Philadelphia

I read somewhere, and it is true, that sometimes in life, there is this one thing you desire so much that you are willing to wait for however long it takes in order to/ until you can get it_ a little like a lion in waiting.

So let’s say there is a girl you’ve always liked and wanted to approach, but the timing never seemed quite right or she had a boyfriend.
What do you do? You wait, one Facebook-click away, for the day she changes her profile status from ‘In a relationship’ to ‘single,’ and then you make your move.

Or maybe there’s a pair of shoes/ a clothing item you feel you desperately need to add to your collection, or even a trip, but you can’t afford the expense at the moment.
What do you? You wait for prices to go down or until you can afford it.

Or perhaps there’s a job, or a particular place you’ve always wanted to go to but only with a special someone.
What do you do? Well, you wait until the position/job opens or until you find that special someone.

All that to say that, since I’ve been here in Philadelphia there’s one thing I have been deeply longing for. A real Philadelphia cheese steak.

I could’ve had one already, but I purposefully delayed the moment to the very last minute. In fact, I had decided that I would not eat a cheese steak until my very last day in town.

I believed that rewarding myself with a ‘real Philadelphia cheese steak,’ (especially) after long and draining weeks of difficult work, would be a well-earned celebration of the job done here.

But today, maybe the pressure of the job was too great, because I decided that I couldn’t wait till tomorrow.

So I found a little food joint along the commercial stretch of Philadelphia’s South Street.

The name of the place is Steve’s Steak.

On the outside, it looked like your traditional/everyday street-side Philadelphian steak joints but very homelike nevertheless with its red-and-white checkered walls and stool-and-counter layout.

There was a bit of a line. But the place smelled like it was worth the wait.

When my turned came, I immediately ordered the obligatory cheese steak.

The wafer-thin “extra lean” beef meat was fried on a hamburger grill, chopped and tossed with onions and green peppers, covered with provolone cheese and slipped into a berth of chalky-tan, sliced-in-half loaf of spongy Italian bread.

As I decimated a stack of napkins, and well before I was even done with my sandwich, I came to the conclusion that if I had to choose one place irrevocably, I might choose to eat here everyday.

No joke.

It hit the spot.

Hours later, I met with Lorraine Young (check previous blog) in her North Philly house. I sat in front of a sinfully large plastic plate of spaghettis and golf ball-size meatballs she had warmed up for me and asked her what would be the one (technological) thing she could not live without. Her answer?

“My stove.”

Growing up, that’s the one thing she desperately wanted and waited for.

An electric stove.

I was done eating (and by that time, I came to the conclusion that if I had to choose one place irrevocably, I might choose to eat here everyday!), so I pulled out my recorder and asked for some explanations.

She told me she still remembers vividly the days of drudgery when a heavy and cumbersome cast-iron wood-burning kitchen stove was the main source of heat for cooking.

Back in those days, cooking was no easy task.

First you had to take down the tree; then you had to dry the logs; and finally you had to split, haul and feed the wood to the stove.

“That’s the way they did things back then.” That was 60 years ago. Lorraine was 6 years old then.

She remembers her grandmother’s wooden stove: “big dark stove,” with wide, heavy doors and knobs. She remembers her grandmother fetching the maul. But she also remembers hearing the thwack of the blade slicing open a log and thinking that she didn’t want to go through the grueling log-chopping-and-carting routine her grandmother had gone through.

Lorraine Young wanted an electric stove.

Bad.

But she had to wait. She had school to finish, daughters to feed and bills to pay before she could get her very first electric stove.

That was a big deal back then.

Lorraine’s grandmother did not even own a simple vegetable peeler or bread knife (she used an old paring knife turned into an all-purpose tool), and would probably be as dazzled by an immersion blender as by an iPhone.
But she probably wouldn’t care for any of it anyway. She’s too traditional. She couldn’t denied herself the delights of simplicity.

And sometimes tradition is just too modest and taciturn to change its ways.

