Hacking the Education System

Reading Bud Hunt’s Make Play Hack and watching Hackschooling Make Me Happy gave me some interesting, new insights on the education system. The best idea of these two pieces is the idea of hacking. Like Hunt says, hacking gets such a bad reputation. When I hear the word hacking or hack I think of someone exactly described by Logan, some creepy man sitting in a basement hacking on a computer. These different ideas need to be opened up to more people because they are exactly correct. Hunt states “The original definition of a hack was a fiddle that improved a process or program.” Of course, as the years continue, the idea of hacking got worse and worse because of the creepy man in

Image Credit: Roland Buulolo

the basement. However, Logan’s idea is interesting because he has shown that hacking his school system has made an incredible impact on his life. While Logan’s main focus is towards his career in a ski shop, he still needs “general” studies such as reading, writing, and math.

Listening to Logan makes me think of different ways to make students happy and prepare for their own future. Not every student is going to go to college and not every student will need to know what happens in Macbeth in order for their career to be successful. As a teacher, I will have to teach things that some students will have no interest in. The trick is to give them options. Say I am teaching Macbeth to a class and they have to do a final project. What I would do (depending on the class) is give them options to present their project. They could write a paper, make a poster, or many other things. The students can come up with an idea to do and run it by me. This type of teaching was shown to me while I was in high school. My teacher did this exact thing and I decided to create multiple MySpace accounts for main characters and have them post things as they would throughout the story. It was one of the best projects I ever did in high school. It took SO long to complete and I had to explain why I chose the posts I did.This type of flexibility in my English teacher is one I want to continue with my students.

Some points I would clarify is the idea of hacking. These ideas can only be changed by changing the mindset of others. Try explaining the positives rather than the negatives. I would love to hear some ways from Hunt on how to incorporate make, hack, play into classrooms using real classroom examples. I see that his is a teacher and it would be interesting if he made another post with some tips and tricks to incorporate these different ideas into every scenarios.

Overall, these two pieces were very interesting and thought provoking. As you couldprobably tell, my favorite part was the idea of hacking from both people.

Until next time!

-Rachel

 

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