Ferdi Serim's Personal Vision of Reform

Move to Princeton Regional Schools Announced March 8

Over the past year a new personality has emerged on the national K-12 network scene. We had read with interest some of Ferdi Serim's posts when he met him for the first time last summer. We had seen him perform in September when we brought Anatoli Voronov the Director of Glasnet to his upper elementary school classroom in West Windsor Township NJ a very well-to-do school district just to the east of Princeton. Early in February, when we paid him a visit to pick up Mosaic for our Macintosh, he began to tell us of some ideas that he had about making telecom work in local schools. We were fascinated and asked him to cooperate on this article. What follows is a lengthy discussion that traces the unusual background he brings to the classroom and outlines the plan by which he hopes to reshape local education by means of technology, the network, and professional and community empowerment in the 2500 student Princeton, NJ school system over the next five years beginning this July.

Before discussing the details of his plan for Princeton, we asked him to summarize some of his life history so that we could gain a fuller understanding of the experience that shaped his present insights. One evening between snowstorms (and after he showed us how he had refashioned his house by taking out walls with a chainsaw), we sat down with a tape recorder at his Kingston home:

Ferdi had appeared to us to have some unique capabilities that he brought to bear in the classroom and in his interaction with the network. We asked him to react to this statement. His answer took us on a brief autobiographical journey.

Creativity, Music and Teaching

I've been described as fiercely creative. I find myself motivated by the challenge of bringing things that had only been there before in imagination into reality. My first outlet for this was music. I started at the age of 9. I chose drums. I didn't realize until later how much of a symbolic language music is and that the two sides of the coin are first the mental aspect, an abstract aspect which is numerical and rhythmic. But there is also an intuitive aspect where a kind ESP comes into view. So much so that if you are doing it right it all takes you into a very timeless sort of space. What that taught me was both how to concentrate, and that you can spend hours and hours and hours doing something that doesn't seem very practical to anyone else. I've been playing now for 33 years and in the last year haven't touched my instruments very much because the only thing I have been playing is the computer. But when I do pick them up the command is still there.

After graduating from NYU, I went on to my first teaching job in Newark at $8700 a year in a building six years older than the statue of liberty. We had 48 students per class and what they went through was unbelievable. Most of my waking life, I saw hardly any white people; after a while white people started looking funny to me. All this happened between 1973 and 77.

Now at Newark I had a great administrator, one of the 3 best people I have ever worked for. He required me to write a lesson plan for every class I did even if it was going to be repeated in six other classes. He said forget everything that doesn't work, only pay attention to what does and after you approach everything with a purpose, you develop a bag of tricks that will work no matter what happens. If the first thing doesn't work, you jump to the second and it ends up looking effortless.

Empowering Students

Putting the kids in the center of it, empowering the kids to be the creators of what they were doing rather than just the consumers became my credo. We had to create what ever we did. We had no money for instruments. I actually stole the instruments from a band teacher who was being moved out to another building. We had worked out an arrangement where the instruments ended up being locked in the wrong closet and when it was time for him to go he opened up the right closets and gee there were no instruments and when he was gone I opened up the right closet and said 'oh look we have instruments to play with.' My master's thesis was written up over what I was doing in just that one school. Its title was Improvisation as a Means of Harnessing Creativity in the Classroom.

We got these kids to play on lunch hour and after school. Why? because I could either run like hell right after school to catch the local to Princeton Junction getting there at 4:34 or I could teach the kids after school for free, getting on the express at 4:17 and to Princeton Junction at 4:50. So I decided it was better to stay after school when no one could tell us what to do or that we had to stop. We made up all our own original music. They would make up the compositions. I would harmonize them and before long we had a whole repertoire. On of the best compliments that I received was what the kids said to a school census administrator who visited when I was absent one day. The question was the teachers race: black white or other. The kids were certain I was "other." "We don't know what he is, but he sure ain't white," was the way they put it.