Take Ethel Young, Lorraine’s mother, for example, she simply refuses to use anything else than a rotary-dial telephone. And up until few months ago, she was still using a set-top rabbit-ears-antenna TV set, often fiddling with the horizontal and vertical holds.

But for Lorraine, who grew up learning how to cook from her grandmother, her electric stove is the one thing she has been waiting for.

Just listen to her talking about it. Sheer, childlike exuberance.

And you could never guess that she was talking about a stove.

An electric stove.

Just got back from Michele Jackson’s home - it was a long day! Today, Adeniyi and I met with a cartoonist whom we hope to have illustrate a cartoon for our piece on Ryan and Michele. This afternoon I hung out with the Jacksons at home taking pictures. Spending time with them is wonderful, and probably one of the reasons I ended up staying so late (last time we were there, we didn’t leave till 12!) Michele Jackson and her son Ryan are the subjects of one of our in-depth stories from Philadelphia. They are a mother and son who have used technology to get through a lot of tough times. We’re excited to tell their story - Ryan is a friendly, techie, extremely bright teenager and his mom is one of the nicest people we’ve met in all our travels. The short version of their story is that Ryan used to get teased quite a lot at his old schools because he was so smart and eager to learn. When you go to a rough, inner city school, sometimes you’re forced to keep your intelligence to yourself and try not to stand out. Otherwise, other kids may come down hard on you for not being like the rest. But Ryan (and Michele) didn’t let that keep him back! They used technology - texting - to keep in touch while Ryan was at school, so he could always keep Michele posted on how he was doing and feeling. The Internet was also an outlet for Ryan, who found friends and ways to pursue his interests online.

Anyway, it’s late and it’s been a long day. Good night!

I wanted to see Philly.

They say the best way to see any city is to walk it. I guess there is something about going through a metropolis on foot that’s radically different from going through the same place in a car.

So I asked a friend of mine to pick me up from the hotel where I stay in Center City and drop me off anywhere close to North Philly. I was scheduled to meet several people in nearby neighborhoods, and I decided to walk from there.

I read somewhere that there is something vulnerable about walking. And I never quite understood …until today when we got to North Philly and I stepped out of the car.

Walking through North Philly (as opposed to driving or not going through it at all), you feel…naked… Fully exposed and unarmored.

But in the end, the city unfolds in a reciprocal manner: fully, without cover.

That’s when you really get to see.

I walked by people’s homes, sometimes right up to the porches where they were hanging out, cutting through backyards, close enough that I could see a woman washing dishes at her kitchen sink, smell a family’s dinner (fried fish) or strike conversations with children on their bicycles.

In a sense walking brought me closer to the city and its people.

Today, It seems that I saw the city for the first time.

And I saw it mainly through the eyes of five generations:

A nephew named Caleb.
A son named Thomas.
A mother named Phyllis Young.
A grandmother named Lorraine
A great-grandmother named Ethel.

Ethel, the great-grandmother, has seen it all.
She has seen the aforementioned apocalyptical side of some of Philly’s most notorious neighborhoods: the deserted streets; the factories, massive, low-slung structures of concrete and corrugated steel that squats among the many overgrown lots; the barren tenements that sit conspicuously above the factories; the rundown storefronts and food joints with boarded-up windows and faded price signs…She’s seen it all. That’s where she lives. No big deal.

She saw “bigger” things than that.

She saw “The Promised Land.” Ethel was born in 1919. She was among some six and half million African-Americans who left the South from 1910 to 1970 in what became know as the Great Migration. At the time technology and the mechanization of agriculture (especially the invention of the cotton picker), had made it tough for Blacks to find work in the South.
She made her way to Philadelphia in 1935 where she came from rural Virginia.

She lived in a different time and refuses to change.
She doesn’t know what Facebook is; she only uses a landline telephone that doesn’t have call waiting options (she thinks it’s rude).

At 90 years old, she is startlingly hale, hearty (she’s never drank a drop of alcohol) and independent (she lives by herself!)

She’s something of a family matriarch; she’s had 6 children.
She’s buried three children and two grandchild.
Tough.

Ask Lorraine about it.

