Fascinating read... sort of rings bells in my head along the lines of DRM/piracy cold war. Reading the article and see the greater and greater extents the stud

Fascinating read... sort of rings bells in my head along the lines of DRM/piracy cold war. Reading the article and see the greater and greater extents the students were going through to cheat and the arms-race occurring between the teacher and the students, he leads you to his ultimate conclusion: the game has to change. You can see the writing on the wall as you read through. Written "brain dump" style assignments, unless changed every year, aren't going to yield great results. Interactive, group-driven projects, competitions and discussions are all things that are much harder to plagiarize, are more fun and will (hopefully) teach the students more. Not to mention more fun to teach. I have a lot of teachers in my family (midwest) and none of them glow when they talk about teaching... they describe it like a war of attrition between the teachers, the students and the administration... like there is some clock ticking away slowly in the background and everyone is going through the motions just trying to outlast everyone else. I am talking about 2 separate generations here, like 40 years apart saying the same thing. I can't imagine a shittier experience. On the other hand, I am friends with a few (younger) teachers out here in the west that are rabid about how exciting their class is and how much fun they have. The common denominator here is that the ones having a blast frequently do highly engaging and custom events in the classroom like re-enacting scenes from a play in drama on-the-fly or the poly-sci teacher segregated his class for a week while teaching about separate-but-equal. Those are micro-examples, but what I'm getting at is that the teachers that recognize that the game has changed are still having a great time teaching. Just like /cgi-bin shopping carts and "DO NOT HIT 'Purchase' TWICE!" buttons are dead on the web, so is the schooling experience of yester-year. If school wants to stay relevant, it has to compete with the allure of these extremely fast lives we live now. People cashing in $100,000,000 companies at 22 makes it tough to argue why your kid should stay in school until he's 73 so he can make $80k as an architect. I wouldn't want to go to school now, a lot of things seem in flux. Notice how popular the "Why go to college?!" conversation is now adays? I think in 10-15 years it will be much different/more effective with a different outlook though; that'll be a more engaging and compelling experience I hope.