Tony Hollowell's blog

Maya Frost, author of “The New Global Student”, has spent a significant amount of time encouraging those who might be interested to explore alternative pathways to education, such as going on a global romp. While this may not be an attractive option for some students, there are some key insights in her book about how this sort of experience can have huge benefits for those who are willing to go on the adventure. As more and more schools talk about creating “21st Century Learners”, her insights and her experiences have more and more relevance. It turns out that traveling to Buenos Aires for a semester (even while you are in high school) isn’t as complicated as you think as long as you have a little moxy.

While Maya’s book is written mainly to parents, it has consequences for everyone involved in education. As a teacher, I was curious about how some of her experiences related to my fellow teachers. I asked her a few questions via email and she was generous enough to respond with the following: continue reading this post

A few weeks ago, I decided to go by the education section and browse the titles. I usually don’t read books from this section because I usually strike out with the books that I find (how many classroom stories can a person handle?) In the process of browsing through the section, I miraculously stumbled upon one of the best books about education I have ever read.

The book is called “The New Global Student” by Maya Frost, and the book contained ideas to which every educator should pay attention. I’m not going to condense a 220 page book into an entire blog post, but here is the scoop.

The author and her husband decided to take their four daughters (three of whom were in high school at the time) for a year of living abroad. They weren’t sure how the credits would work out and what they would do about graduation or college admissions, but they knew they wanted to go on the trip. After trying to make it work out, they ran into red tape that just wasn’t convenient for their plan. So what did they do? Did they try to change the system? No, they just bailed on the system all together. They stopped listening to what the system said they should do, and they just made decisions that were right for their daughters. They packed their bags and headed on their journey as a family, figuring they would worry about standardized tests, graduation requirements, and earning credits at some point further in the future.

Fast forward to 2-3 years later, and the question is: did the escape work? Were their daughters left to disarray and destitution after “losing” such a grand opportunity to be trained by the American Educational System? Are their daughters some of the thousands of college graduates with freshly-minted degrees but no job offerings? Nope. Their daughters are all-stars. They all entered college early (and didn’t even mess with that whole SAT/ACT thing, leaving the standardized tests in the dust), they were TA’s at the age of 17, and they finished college early. They also accomplished something that is dear to my own heart: THEY DON’T HAVE COLLEGE DEBT! continue reading this post

Photo: Time Archives

Muhammad Ali is the greatest marketer of all time. He simply told people, “I am the Greatest.” He made it known, loud and clear, that he was the greatest in the sport of boxing, and he was saying that at the age of 20.

And at his retirement, after winning the heavyweight crown three different times (a record that remains this day), he proved his comments were true. Even to this day, he is acknowledged by everyone in the sport of boxing as the Greatest of all time.

One of my favorite quotes from Ali: “Some people say I’m cocky, they say I talk too much, and that I need a good whoopin’. But anything I say, I’m willing to back up.” This is why I think Muhammad is one of the greatest marketers of all time: his product delivered as promised. He talked a big talk, but he backed it up every step of the way.

Marketers and companies are really good at promising great things. A business claims that their product is going to help you, a politician claims to change society for the better, a school claims to build life-long learners. However, the business, politician, and school often do not deliver as promised. In many instances, the marketing is much better than the product. People get the word out, they claim that their product is amazing and going to change things, but it just doesn’t deliver. The problem is that many organizations spend more time developing their marketing instead of developing their product. continue reading this post

There is a “teacher crisis” in America because the number of people preparing to be teachers is significantly under the projected number of teachers that are needed. This is already true in math and science, where teachers with this skill set are highly sought after and given significant federal incentives (scholarships, loan forgiveness, etc.) to pursue this path. The question, then, is how to get more teachers into the field, and once you get them to pursue the field, how do you best prepare them?

One suggestion is to take people who already know something and have spent years in many different industries (business, government, law, etc.) and just get them into a classroom. These people already have the skill set, they already know content and even better, they know how this meaningful content can be used in the real world in which they worked. They have what many teachers do not have: experience with the application of knowledge. This experience is priceless.