At 66, she has seen her fair share. Good and bad.
She saw the 1960s.

I ask her about technology back then.
She smiles.

She remembers the family’s first TV. It had only one channel and it broadcasted in black-and-white. One day her father brought home sheets of colored plastic. He taped the sheets of colored plastic over their black-and-white television so that they would get “color TV.”

“Things were simpler back then,” she said. “People were happy.”
She saw the 1970s with its grimy industries and factory-fouled air. That’s when her second daughter, Phillys was born.

Phillys saw the 1990s; crime rates spiraled, while the quality of schools and services plummeted and the number of crack houses multiplied. A city police officer, she raised her only child Thomas, the way her family has always raised all its kids: with tough love.

But watching her and her son debate Shaq’s trade to the Cavs, you couldn’t tell they were mother and son. They are more like sister and brother; she had Thomas when she was 17, and now they are ‘friends’ on Facebook, have access to each other’s account, and often share updates on friends/people’s status.

“Oh yeah, My mom’s cool as hell…” Thomas is talking to me.
But he is also talking on his Nextel, using the cell phone’s push-button walkie-talkie function to carry on a different conversation. We were sitting in a cheese steak restaurant on South Street, watching Michael Jackson’s memorial and Lance Armstrong in stage 4 of the Tour de France.
At 22, Thomas is your typical college student: he has two cell phones syatematically clasped to his belt and one Blackberry he’s “always playing with”. I’m not exactly sure yet which phone is use for what…

But I will find out and write more about the Young family on my next post.

The entire family will meet at Phyllis’ house. I was invited to come and see.

I plan on walking there.

Hi, Philadelphia. Adeniyi and I have been back in town for about a week, and we’ve been searching for that one final story that will complete our time in Philadelphia. So far, we’ve had plenty of leads but are still working hard to make it happen.

Coming back to Philadelphia has been a little different this time around - the city is sweltering in the heart of summer, school is out and the streets are teaming with people. It’s hot, hot hot–but Philly in its full summertime glory is a site to be seen.

Yesterday, Adeniyi and I met with Marcie Hull and her student John. We met them the last time we were in Philadelphia. We came up with some interesting ways to tell a “generation lap” story between them. Marcie, being a teacher, was very, very helpful in working with us to come up with ideas!

Marcie and John have an amazing story to tell, and we only hope that we can do it justice.

Till next time,

Sabina and Adeniyi

The following is a letter from an imagined retired Philadelphia high school teacher to Technology.

Dear Technology:

We have not formally met, yet I feel I know you well enough to call you a friend. I see you everywhere: cell phones and laptops and texting and video games and Facebook and Youtube and Twitter and Skype and Google and Tivo and Slingbox and BlackBerry. I see people talk to small metal devices pinned to their ears, in the street, in airports, hospitals, grocery stores, schools… Today, we seem to depend on your connective tissue for every moment of our lives. And your popularity shows no sign of abating.

I write to you now for your help. Of course, in doing so, I see no way to avoid the fundamental differences in our views on education. You believe in a paperless classroom where teachers e-mail parents and cumulate final grades with a few keystrokes and a flick of the mouse; I used to painstakingly record my student’s grades by hand in a gradebook and meet the parents face to face. You believe in an academic world where all students own a laptop and turn in their assignment by simply dragging and dropping it into a folder where the instructor can wirelessly retrieve it. You believe in speed. I believe in workbooks, chalk and blackboards. I believe in sweat.

You may ask at this point, Why me then? If our views are so different, why even bother asking me for help? Simply because ultimately, we share the same world, and, in this digital age, you have become the connective tissue that unites us all.

Granted, the gulf separating our views on education is wide, polarizing even, but does it mean that they are irreconcilable? No. You may be wrong; I may be wrong. We both may be partly right.
Does it mean that we have nothing in common? I do not think so.
You value the notion of community. So do I. So please, let us forget our differences.

I suggest we set aside our (virtual) disagreements in order to deal with the imperatives of the real world we share and save our school system. Dear Technology, we need your help. The school system_ our youth_ is in deep trouble. I believe you have the power to help solve a great problem about which I care deeply. I hope you have the same concern. And if you do, then let us meet on this common ground and save our school system.

