Space Junk
Last week, the folks in the international space station had to duck and cover as space junk came dangerously close to their orbiting haven. It seems that debris from various objects humans once shot into orbit continues to plague any active space mission. This danger clouds each advancing endeavor while, as NPR puts it, “experts continue to debate what can be done about all the trash that’s orbiting our planet.”
I sit at a traffic light, listening to this story, wondering…
…as experts continue to debate what can be done about all the (trash?) that has been shot into the orbit of education?
Is outdated school curriculum the space junk of learning? Sometimes we see kids excited about what they are learning as they orbit the earth at 20,000 miles per intellectual hour. They experiment, discover, communicate and enjoy learning. Add the power of sharing this experience with others at a distance, and the process becomes even richer. But the shards of old, broken curriculum are a constant threat. Just as young writers create their own interactive online books or narrate and annotate the uploaded images they have created, an alert sounds:
Warning: Incoming Space Junk. Change course to avoid collision! The curriculum says you need to be able to diagram a sentence and identify parts of speech. Course correction requires that you immediately stop and demonstrate these skills in regulation format to avoid catastrophe. Fire one number two pencil –oops, retrorocket — with bearing 1A 2E 3C in precisely 60 seconds.
Can you think of an instance where space junk nearly took out a viable learning mission? Have you ever taken refuge in an escape module as the debris whizzed by? What can be done about all the trash that’s orbiting?
