This is the anniversary of my first blog. I have now been blogging for a full year. 59 posts, 147 comments and countless hours and caloric expenditures of creative energy later… here I am. Somewhere.
But this week I had an epiphany.
On Thursday I contributed a comment to Scott McLeod’s blog called Dangeously Irrevelevant, and somehow I think it got deleted. He is a professor in Iowa and a frequent critic of public education and his own children’s schools. Blogs are good for asking challenging questions and he usually asks some tough ones. But I took exception to this:
Does anyone think that we were doing a fine job of meeting the needs of underserved populations before ‘the tests?’ Have we all forgotten that school has been boring for generations?
It’s not ‘the tests.’ It’s our unwillingness and/or inability to do something different, something better.
It’s not ‘the tests.’ It’s us.
So whose schools are we talking about? His kids go to school in Iowa for God’s sake– hardly the crucible for school reform. Yet this is the kind of statement I see made all the time, especially from university professors who have little room to question the quality of instruction at the K-12 level. So I said, in effect, “I disagree. We are doing something different at Mueller Charter School and it certainly isn’t boring.” And I cited our partnership with the Chula Vista Nature Center as an example.
Maybe citing Mueller Charter School is considered self-promotion on somebody else’s blog.
Maybe my objection was deleted because I used my own school, as I often do, as an example of a public school that works.
Maybe the critics of the K-12 system don’t like to acknowledge “isolated examples” of schools that work– even though charter schools exist to serve as innovative and sometimes “isolated examples” of courageous change. The way I see it, one example from El Milagro is as valid as criticizing the entire K-12 system on the basis of a single school in an Iowa cornfield.
So whatever. Dangerously Irrelevant has to live up to its name. My blog merely needs to live up to El Milagro— the miracle.
All I know is that I am investing too much time commenting and debating in this medium; I’m expending too much creative energy on trying to be a participant and build an audience for my blog.
I have a school to run. I have students and staff who need my creative energy to be devoted to them. I have several book projects winding their way to completion. And we have two extraordinarily promising projects on the drawing board that could profoundly transform our school (and any other school that pays attention to our work.)
So this is as good a reason as any to steer my blog (and my blogging) in a different direction. I’m just going to document the transformation from Mueller Charter School into El Milagro and leave the debating to the critics on the sideline.
As for the two projects… stay tuned.
It’s Week 2 of the California Standards Test and students are fingering their math facts like an abacus. Many of 
And this morning, they will each complete question number 21– a pre-algebraic word problem with one absurd possible answer choice, one answer choice that will trick a number of children who aren’t yet test-savvy enough to smell a rat, one answer choice that is correct and one answer choice that goes down smoothly…a sugar sweet placebo to remind us all that standardized, multiple-choice tests are to the disadvantage of the children that actually think. But they don’t know if they got question #21 right. They don’t know if they fell for the tricks and the traps so they cannot make mid-flight adjustments like they do on their video games. They’ll never know.
But imagine what our teachers might do with the data if they could get it back next Tuesday. As they unwrap the tangled trends: 
It is Day 3 of the 2009 California Standards Test and it is quiet across the campus. Still. Ghost-like. Except for the traffic up on I-5 whistling like a turbine and leaning ceaselessly into the North wind. The South.
Now we are in it. And that heads-down, pencil-gnawing silence of testing is mixed in with a healthy dose of celebration. Every day. Today the staff will play the 7th and 8th graders in flag football. Yesterday there was a school-wide movie, a huge game of “Capture the Flag” and a chess tournament. The day before we cranked the music up and danced on the black top. Testing time is also a celebration of learning. We equate it with the team that practices all week long for a big game on Saturday. The practice is fun… but it doesn’t compare to the rush of competing in bright uniforms against another team.
Gunpowder Point is bathed in ocean breeze and bird poop. It is now a protected marshland in what seems to be the last square foot of undeveloped land in Chula Vista. Bordered by freeway noise to the east, and insulated by acres of natural foliage, the Nature Center leans into that stealthy wind.
