Technolandy

Day 4 (of 2025/26) 3 news items education related:  @msn share on 5 things schools should be teaching… but… also a look at a cell phone ban in eastern canada… and Tylenol = ASD?!?

1. I like checking out ‘education in the news’ and always love the usual start-of-year articles like “5 things schools should be teaching” that kinda don’t really know what they’re asking… the video is here: MSN 5 Things Schools Should Be Teaching

1. Taxes… because ‘the thought of taxes brings a shudder to many an adult, likely because they never learned how to do them in school’… but: what strategy ought we teach? The hoped for method of taking your T4s and seeing how some deductions are calculated?? OR the way that the higher classes to in order to reduce the amount they pay to near zero… the problem of course being that our countries rely on income tax coming in… if we were to focus on the grey areas, and more specifically the ways to bring in ways to avoid paying taxes, does that really help our system… well it must since prominent politicians do exactly this… but is this really helpful to our system?
2. Gardening… such an elite and privileged mindset assuming that schools and students have access to the space needed to create garden spaces… people think about the harvest season (which is awesome) but not the monotony that comes with the prep and setup… not that there aren’t some good learnings from this – rigor and patience are important… but childhood obesity is not going to be solved by the school gardens (and totally guilty of once doing a window garden in a class… closing the blinds… and all of us being surprised months later that we had set up some plants on the window and totally forgot about them)
3. Personal Finance… the wished for focus is on the rise of household debt… and yet ‘sticking to a budget’ is easier said than done – and I laugh at the advice of ‘how to invest’ when working with families who are struggling with housing and food sustainability – finding money to invest into a disney stock is not going to be a priority… this is again another thing we need to be mindful of… do we teach how to avoid things like payday loans and the lottery as strategies the 1% use to keep poverty a growth industry? Or, again, how to leverage strategies some of the 1% use to ensure that their money is not used to help the economy or national infrastructure? Not to mention that the budget lessons I used a few years ago are no longer relevant to the world I am living in… 
4. Voting… it is true that democracies have lower voter turnout than we would like… but the system is designed to encourage that – in canada we have tried to help by keeping a 37-51 day cycle; in the US the cycle is ongoing – when I visit family (whenever that is) there seems to be a campaign for something underway all the time – burnout is real and gerrymandering districts only decreases voter engagement. We can pretend that teaching concepts of citizenship and participation matter, but when you dig into the US system and see the flaws of the Election College… it might not get the results that MSN would like it to…
5. Cooking… okay, I’ll do a mini-rant reminding everyone that canada remains the lone G7 nation without a unified food program for students (except for PEI) – the link to this is that we (and most schools) do NOT have the infrastructure to authentically work on helping students with their cooking – then there is the other challenge of ensuring that the foods presented might meet the wide cross section of dietary, religious, etc restrictions and issues – a common cooking curriculum is a lofty dream, though I’d agree knowing how to boil water and use a stove/oven is helpful (though airfryer/multiunits are much more economical to run…) and the healthiest thing to do: know how to read the ingredients list… things like riboflavin might seem scary words, but vitamin B2 is good for our body… salt counts above 1000mg are not… and the different names sugar goes by… wow. 

To provide a counterpoint… here is where I think schools should focus on:

1. Critical thinking – as AI continues to more publically share how embedded into our world it has become, it is becoming more and more important to have a critical eye with more and more of what we read and see… if we thought the Soviet Union was masterful at photoshop… we are only touching the starting line of how ‘fun’ the videos of animals on trampolines are… and the era of AI generating 6 fingers on people is winding down in months… what is real? And should we consider… does it matter? 
2. Consuming content – we need to honour some of the truly ‘new media’ that are amazing at communicating stories and ideas… the fad of text based printings has had a good run, but it is great to see how tech is enabling us to truly get ‘back to basics’ with a focus on oral/aural story telling via youtube and TikTok etc… social medias are the ‘pulp fiction’ of the day – but Charles Dickens and Geoffrey Chaucer were also ‘for the masses’ in their day as well… the others I wish more would explore: the evolution of comic books into graphic novels… truly pictures enhance what you’re reading by replacing a thousands words… and the one that I know others are gonna hate: video games. Amazing stories embed this interactive media!
3. Creating content – but forget the five paragraph essay… focus on organizing thoughts around infographs… better value the point form notation system… show how to edit long form rants into instagram vital posts! Reading and responding in persuasive/narrative/expository/descriptive formats in styles used by The Atlantic or via PowerPoints are going to show some more effective strategies that engage readers. In all things screen related, I always promote the mindset awareness of are we consuming or creating? A balance would be nice!
4. Climate – we must spend more time looking at how the climate continues to shift as it becomes clear that it is being ‘assisted’ by human interactions in a way that is not going to end well.  I admit that I am still one who doesn’t mind reminding people that technically, we are still exiting the last ice age… but I am also aware that things like CFCs and ongoing pollutants were not factored in when the planet was created, and we need to be aware of our impact!
5. Learning to learn – we can’t pretend we know what jobs are still going to be viable for our graduates… once ‘big money’ graduates of computer science degrees are being let loose… I can only think of a handful of AI resistant jobs (live sports & live theatre/performances) so we need to teach students the Metacognitive skill of learning new things independently. AI will be doing our taxes/finances… 

Hmm – can we blend both individualizing education with broadening the curriculum? Can we collaboratively personalize the learning experience?

Get comfortable being uncomfortable – it’s a great SEL mindset as well as a likely reality for future thinking schools!

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1. Cell Phone Bans continued

Cell phone bans continue to be discussed https://apple.news/Ar0SOrlmoRLCBwrBR__f99Q and while I am not a fan of bans – as I would prefer more modelling and teaching of good use rather than hoping they figure it out in the real work…which continues to isolate ‘school’ as further detached and apart from the lived world…. I want to reassure everyone that  I am not advocating for screens all the time… but I do know that when done right, screens can create collaborative creative learning communities where talking and sharing and outside time is a feature! All the interconnectivities that are ‘wanted’ do occur! Just interesting that the same attempts to ban books… then calculators… are now employed to try to limit the most powerful tool to disrupt education – reminds me of when blockbuster tried to ignore netflix…

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3. Autism and Tylenol…. RFK is expected to make some… interesting correlations set up as causations… https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-15024243/painkiller-paracetamol-risk-autism-ADHD-Harvard-experts-warn-major-public-health-implications.html

Some easy counterpoints gonna come out:

adhd/autusm.depression/anxiety ain’t new, but we are getting better at not letting it slip through the cracks in our youth… who wants to point out that ASD was around long before acetaminophen was first synthesized in 1878…