Ah, the Power of Mail Merge!

On the heels of yesterday's get-out-of-jail-free notification, my son's teacher surprised me this morning with this:



Now there's no way my kid's ditching Science next week!

Well played, Mr. Science Teacher! Well played.

The Last Daze

The last day of school for the year is next Thursday. I got this email today.



Can you think of any ways my son might benefit from attending school next week? What might other parents/students be thinking - especially if this teacher hasn't established other effective motives for learning in his classroom? 

Twenty-four Year Old PhDs Will Become Commonplace

I responded to Jim Groom's assertion that 10,000 students might just enroll in Georgia Tech's newly announced $7,000 Master's Degree program:

Jim,

You might very well be right. As I try to wrap my head around the implications of this Georgia Tech/Udacity deal, I keep bumping into the fact that they chose to offer a Master's Degree program first.

Can you imagine what will happen when a comparable UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM becomes available for this price and at this scale? It seems to me that the role of *public* K12 in preparing students for college would/will immediately shift - from helping students to acquire the SKILLS needed to succeed in college, to helping them acquire the SKILLS while also providing underprivileged students with ACCESS to *college*.

We all know there exists a percentage of students who are academically prepared for college while in their early years of high school. When we were in high school, we had little choice but to wait out our high school years (possibly earning AP credits along the way). Today's students are able to take concurrent enrollment courses - or also AP - earning their way to an Associate's Degree upon high school graduation. When quality undergrad MOOC programs become available, is it really that hard to envision our best high school students also leaving high school with their Bachelor's?

Twenty-four year old PhDs will become commonplace.
How ready are we for this kind of shift?

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