Before contacting you I spent the last few weeks visiting some schools in the district.

Dear Technology, let me tell you what you are up against. Let me tell what I saw.

I saw an inspiring math teacher. Sometimes more social worker than educator. She did her best, with genuine compassion and real hope, to create a bunker of sanity and productivity within their classroom. She came in early and stayed late.

Few weeks before my visit, the young teacher was assaulted by a student. The student was mad because he was told he could not participate in the school play due to his poor grades and low class attendance.

I saw parents and students who seemed to think that daily attendance was as optional as homework. Dear Technology, I believe a school should be as much a lifestyle as it is an education.

I saw a teacher who failed at least 25 percent of her students. I saw the end of a fight in her sagging shoulders.

I saw an appalling achievement gap between the richest and the poorest students.
I saw a city where 84 percent of its students live in poverty
I saw graffiti-smeared buildings.

I saw a school hemmed in by competing neighborhoods and absolute destitution.

I saw a sprawling, faceless, and complex school system and the ingrown nature of its bureaucracy.

I saw an administration in chronic conflict with its teachers.
Yes, today’s teachers score the lowest quartile of college grads. But tell me, Dear Technology: Should we blame the teachers? And if yes, do they deserve all the blame?

This school system, however battered and helpless it may seem to us at this moment, is a dear to me. It is an institution worth saving.

I looked at the school system, and I saw a corporation, a big business (the Superintendent’s official title has been changed to CEO). I saw money, and the lack thereof. Technology, help me understand: Where does all the money go? All the millions? All the billions? Where did/do they go?

Clearly the city Philadelphia faces expenses suburban areas don’t. With many of its schools in high-crime areas, the Philadelphia system spends millions on its police force of 6,600 personnel, whose overtime pay alone would be enough to provide the starting salaries of at least twenty full-time teachers. But the city must also pay the routine expenses faced by every school system, the largest of which is always salaries.

Textbooks, which have been at the heart of public debate over how school budgets are spent, represent less than 1 percent of the District’s expenditures.

Dear Technology, help me understand. Please.

Amidst the chaos, I saw a new superintendent. I saw hope.

According to Cities in Crisis 2009: Closing the Graduation Gap, the Philadelphia School District raised its graduation rate from 39 percent in 1995 to 62 percent in 2005, making its gain the highest of all major urban school districts in America.

Better, but not enough for a school system that still has more dropouts than most cities have students.
In a typical school year, about six percent of the 130, 000 students in grades six through 12 in Philadelphia’s public schools (including charter schools) drop out, and another 4% are “near-dropouts” (i.e. students who were officially enrolled in school but attended less than 50% of the time). In total 13, 000 students (15% of which are in grades six to eight) could be classified as dropouts or “near-dropouts.” [Researches conducted by Ruth Curran Neild, a research scientist at the Center for Social Organization of Schools, Johns Hopkins University]

Surely we can agree that the impact an uneducated mass has on the moral behavior of the country and the health of the (already battered) economy cannot be underestimate. Technology, tell me: Can you help our kids stay in school? Tell me, I need to know.
Can you save our schools?

*Inspired from Edward O. Wilson, “Apocalypse Now.”

“But it’s not about technology.”

Marcy Hull just threw me a curve ball.

Tuesday, Sabina and I visited Hull an educator at Science Leadership Academy, to discuss “Youth & Technology.” When we met with her on the second floor of SLA, inside the school’s library, the school had just cleared out for the day, but students were still buzzing around (“they don’t like to leave. Come 6 pm we have to drag them out. Literally,” Hull explained).

This past 2 weeks, we spent several days with various SLA staff and faculty members, attending classes, hanging around and talking, often for hours at a time, about technology and various approach to teaching.

Hull is cheerful and engaged, an enthusiast about everything from kids, to dogs and yoga.

I asked her to give us examples of some of the miracles technology had made possible for students at SLA. I had rather naively and wrongfully assumed that that’s what we were all gathered to talk about.

