Artisode; John Ganster: American Dreaming

The American Dream is what we're dreaming of in the future. I think a dream of a better country like Iraq and pollution and bringing troops back to the country. We're thinking about bringing back the electric car. I want everybody to succeed. You know, I would really like everybody to get a hold of a piece of the dream. You know, there's a resistance to change in our culture, I think, and we're being forced to face that right now. I started a year ago to dance. It serves as a way to continue to learning, and for me, it's this huge challenge to go do that.

You know, I like to try things that are new and different, and so there's proof now that we're not succeeding as well as other places in the world. Why we don't perform as high as we could in math is because we have children memorizing formulas. They have way too much to deal with coming in, so they don't really own any of it. None of it is truly theirs. And so they get flooded with material and their days didn't confuse for lack of a better word. We're trying a new program and how we're teaching it, at least in my classroom, we're trying a completely different way of teaching it. Teacher backs off, students work independently in groups. So we're going to be like Zen masters from Japan. I'm going to ask you to think, and there's our think, and there's no other material

up here than a very short problem that you are going to work off of using your pyramid models to solve. We have no math books with us. We have no workbooks with us. You don't have ditto sheets, so you're going to apply the knowledge you learned. I love the idea of questioning authority. We always should do that, and that's not done anymore. We've gotten just used to believing the little blips of information that we get, and people recite that. And it's a direction that harms us, because we're no longer critically thinking if we're just going to believe what somebody tells us. If you had a dream, like Martin Luther King, he had a dream that there were blacks and whites when they had to be separated. So each dream came true, so I think that dreams can be real. And

independent thinker is a person who can problem solve a number of different ways, and that's why we are not as successful as other countries. As we go through the formula, we go through these procedures. This is how you do division of fraction, and so the kids learn that, and they don't see the models underneath it. As a country, we're less likely. People are really afraid to just try to change policy or change direction. I don't know if there is one dream. And in that, I think that people need to really take a look at more than one thing works. And this idea that one program fits all, it doesn't as an instructor. We're supposed to stick to something even though it's been proven to fail. And I just don't see the

wisdom in that. And if something isn't working right, it's within our abilities, as we have free will, as thinking beings, we can say, you know what, this doesn't work. We really need to change our focus.