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Amidst the Trees, a School Grows in Chicago

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Amidst the Trees, a School Grows in Chicago

Before these six acres were left to the trees, before the buildings were razed and the families displaced, before the $31 million promise or the thousands of visitors, and before there was ever a blueprint for a campus that might light a path towards the school of the future — there was the young woman on the bike with the 600-page plan under her arms, the one whose childhood teachers labeled her defiant, the one who set out alone to discover the world while still a teenager, who refused to take no for an answer, and who looked out at these abandoned lots and neglected tapestry and saw the culmination of everything those 600 pages had outlined.

For Sarah Elizabeth Ippel, it was an idea that had first taken hold of her as a child, and would not let go until she found a way to make it manifest in the world: Humans re-learning to live in harmony with nature — and schools as the vital containers in which that re-education could begin.

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A Parent Guide to Home Learning During the Coronavirus

Posted on | by Sam | 10 Comments on A Parent Guide to Home Learning During the Coronavirus

My fellow grown-ups:

Now that the End Days are upon us (kidding/not kidding) and your kids are out of school for the foreseeable future, how should you structure their time?

This is both a helpful and a horrifying question.

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The (A)morality of Trump’s School Choice Plan

Posted on | by Sam

In his State of the Union address tonight, President Trump will renew a call for tax breaks in order to provide more scholarships for students to attend private schools.

The Education Freedom Scholarships would provide up to $5 billion in federal tax credits to individuals and businesses who donate to scholarships for families to use at private, faith-based schools or to fund homeschooling. “For decades,” Trump explained, “countless children have been trapped in failing government schools. We believe that every parent should have educational freedom for their children.”

To which I say, buyer: beware. 

And: it’s complicated.

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Nature’s Design Principles: Processes

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Nature’s Design Principles: Processes

As far as conundrums go, there aren’t many more complex than the one that was facing South Africa back in 1991.

A year earlier, South African president F.W. de Klerk had ended Nelson Mandela’s twenty-seven year prison sentence; begun legalizing every political party that opposed him; and set out in search of a way to negotiate a peaceful transfer from a racist past to a racially just future. 

To help navigate such a landscape, de Klerk turned to an unlikely guide: Royal Dutch Shell, which for years had used the process of scenario planning — in which a set of carefully constructed, plausible stories are used to demonstrate different ways the future might unfold  — to guide its own internal thinking. 

Could the same process help a deeply divided nation envision its own possible futures, and contribute to creating a new reality in the land of apartheid?

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Nature’s Design Principles: Relationships

Posted on | by Sam

In the beginning, everything was connected.

Along the way, some of us changed our minds.

And now, in the shadow of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, our survival depends on our ability to rediscover the wisdom we have lost.

In the end, it turns out, everything is connected, and at every scale — from the cosmologic to the subatomic.

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Nature’s Design Principles: Information

Posted on | by Sam

Amidst the deluge of daily life, what deserves our attention?

This is, relatively speaking, a new question for us to consider. 

Until recently, homo sapiens were an incremental species. Our ancestors only learned to read 200 generations ago. The first universities are just 1,000 years old. We didn’t even develop a germ theory of disease until the late 19th century. 

Before, in other words, it took many generations for big changes to occur. 

Now, however, we are experiencing multiple, massive shifts to the structure and flow of human life in a single generation. Whereas it took decades for the telephone to reach half of all U.S. households, it took just five years for cell phones to do the same.  And although it seemed laughable in 1965 when Intel’s Gordan Moore predicted that every other year we’d double the number of transistors that could fit onto a single chip of silicon, “Moore’s Law” has become the most enduring technological prediction of our time; indeed, today’s computer chips offer 4,000 times more performance than they did fifty years ago, are nearly 100,000 times more energy efficient, and cost about 60,000 times less to produce.

As a result, the Industrial Age has begun to give way to the Information Age, reshaping our timeworn frames for what is worth knowing — and who gets to decide.

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The Art of “Oh, My Sweet Land”

Posted on | by Sam

For as long as we’ve walked the earth, we’ve made sense of the world through stories. And for thousands of years, the theater has been our most enduring place to share them — a darkened space in which we are invited to imagine alternate worlds, and have our senses activated through the magic of language, lighting, and set design.

It has not been the place we go to experience the sting of freshly chopped onions, or to hear the crackling sizzle of a heated pan. 

But a new play, and a new frame for thinking about how and where our dramatic stories can unfold, is changing all that — and making the theater a space in which all our senses can be brought to life in the service of generating a deeper connection to the stories we tell.

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Nature’s Design Principles: Identity

Posted on | by Sam

More than four hundred years after it was written, people around the world are still reading, performing, and wondering about Hamlet. 

Why?

The simple answer is because it’s the world’s most famous playwright’s most famous play. But the complex answer is because the title character and we, no matter our culture or our age, are kindred spirits. 

Like every young person everywhere ever, Hamlet has visions of his future that don’t align with the visions the adults in his life have for him. He is an artist and a dreamer — a person more comfortable in the world of ideas than the world of actions. And he is in love.

But Hamlet is also the future king of Denmark, which means he is bound by custom to avenge his father’s murder — a duty that leads to his own untimely death in no small part because the act of killing goes against his very being.

No matter your age, then, to read Hamlet is to watch a fellow human being struggle between staying true to his own sense of self and accepting the role society has assigned him to play. And so Hamlet’s struggle illuminates a central question we all must wrestle with — a question not coincidentally posed by the first two words in the play:  

“Who’s there?”

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