Originally Posted by StevenASylwester
Kudos to "inky" for reading this:
http://nasa-academy-of-the-physical...9/11/making-it-happen-nasa-and-naps.html

Now, how do I get everyone else to read it, too?
I think you have two separate problems to tackle:
(a) how to get people here to read your proposal;
(b) how to get other people to read it.
I think you'd do better with (a) if you realise that this is a community (largely) consisting of people struggling to get better education for their children. You don't need to convince us that there is a problem in much of education: we know that.

Moreover, we are busy and we don't owe you anything. "Thanks" to inky for reading your proposal would have been more tactful than "kudos".

It would also help to know why you would like us to read it. Do you want detailed constructive criticism? Feedback on whether we broadly like the idea? Action to push for its implementation? Or do you want nothing from us and just think we'll find it interesting or encouraging that it exists?

If you want people to invest time reading your proposal, what you need to convince us of (and in fact, the same will apply to others, although with others you may also have to convince them that there is a problem to be solved) is that you have something to offer towards a solution. That could either be a convincing abstract posted here, or something about your credentials to do this (who are you, what is it in your background that means we should expect you to have done a good job of designing a school?) or better, both. To be concrete, I think a succinct description here of your Pauling Colloquy, which is a seriously interesting idea, would have hooked more readers than what you did write about it, which didn't make sense unless the reader had actually read what you'd written about it elsewhere.

My own reaction, which may or may not have been typical, was: when you first posted, I clicked, skimmed, saw a large body of highly rhetorical and not clearly structured text, and made a judgement that the expected value from reading your blog wasn't worth the time it would take. It was only when chris1234, a long-time poster here whose opinions I've come to respect, posted that it was interesting that I invested the time in reading it.

When I did so, I found some interesting ideas and a lot of statements that I agreed with, but I felt that the proposal was frustratingly vague in important ways, such as the curriculum. Perhaps your US readers have background that helps them to understand things I'm missing, though. To give one example from a field I'm very familiar with, you list CS courses and you suggest that computing is central to your proposal, but you say nothing about what's in the CS courses and you come worryingly close to equating CS with programming. It makes me wonder whether there is any substance to the proposal.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to write a straight, rhetoric-free description of what the proposal actually is, with more detail than you have given so far, and separately, a document justifying your choices?


Email: my username, followed by 2, at google's mail