In a friend’s house – he is a successful writer for television - I see a full shelf of his scripts. About this astonishing output, I ask the perfunctory and stupid question: How do you write so much?
He answers in one word: deadlines.
For well over a month I've been crashing through the soft deadline of a short piece of writing I need to complete for a school.
I'm getting stuck in two places.
First no hard deadline. Second, without a hard deadline, I'm hopeless.
And third, what they really need is between five and a hundred million dollars. OK, I can hear you saying, yeah doesn't everyone and doesn't every school? Yes and yes.
But my thought for the money is not so much to cover the classrooms and gold or triple the pay of the teachers, which would be money well spent, it is more to do something I think schools that actually want to make a change need, which is a way to guarantee to the kids and to the parents that their diploma will matter even as the school spends years experimenting.
My plan would be to give a little money to the student for each year they attend the school. This would be money they could take to live for a little while or use towards college or whatever as a hedge against what the school would be doing while they were students there, a safety net to give people confidence as the school experiments.
And what is the experiment I am urging this school to try for the next ten years? Turn teachers loose and let them teach however they wanted to teach.
Right now schools in general, and certainly the one I am writing to, can’t really experiment in this way because they are forced to worry about those metrics the world has been fooled into thinking matters, like Cambridge exams.
But if you could wipe those away for a while and free the teachers up to do whatever they wanted, it is my belief that you would not only get much better kids as a result, something like a Cambridge exam would end up being much easier for them to pass too. Why? Because the excitement of the teachers would translate to the kids and curiosity and learning would be in the DNA of the school.
To prove it, to buy off all the parents and all the kids, I just need a few million bucks.
And that’s why I am stuck.