That’s when she threw the curve ball.

And I struck out. Big time.

Hull is the technology coordinator (and Digital Arts teacher) at SLA so it came as something of a surprise when she said that it wasn’t about technology.

“Seriously that’s not what this school is about,” she insisted, smiling. “It’s about so much more than that.”

“First of all what does technology means? Everything is technology. It doesn’t mean anything.”

To have the technology coordinator make such ungodly statement seemed an advanced kind of heresy.

This is not to say that Hull isn’t, above all, pro-technology. It’s just that she sees it less as an entity than as a way of looking at, of being in, the world.

It’s about the big picture, she says. “Technology is just a tool.”

At a time when education no longer feels like an inalienable right for many kids around the city, for SLA students, however, technology is often a matter of exploring or fulfilling half-understood desires (freedom, customization, speed, innovation, entertainment, collaboration, etc).

Technology is just a tool.

It isn’t easy to teach from scratch, although, to listen to Hull, it’s sound like a lot of fun.

Many schools have structured themselves, largely for the convenience of complex bureaucratic systems, around standard, one-size-fits-all ways of administrating teaching but not necessarily the best methods of learning.

So yes, every student gets a laptop. So what? What does it really mean then?

Technology is just a tool.

Hull’s methods of instruction _ pluralistic, laissez-faire, diverse, inclusive, tolerant, no-holds-barred, daring, tough_ have more in common with the kind you see in a liberal arts college, where the focus is on learning how to learn, than with a standard public school curriculum.

Her approach to teaching is very Socratic in a way.

When the approach works, the effect can be significant. Several years ago, a student named John wandered into Hull’s office when she was teaching in West Philadelphia at Shoemaker Middle School, one of the district’s most troubled schools (Since then the school has been shut down and replaced by a charter school).

Sitting next to Hull in the library, the 17 year old talked about his relationship with her. It was born because of technology (“He was constantly asking questions,” Hull said) but essentially based on trust.

It’s not about technology

One day, after Hull had left Shoemaker School for SLA, she asked John to join her there.

School at SLA wouldn’t be easy, she told him. He’d have to arrive early each day; he’d have to do stay after school to do his homework until 6 p.m. each day.

That day Hull made a commitment to get John to college.

Hull reminded me of another teacher we met today at a different school: Miss Cooper at the School of the Future.

Both Hull and Cooper share a sharp intellect and a bluntness that can come across to some as curt. Both use technology as a mean to an end. No more.

Like Hull, Miss Cooper, 23, is demographically quite a bit different than her students; she is white with bright red hair, a full complement of freckles, and is from Eerie, Pa , but she seemed to have built a rapport with her students (most of whom are poor African-Americans from West Philly), in part by encouraging them to talk.

The students all arrived in her classroom performing well below the mean. Cooper, who is in her second year of teaching, says that she and her colleagues worked day and night to prepare for their classes, and saw their group of kids go from the bottom of the heap (“We had to teach them how to save [documents on their laptops]”) to where some of the kids know “more than [we] do.”

Still, despite all the technology the school offers the majority of these kids will never go to college (students in Miss Cooper’s class had just received their SAT results that day we visited and a majority of them did poorly and will not be able to pay for another test to improve their score by the time graduation rolls around).

Overall, I was very, very impressed with Miss Cooper’s ability to connect with and motivate her students, some of whom were only a few years younger than she was.

“Sometimes, you just can’t make up for what they missed [before coming to the School of the Future],” Cooper said. And technology alone is not going to solve the mind-numbing problems surrounding the education of poor minority kids.

Because, it’s really not about technology.

At SLA that message gets hammered home in the classroom. Classes are informal in structure and have an art-school feel: students, wearing whatever they pleased_ T-shirts and jeans, shorts (and even the occasional pajama-like bottoms) _ are up and down and walking around the room, clustering around their projects and discussing them.

Hull told me she pushes her students not to just follow instructions. Her style of teaching encourages questioning and pushing back.

