The opportunity to participate with everyone here is really astounding.
Every once in a while I must take a second to recall the "Law of
Diminishing Astonishment" which states that all things lose their "bigger
than life" status over time and experience. (even the education and legal
communities...)
I am a coordinator of business training for an Intermediate School
District in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We're an organization that supports
the K-12 school systems in Kent County, Michigan. My position here
straddles business and education, and training programs we typically
provide tend to be more technical, such as machine and software operation
and ISO-oriented topics.
I have two sons and a caring, strong wife. My eldest son Dan has some
technical difficulties from cerebral palsy. The medical community calls
him a quad-spastic. Youngest son Nick has been tagged as "gifted". Only
now they both may be facing Individual Educational Plans (IEP's). One by
law through Special Education and one voluntary to meet additional needs.
And that brings light to my intense interest in the topics of this ongoing
LO conversation: Why doesn't everyone have an individual educational
plan?
We have also been pursuing an educational curriculum for Dan called
"conductive education". This is a pedagogy that assumes cerebral palsy
(or motor disorder, as they refer to it) is more a learning disfunction
than a medical one. Conductive education was developed in the 1940's and
has just recently received increased attention. We feel this is a very
important effort, and currently have gained cooperation from a local
college and public schools to move to transplant this curriculum to the
USA while measuring its success. But since this is a very wholistic
system of teaching whose stated goal is to "develop fully the whole
personality of the motor disordered child"; what should we measure? has
been the question. If you have interest in more information about
conductive education, please email me and I can point you to resources.
I have a sense that in these LO pages and other conversation or dialogue,
we have a long way to go before we can get to shared meaning of all the
patterns, characters and symbols that we continuously build as
representations of the world as we see it through our individual frames.
But this is the most hopeful place (virtual place?) I have found.
Thanks for listening and we wish you a hopeful future...
My son Dan thanks everyone for the hugs.
CS
--Charlie Saur <csaur@remc8.k12.mi.us>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>