But some people (usually professors in the Education Department of some University) don’t want these people to teach until they have taken 20 credit hours of pre-requisites and spent $30,000 on university classes. Furthermore, these people have a significant voice in the creation of licensing standards, and therefore, they are in a position to oppose non-standard routes to licensing.

This is a problem. continue reading this post

Dear Corporate America,

Please stop being fake.

Please stop making fake advertising.

Please stop making fake products.

Please stop hiring fake employees who pretend to care about me but really don’t.

Please stop faking a smile when I enter your store.

Please stop making fake customer service call centers that send me to people who do not care about what I need or want.

Please stop pretending you care about something besides your company.

Please stop sending me updates about how you are donating 0.0001% of your profits to preserve one acre of old-growth forests in Mongolia. continue reading this post

Schools play an odd role in society. They fulfill many different functions for many different people, but perhaps their most important function is to provide an environment of learning. However, there is a fundamental (and irreversible) flaw to schools that inhibit the level of learning that can occur within their walls. What is this flaw?

School is not real.

School is only a simulation. continue reading this post

I am perplexed by the fact that I still meet people who think that one day, “technology” is going to rise up and destroy humanity. There is this notion that lying deep within the depths of our computer is a sinister power waiting to unleash its savage plot to destroy all of mankind, to begin its uprising and establishment of a new order of life. It is as if people think our computers are conspiring, plotting, and just simply waiting for their moment to take over humanity. Thanks to the producers of “The Terminator” and “The Matrix”, as well as several other testosterone-filled movies with massive biceps and smash-mouth metal-destroying machines, we think there is something to fear in technology.

But despite all the hype, people are missing a very important point: technology is simply a tool, and there is no group of people with a more-desperate need for clarity on the meaning and use of technology than the people running our schools. continue reading this post

As I was driving along on an epic road trip last week, the song “Irreplaceable” by Beyonce came on. Now I don’t jam to Beyonce that much, but as I was listening to the song, I realized that Beyonce was telling me a secret about how to never lose my job AND how to date her at the same time! Who knew Beyonce, besides being an excellent vocalist, also has some great career and relationship advice?

What was her advice, you ask? continue reading this post

I have heard many people make comments along the lines of, “I am so uninformed because I just never have time to read the newspaper” or “I don’t have time to read the newspaper, and therefore, I don’t know what is happening in our world.” These remarks have always been peculiar to me because I hardly ever read the newspaper, but I still consider myself “informed”. I was tired of people somehow linking my duty to be an informed citizen with the amount of time I spend reading a newspaper. I’m a digital learner, and I don’t need a cup of coffee and a newspaper to inform me about what is happening around me.

But instead of dismissing those who think a newspaper is linked to my duty to be an informed citizen, I went on a quest. I took the day off, and instead of working, I actually read my local newspaper (The Indianapolis Star) all the way through. I decided to read every word of every story just so that I could find out what I was missing. Not only did I read every article, but I also went through and calculated what percentage of the newspaper is dedicated to advertisements. I wanted to know if, by not reading the newspaper, whether I was missing news or if I was missing advertisements. I went through every page of the paper and blocked each advertisement and calculated the total surface area of the all the advertisements in the paper just to see how much marketing penetration there is in a newspaper.

So, what did I find out? continue reading this post

Last week, I heard that President Obama was going to be delivering an address to students and that students “had” to watch it and that there was going to be a “mandatory lesson plan” that “would ask students to think about how they could support the President’s policies”. Ok, so that alarmed me. I didn’t think the President should be sending out lesson plans that involve students exploring ways to support the President’s policies. That smells too much like a dictatorship, and I don’t like dictatorships.

So, what did I do? Did I go turn on my radio and listen to what other people were saying? Did I run to my newspaper and read the editorials? Of course not. I just went online, read the text of the speech, and then came to my own conclusion, a conclusion based on facts and not on opinions. continue reading this post