And that made me think… and reconsider.

When we started this project our goal was to report on “Youth & Technology,” while thinking outside the box. But somehow, along the way it seems that I got caught up inside that very same box I was wary not to be trapped in: the technology box.

So now I have a dilemma: I am supposed to report on Youth and technology.

But it’s really not about that, is it?

“I held the pencil for a while. I didn’t want to use it; since

they aren’t making them anymore, you have to conserve

Thoreau’s pencils.” –From Robert Sullivan’s new book “The Thoreau You Don’t Know” ((New York Times Book Review)

“I miss paper and pencil. That was the best.”

Shamece Cross is 15. She is a ninth grader at Philadelphia School of High School of the Future, and she is giving us a tour.

The school, located in West Philadelphia, in one of the city’s poorest neighborhood, is a $61.4 million project initiated by former head of the Philadelphia school system Paul Vallas (who now runs the New Orleans Recovery School District) with help from technology giant Microsoft.

For many years now, the central debate in American education has been over just how much schools can do to improve the low rate of achievement among poor children. Many believe a school like The School of the Future can be a good start toward consistent and measurable progress. The school, which uses a lottery system (when a computer randomly allocate new children to sought-after schools like The School of the Future), has in fact an “open enrollment” policy, meaning it accepts every students selected in the lottery from anywhere in the city, regardless of academic performance.

And on top of that every student gets a laptop.

“I looove my school,” Shamece said outside the state-of-art auditorium. ” But I miss the feeling of having a bookbag and books. [Because] It actually makes me feel like I’m in high school. Now I’m carrying one laptop around. It’s boring…”

I was chocked and somehow troubled by Shamece’s declaration. It was innocent, it meant nothing. But to me it suddenly meant everything. Did you just say that you miss the books?

She nodded. “Yeah, I miss it a lot…”

Her voice trailed off as she lead us in a classroom.

I was lost.

How can could she say that she misses the pencils, the standardized paper, the spiral notebook, the lesson books, and the weighty feel of a bookbag when she went to a school like this! She was issued a laptop, a digital camera…I just couldn’t understand.

I followed her in that classroom and everything made sense…

The bare-bones classroom and its soothingly bright lighting had the feel of state-of-the-art corporate meeting rooms: no pencils, paper or printed textbooks (the library has four books total I think). Chalk and blackboards were no where to be found as well. Instead? plasma, flat-screen television and high-tech whiteboard video projectors. The school uses a Web-bases education software so that students, teachers and families can be linked through networks. But sweet Jesus, was this a high school or a college? Frankly, at one point I couldn’t tell anymore.

I was knocked down by the slap of luxury and the lucullan feast of technology. Knocked down.

But what Shamece said to us earlier [about missing paper and pencil] started to make more sense to me as we went along with our tour:

All that technology was great. But these students were still kids…

And I know the school is doing a terrific job preparing its students for a technology-driven world and closing the arguable digital divide between students who have computers at home and those who do not. I know that.

But at the same time I couldn’t help but feeling like Shamece that day: nostalgic.

Consider the pencil for example. Historically pencils have always stood for thinking and creativity; it is the tool of thinkers, planners, drafters, architects, and engineers or doodlers like me. But it is also the toy of kids…

And she is still a kid.

“I miss paper and pencil. That was the best.”

IT’S HOT. Afternoons in Philadelphia have been pretty much brutally hot since we got here, but today, was downright perverse.  Anyway…

We met Michele Jackson and her son Ryan, who is a student at Science Leadership Academy, one of the two charter schools Sabina and I are working with.

Ryan, came to Science Leadership Academy last year from Gesu school, an independent Catholic school in North Philadelphia educating children from pre-K through eighth grade.

At Gesu, which mostly comprised a demographic generally considered one of the hardest to educate_  poor African-American kids_ Ryan, couldn’t be himself.

“Oh, you’ re a white boy,” his classmmates would say to him when they saw him riding his skateboard.

 ”I don’t like basketball or football,” Ryan told us. ”If it doesn’t have to do with a computer I don’t like it. They [students] would call me a geek, a nerd, slap my hand down when I raised it in class.” 