Classroom to Arts Administration - Dizzy Gillespie as Mentor

Finally late in 1979 I went to Rutgers and approached Larry Ridley who ran the music and jazz department up there. The first meeting led to a second and eventually he hired me as his assistant. He was working for the National Endowment for the Arts. I helped him out with the curriculum. This is what I did until Reagan came along and gutted everything and forced an end to the national coordination project. It was right about then that I met Dizzy Gillespie on a bus at a meeting down there. My daughter was about 5 months old and we were doing a project up in Maine. Being a good administrator I said, 'tell you what. I'd like to go and evaluate that project that Dizzy is doing up there. I'll drive your bass up in my van. (It was a big acoustic bass that would otherwise have to go in the airplane cargo hold.)

So we drove up and the first night went to the rehearsal. It was a college band and the leader was playing a bunch of stuff that really didn't belong with Dizzy Gillespie who finally arrived about 3 hours late about a half an hour before performance time. As Dizzy took over the rehearsal there was one piece where the drummer just could get the rhythm. I took one of my sticks and started tapping the music stand. Dizzy turned around and said to me: "hey boy, you're a drummer, get over here." So that rehearsal at the Portsmouth Civic Center turned into my entrŽe. He liked the way I played so for the rest of the tour when those tunes came up he made the regular drummer get up and me sit down. Then one night at the Camden Opera House there was going to be a jam session and I brought my percussion instruments to jam with them. We were playing along but all of a sudden he stopped the whole band and I was alone in front of 3,000 people with nothing else going on. So I just closed my eyes and I went down really deep inside and I just felt the music come up out of floor and before I knew it I had a standing ovation. later we played at a high school and they asked for a solo and dizzy wouldn't let me take one. That's when I knew I had gotten to him.

But the following year after Reagan pulled the plug, we didn't have a single artist in residence for the entire state of New Jersey. No one wanted to go there. So I applied for the job and I got it. In 1981 I became artist in the same program that I had designed under Ridley at Rutgers . Having lost the job as an administrator, I became one of the troops. So I called Dizzy up and he didn't know who in the hell I was. I knew he liked kids so I asked him about my daughter. "Do you remember Jasmin the baby in Maine?" "Oh yeahhhh, Jasmin, now I know who you are!" He agreed to come down for very little money and played there. This is the stuff I documented on line when he died about a year ago.

He really was an incredible mentor for me. He showed me that if you really work hard enough that you can really get to any level that you want to attain. Also there is a certain almost corny thing that if you are really approaching something from purity of heart, doors will open for you that won't open if you are just doing the normal American scam game of pursuing your own enlightened self interest. When you are thinking and doing for other people things can happen at a level that they don't happen consciously. I have experienced this again and again and again.

In 1984-85 when I became New Jersey's first performing arts coordinator, I was able to get Dizzy Gillespie Day promulgated by Governor Keane. I brought the contract up to Dizzy's house and he looked at it and said, "well I don't know them down in Trenton, but I know who you are and if you tell me this is going to happen, good then I'll do it."

When I went around to schools playing with Dizzy, people would come up to me and ask: Are you famous? and I would answer: well I'll tell you fame is when a lot of people you have never met have already formed and opinion about you. Well that statement served me pretty well up to the Internet. Now of course it doesn't work well because there are a lot of people there you've never met who form an opinion about you.

I found out this position was a lot like being the eunuch in the harem it was illegal for me to play in any program in the state that got state funding. It took the State Arts Council nine months to hire me because every time the paper work completion was ready to go forward, it came to light that I had voted Democratic in a primary. So when finally after nine months when I became official you'd think they'd have a place for me to sit. But no desk, no nothing except that they had just paid $50,000 for five IBM PC's with 256 k of memory and floppy drives. So the only place to sit was in front of one of the computers.

