Posts from Classroom

Fifty For Fifty!

Last night we passed our goal of raising $50,000 for teacher's projects that bring families closer to the classroom. The Gotham Gal and I are delighted. This has been an amazing gift that all of you have given us. Almost 10,000 students and their families will benefit from your generosity.

This is the fifth monthly campaign that this blog community has done via Donors Choose. In past years, we've raised about $20,000 each year from about 200 donors. This year, we raised more than $50,000 from 314 donors (and counting). That's a big step up!

We will leave the Giving Page and blog widget up for the remainder of the month. Hopefully we can raise a bit more for classrooms. At the end of the month, we will wrap this up, I will write a final blog post with the stats on the campaign, and I will list all the donors and link to their twitter handles if we have them.

On November 9th, from 6-8pm in the USV Event Space, the Gotham Gal and I will host a meetup for all the people who donated in this campaign plus some of the wonderful people from Donors Choose who make it possible to do this. We will get a Meetup page up shortly so people can RSVP for that event. It will be limited to those who gave in this campaign.

I talked to Charles Best, the founder and CEO of Donors Choose, about this campaign last week. He said that there are only a few other communities in the world that can rally around a Donors Choose campaign like this. This is a special place and you are special people. I am so gratified to be the "bartender" of this joint.

#hacking education

Fifty For Fifty Update

On August 1st, we launched the "Fifty For Fifty" campaign to raise $50k for classroom projects that bring families closer to the classroom.

Twelve days in, we've raised just over $27,000 from 137 donors.

That's better than half way to our goal which is fantastic.

I'd like to thank all of those 137 people for their generosity.

And in an effort to encourage more of you to participate, a few updates are in order.

First, The Gotham Gal and I will be doing a meetup in November in NYC. Anyone who gives to the campaign will be invited to attend. This will be like the meetups we've done for past Donors Choose campaigns but we'll host it in the USV event space instead of the public school cafeteria where we've done the prior ones. I will be back with a specific date for the meetup in a few days.

Second, I am going to blog the names and possibly twitter handles of everyone who gave to this campaign. I will wait until the end of the campaign to do this. If for some reason you don't want to be listed, let me know.

Bringing families closer to the classroom is such an important part of education and I'm super pleased that we've already raised $27,000 to fund those efforts. Please consider joining the campaign and getting us to our goal of $50,000.

#hacking education

Teaching

I woke up this morning in the middle of a vivid dream. I was standing in front of a large auditorium style classroom and teaching a bunch of college students. I was calling on people. Asking questions. Making jokes. Having fun. Teaching.

I've done that before. I taught classes at Penn to help put myself through grad school. And I've done guest lecturing so many times it is like second nature. But this dream was a bit different from what I've done in the past. It felt like it was my class and I was a faculty member.

My dad was a college professor (at West Point) in addition to a long military career. I've always thought that, like him, I would teach as a profession one day. It's the only thing that really interests me other than venture capital.

But I wonder if the classroom is the best place for me to do that. At some level this blog is my classroom. I look at what Sal Khan has done with his Khan Academy and I am inspired to think of new ways to teach.

MBA Mondays is an effort to understand what is possible in a blog format and what is not. Putting concepts down in a text format that anyone can read if they can get on the web is powerful. And the comments section allows for further discussion. The comments on the MBA Mondays post are often way better than the posts.

But every time I sit down in front of group of assembled entrepreneurs, I realize that the "in person thing" is different and better in some ways. I feed off the energy of real people sitting in the same room as me. I like the back and forth. Asking questions. Making jokes. Having fun. Teaching. Just like my dream this morning.

MBA Mondays can be a burden at times. I sit down in front of the computer each monday morning at 5am and churn out another post. It is work and it is not that much fun for me. Contrast that with stepping into a classroom of a hundred or so students armed with a topic for the day. That is a blast for me.

I've been thinking about the ideal model that combines all of the above. A freely available curriculum on the web that grows and evolves over time. A physical space where people can come and take classes that are recorded and broadcast live and also available for viewing after the fact. Some version of that seems ideal. Should it happen in connection with an existing education institution (an engineering school or a business school), or should it be its own educational institution? Not sure.

But the one thing I am sure of is that teaching is god's work and I love it and I'd like to do more of it.

#hacking education