At first, Ryan fell out of place at Gesu, but Michele’s encouragement helped a bit.

“I was at working at the time, so I couldn’t talk on the phone,” Michele said. “But he would text me when he was having a rough time, and I’d tell him ‘hang in there Ryan, it’s only until the end of the year and you’ll never have to see these kids again.’”

By the end of the year though, things had gotten worse. Ryan’s grades had fallen from A’ s and B’s to C’s in his final semester. When the school year ended, Ryan, a gifted sholarship student, had failed to make honor rolls, and Michele immediately went looking for a different option.

She searched for a high-quality public school for Ryan all summer until she heard about Science Leadership Academy, a brand-new (Sept, 2006) Philadelphia magnet school for science, technology, mathematics, and entrepreneurship.  She heard that the students at the school hardly used pen and paper and instead they used a school-issued laptop. She also heard about the communautarism the school emphasized.

Finally she heard that the school,  the school, although, publicly financed (a partnership between the School District of Pennsylvania and the Franklin Institute) like any other SDP schools, was relatively different in spirit; school officials there really try not to get caught up in or distracted by the city’s sometimes troubled and messy education bureaucracy (magnet versus charter, union versus non union, etc) .

 What matter most to them was what was happening inside the classroom. 

Michele, who is 48,  was a product of the School District of Pennsylvania ( now the seventh-largest school district in the country with a 185,000 students), monochromatically black and overwhelming poor since well over half of the students had family incomes low enough to make them eligible for subsidized lunch from the federal governement.

She was familiar with failing schools and poorly trained educators who didn’t seem to care much; thus, she understood the necessity to find a school that could provide sensitive and perceptive educators like 23-year-old Math and English teacher Matthew Kay and history teacher Diana Laufenberg. Both were known as visionaries, relentless out-of-the-box thinkers, with boundless passion for the kids. Both were committed to raise student achievement level.  Both were educators that care.

“It wasn’t just about the academic,” Michele said of her decision to send Ryan to SLA. “It’s really about the environment. He can be himself here.”

Today Philadelphia School District is changing but still paying the price for decades of substandard school system. The needs are great but resources can be relatively thin many educators told us. 

Yet, despite SDP facade of decaying walls and peeling paint, more students than not believe they can be successful.

Students like Ryan for example. 

Sabina and I went to tour the school and visit the students a few times this week. It offers an educational landscape unlike any other.

 ”Because Technology is the future,” Michele said.

And I gotta say this: watching these kids triggered parts of my brain I didn’t know existed. Seriously, the school is amazing.

The first time I walked in the building I sensed this vibe… It came rushing to me in the form of one word_  one word only because it captured the spirit of the school, the educators, the students, and the mood of the academic airspace.

The word is cool.

People use the word cool to describe a person, place, thing, a speech, an attitude, an abstract idea, the weather. It means tranquil, clear, focus, chill, calm, beautiful…

Cool is technology; a mixture of fear and fascination.

Cool is memorable. Like Tiger Woods winning the U.S. Open on one leg. How he had two eagles and a chip-in birdie in one celestial six-hole stretch on Saturday; how he rolled in a twenty-footer to defeat Rocco Mediate on Sunday; how he had to make do-or-die birdie putts on the 18th hole on successive days, with defeat staring him in the eyes; and then endured 19 extra holes on Monday to finish the thing off.

Cool is smooth, controlled, knowledgeable and forward-thinking. Like Barack Obama. How he has mastered the art of oration; his ability to get inside each listener. The sharp delivery, the rich phrasing ladened with a youthful sense of  dynamics, the artfully pacing, and the timely and skillfully placed pauses to provoke “call and response” with the audience. 

Cool is evil genius. Like Miles Davis. ”Endearing with his music, offending with his personality.” Just consider the cover of his album ”In Person at the Blackhawk, Vol. I,” on which he is draped in a pimp-like checkered overcoat. Bent over to light a cigarette, his face is made barely visible by side lighting. Engulfed in darkness, the only other face you see is that of his wife-to-be, the dancer Frances Taylor, peering intently at her man… A bad man of the highest order. 

