaceable, your obligation is minimal.

The fact that they're looking at changing what they do complete is not an encouraging sign, as it's very difficult to shift back from those changes.

Were I in your shoes, I'd quit and would be reaching back out to the startups who reached out to me, as well as to others that seem like good places to work. I would make it clear to my employers why I was quitting (in business, rather than personal, terms), and would hope that such honesty helps them to survive, or at least to make better decisions in the future.

This approach has worked well for me in the past, as it lets me maintain personal relationships (and even professional relationships) while extricating myself from situations neatly and efficiently.

Then figure out, in terms of expenses and whatnot, what you'll need to get to demo and beta and beyond (should this prove feasible).

From there, it gets trickier, but if you've built a good product that relieves some need without causing too much additional pain, you'll (possibly/probably) be fine.

Shouldn't data exist in the form of direct competitors? If there aren't any, then does this market exist? (It's entirely possible that it does, and no one but you sees it yet).

Data should also exist in the form of knowing roughly how many people could benefit from your product (and who might consider it a step up). If you're basing this on a market need, then that population should be at least a somewhat knowable quantity.

Business plans can be extremely useful, or not useful at all, depending on how you use them.

The biggest questions they should answer are: "What are we doing, how will we make money from it, and how much money will we make?"

(It should also answer the question of "What do we do if everything fails?").

I found Guy Kawasaki's ten-part outline ( http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/the_zen_of_busi.html#axz... ) to be pretty reasonable. I followed it for both of the business plans I wrote (freelancing), which both achieved their purpose, and will follow it again for future business plans I write.

Depending on who your potential angel(s) is/are, you may have to be more "optimistic" than you would for others, as far as your financial projections go.

That said, the real purpose of the business plan is to give potential investors some solid numbers such that they can decide the odds of them getting their investment back, and also to force you to sit down and clarify your plans so that you don't get sidetracked with nonsense.

William Faulkner claimed to have written "As I Lay Dying" in one draft over the course of 6 weeks.

He was almost certainly lying.

I spent my summers (as a child) doing more or less what you've described.

Looking back, my parents did a few major things that helped make this a successful venture (or so I like to think, given my belief that I can do the things you've outlined in your last paragraph):

1) So long as we were learning, they didn't mind too much what (though it was always grounds for discussion and debate). If I wanted to read about dinosaurs, that was valued just as much as reading about history or politics or engineering.

2) If we were struggling, they'd start by giving me a small hint, then a slightly larger one, and so on until I either understood it or asked for a demonstration. Nothing wrong with the latter, as there are a lot of things that aren't immediately intuitive, but better to build intuition first.

This is an extended way of me saying "I think what you are planning to do is fantastic, and would like to offer these two things I remember from my experience."

The best editor is one who is insightful, constructive, and absolutely merciless toward your writing.

Your responsibility as a writer is to your reader; give them the clearest and most direct path to follow that you can (via the most accessible language you can wrangle) and then populate that path with compelling people, scenes, and ideas.

No one (except Faulkner) criticizes Hemingway on the basis of "his sentences are too short".

I have my students do this, from middle-schoolers who are just learning the language to high-schoolers in advanced placement English classes. Reading your own writing aloud works wonders, so long as you're willing to edit mercilessly while reading aloud.

It could be that he looks at all the things that need to be done, goes "Aw crap. Where do I even start?" and then gets frustrated and overwhelmed, leading to inaction and the subsequent guilt over inaction.

In the non-profit I run, I find that I have to come up with a list of things that need to get done; then I sit down with my board members and volunteers and we prioritize and then divvy out tasks. It takes some time, and my board members are still not particularly good at taking action when needed, though they're getting a lot better), but all of our stuff ends up getting done more or less where/when it should.

The other possibility is that he realizes he's in way over his head and wants to go back to something safer/less demanding.

It seems like you're pretty loyal to this fellow and that you want to keep him around. The thing to do, I think, would be to give him a more concrete sense of direction and see how he responds to that. If he doesn't respond well, then it might be time to have a frank discussion with him and to search for someone else to fill that role.

Generally, I'll make sure to map out complex tasks by breaking them into simple components/milestones, each with a clear deadline.

More specifically, I've been using Google Calendar for about a year to great effect to keep track of my freelancing, the non-profit I run, and also the side jobs I take (substitute teaching and tutoring). In addition, I use it to keep track of my personal life, including social engagements/obligations and birthdays.

The "Tasks" feature and I never really got along, so instead I created different calendars for each domain. Relevant days and times are extremely easy to keep track of (as you might expect).

I'll generally store hyperlinks in the "Description" box. I'll also sometimes mark calendar events with an asterisk if there is something in the "Description" box that I need to look at (be it a hyperlink, a "Bring _____" note, or some other actionable item). If there are relevant files, I'll either keep them out on my desktop, or I'll include a hyperlink to the file in Google Docs (under the "Share" dropdown menu).

Each morning, my calendar will e-mail me an agenda for the day. Items that I don't complete get moved ahead to the next day (or to a later time that day). If I finish things ahead of schedule, I'll move them back to when I finished them and congratulate myself with a delicious and healthy fruit smoothie.

You might find that GCal is suboptimal for your purposes (I don't know how well this meshes with the GTD system, as this has worked so well for me that I've never needed to explore alternatives), and it may be a bit less automated/centralized than what you're looking for. Or perhaps you're leery of feeding information to the Googleplex. But I've found my system to be useful and unobtrusive, so perhaps others might as well.