And all of this matters. The Nature Center is less than two miles from 
Imagine children rotating through varied learning opportunities over the course of a school day: contributing to data collection and exhibit management, developing individual research projects that make a significant contribution to the body of knowledge accumulated here, serving as museum docents and guides at the sting ray petting area, performing community service to help maintain the sprawling acres, advocating for green energy. Imagine children not just simulating the work of science, but being scientists. Contributing. Developing not just an appreciation for the fragile interdependence of living ecosystems, but a profound reverence for their own place in the world. Here there are owls and sharks, reptile and eel aquariums, there are marshland aviaries, and shoreline birds. There are rare sea turtles. There is an adult bald eagle. 
This is also the time period in which we cease to philosophize about the wisdom of standardized tests and what the pre-occupation with language arts and math might be doing to our students’ broader abilities to think and innovate and solve problems and reason. This is not the time to engage in the political debate. An NFL coach may not like the rules for sudden death overtime, but when you are out of downs on your opponents’ 20-yard line, you better just trot out your kicker for the game winning field goal and argue about the rules of the game later.
So we are playing to win. And when we win, we expect that there will be some interesting headlines in the morning newspaper. Something like:
In 1985 I bought my first personal computer– an Apple IIc with the chicklet keybpoard and alien screen. It seemed almost portable enough to carry around like a briefcase. Or maybe like a computer that could sit right on your lap. Compared to those old green Kaypros and clunky Apple IIe’s, it was revolutionary. I had a milk crate in my living room and that’s where I put the screen. I wrote my entire dissertation on my Apple IIc and stored every chapter on a box of labeled discs.
Then a teaching colleague named David Mika pulled up to Muirlands Junior High School with his new Macintosh thing. You could actually manipulate the cursor right on the screen and “Oregon Trail” evolved accordingly. And the discs were smaller and made of hard plastic. They just fit in your pockets better. They didn’t fly as well as the old floppy discs though. (I could flip the old discs halfway across the playground. Digital frisbees. They could put your eye out. But soon enough they were replaced by CDs which sailed three times as far as the floppies so I startted to feel better about where the technology was headed.) And so I upgraded my classroom with first generation Macintoshes while still making the best of the now-antiquated IIcs.
personal computer wars between IBM and HP and Compaq and Apple and others resulted in business disasters and technological wonders. Marketing pitches tapped into a nation’s fears about losing our humanity. IBM’s signature advertising campaign featured Charlie Chaplin in black and white, approaching the PC on a table adorned with a vibrant red rose. “High TECH”, said John Naisbett, “demands high TOUCH.” And thus, the rose.
In the range of 
Now that I think about it, every outstanding teacher I have met since propping up my Apple IIc on a milk crate in 1985 seems to possess that common gift of Imagination. They all have an ability to integrate the use of new tools, new strategies, new technologies to heighten student engagement, and to engender extraordinary learning. They are willing to stretch and take risks. To imagine.
I run into former students in oddball places. I met one in a hospital elevator a few years ago. She was holding two kids in both arms and struggling to push the button to go up. “Dr. Riley! Remember me?” My wife looked at me kind of funny. “Ugh… well…ugh…” 
Palomar Mountain School is a tiny, one-room school house a few hundred yards from the world’s largest telescope. From this location, on the top of Palomar, astronomers have been peering out into space for decades. It is here, where it seems that God has been peering back. The school sits back in the trees, nestled behind a ranger station on the last hairpin turn leading up to the telescope. If you blink… you will surely miss it.
But when it is just you and 16 kids and crisp mountain air and a neighborhood so quiet you can hear the deer sneeze; when the shadows of the world’s largest telescope is cast across your playground; when you have no textbooks even if you wanted them (and I didn’t); when you are at the early stages of your teaching career and you want to bring the whole world to your students and be a force for good in their lives; when you are just naive and idealistic enough to believe that you can single-handedly change the world for every child… that is a muse worth capturing.
"El Milagro Weblog" 