Cool is change. Like the press in the new digital era. Like the Patriots announcing each 2009 draft pick on Twitter. Or baseball players announcing their retirement on their blog. Or even Like Barack and his BlackBerry.

Cool is a school like SLA:  free from tensions or violence.

The perfect place for Ryan.

Another day in Philadelphia, and Adeniyi and I are thoroughly smitten with this city. For me, it’s coming home–but seeing Philly with new eyes. I’m reminded each and every day why there’s NO place like home!

Even Adeniyi, a Frenchman and (perhaps more accurately) a Parisian at heart, has fallen for the city, and the people who belong to it. On the car ride home today after another long day, Adeniyi and I both expressed our longing to come back one day (and in my case, stay).

Anyway, back to the task at hand–we are, after all, talking about teens and technology! Today we returned to Science Leadership Academy, where we spoke with Diana Laufenberg, a history teacher at the school. Diana is one of those teachers every kid wants, but few are lucky enough to have–energetic, engaging, motivated, fun, dedicated to education and even more dedicated to her students (did I use enough adjectives?). Five minutes spent with her, and Adeniyi and I knew we’d come to the right place to find and tell stories about Philly teens and technology.

You wouldn’t think a history class would be a place where teens are learning through technology–but don’t tell that to Diana. Her students use technology to not only learn about, but to live history in this most storied of cities. Check out her students’ self-produced history assignments, including a series of podcasts they did on Election Day ‘08, in partnership with a school in Texas. As an aside, the most interactive I ever got in history class was a paper mache model of the liberty bell.

Here’s an hilarious video one of Diana’s students created to illustrate how far technology has left behind the traditional textbook:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkhpmEZWuRQ

The Election Day podcasts (scroll down to click and listen):
http://dlaufenberg.pbworks.com/Election+Day+2008+Project

How they did it (although Diana mentioned that the program is no longer free, as it was when her class used it):
http://dlaufenberg.pbworks.com/Using+GCast+with+a+Class

A blog from a fellow teacher at Science Leadership–it will give you a glimpse into the kinds of things the school is trying to do, and prove that Diana is not alone in her belief that technology is a powerful educational tool:
http://phoenixchase.blogspot.com/2008/02/untitled_10.html

That’s all for now folks! Good night!

“Just imagine waking up every single day with flu-like symptoms, and your entire body aching.”

Miriam suffers from fibromyalgia, an obscur and chronic disorder of widespread muscle pain, fatigue and multiple tender points. She is almost 20 years old. Sabina and I first met Miriam nearby the City Hall Tower.

It was broiling under the cobalt blue sky, but she stopped nonetheless for the “50 people 1 question.”

And then she told us about Fibromyalgia. And how far she’s come along.

Back in the day, she would go weeks enduring chronic pain and sometimes crippling fatigue, unable to do physical labor. That’s what Fibromyalgia does to the body: it forces it to surrender.

The pain and the exhaustion would be such that she sometimes found herself home, unable to go out .

It was the type of suffering that honors no season and respects no calandar.

The type no one would want anybody else to know about (even in this “age of no privacy”). She had minimal social interaction.

Until the Net came along.

Today, a junior in college, Miriam still experiences the recurring pain ; but she counters it with everything she has, mainly escaping into technology and a three-dimensional online world called vSide.

In fact, the virtual life she is living gives her some the things she is not able to do when she feels ill: the picayune pleasures of life, the shopping, clubbing and hanging out with friends.

Her story is the story of people coming together in cyberspace, of online communities helping people to regain a sense of belonging to something somewhere. It’s also the story of technology and the herculean power it wields.

As part of Fybromyalgia Awareness Month, Miriam talked to us about telling her story; she wants to explain how technology has affected her life.

She will be featured in an upcoming multimedia piece. Until then you can learn about her and the illness she lives with on her Website:

http://www.howfibroaffectsme.9k.com

Until next time,

Adeniyi