I'd been there for about ten minutes in September of 1984 when a call came in from Washington. "We want a report on everything that happened in New Jersey in dance last year, and we want it in 6 weeks." I saw there was no way to do the job without the computer, so I called up and asked if I could get some training from another arm of state government. "Yeah in about 2 months," was the reply.

Obviously that wouldn't do. So I sat down there in front of that machine and for 100 hours beat my head against it until my head gave way. When that happened the computer and I got along much better. I realized that I was never going to teach it to think the way I did. I had to somehow come down to its level and when I did I intuitively began to understand what was going on. Eventually I computerized the whole office. I guess the teacher in me wouldn't let me know something that someone else didn't. So when in 1985 I was essentially doing two jobs for them I said "how about giving me a little stipend for this computer work?" and they said "no we cant do that".

At about that time my father who is a naval architect who had become president of the company down in Cherry Hill that had gone down in size from 100 people to four. I walked out the door of the Arts Council where I was running a $6 million dollar program for $19,000 a year and into the Cherry Hill operation for a $10,000 raise. I didn't really want to work in the defense industry but with the idea of this being a family business and just having a new son I found myself making the switch. Quite soon I found myself writing applications for them. Dbase and things like that. I had pretty much free reign for the almost 3 years that I was there. Then at a follow on job with another company I got into Novell and my claim to fame there was that I built a Novell network out of boxes of dead computers that showed up with almost no documentation. Never the less I installed the interface cards, configured the server software, did the wiring and then wired all that into a system 38 which meant I had to get some specialized boards and 9600 baud modems which then were rare and exotic things. I had to figure out a remote access scheme that would allow people in various offices in Virginia and New Hampshire dial into this one PC attached to the Novell LAN that could them access the IBM System 38. When it was done, my boss said that I had built a system in 3 months for $10,000 that would have taken a year and a half and $250,000 from outside consultants.

Technically it was fun but in general I soon got sick of business. The management was so Neanderthal that I could show them with the computer what was going to happen. But they preferred to "b- s" each other while with every iteration my accuracy got better and they resented it even more. I had my own understanding of how to apply the technology as an extension of the mind rather than to automate the manual processes already in place. Not only did management not want to hear it but I could find any people to help me do what I needed to do. You could find people to do specialized tasks, but finding someone who knew how to use the technology in a big picture way to shed some light on a process to provide some insight was a problem. I didn't know anyone who knew how to use the computer to think! I was sure that there ways the technology could be used to show trends. I was very much into relational databases. It was just common sense.

So round about spring of 1990 I decided I wanted to go back to teaching. I called a woman right over here where I had done my last residency with Dizzy Gillespie.

"Willa, I want to go back to teaching." She said "sorry we don't need any music teachers." I said "no no, I'm a computer guru now." Oh, we are building a school and we do need a technology person. Get in touch with Mary Lou Simon. Well Mary Lou remembered me from my jazz residency, she said she'd never seen teaching like that., never seen anyone get elementary school kids to make jazz come alive. I said that's what I want to do with computers. So I designed a technology five year plan for South Brunswick. I also went to all the interviews and thought I had done very well and thought I had the job only find out that they had to take one of the teachers from inside the district.

"Are you still interested in teaching?" "Yeah." "Well there's this guy Rob Staats. He's looking for a teacher." As they say the rest was history because its not every day that a computer coordinator gets a systems analyst walking in off the street ready to teach elementary school kids how to use the computer. But the last job I had had was so abysmal that teaching was actually a pay raise for me. I had had to take a big pay cut when I went from the family one to the competitor's shop in the weak economy of 1989.

What It Takes to Do Education Right

What made it so wonderful in West Windsor was apparent to me from the first 10 minutes that I was there. I watched a student come into the office and talk to the secretary and the amount of respect conveyed in tone of voice and body language was amazing. And then I saw a student talk to a teacher and there was this incredible rapport and respect on the part of both. Then Rob showed me the facilities and I said this is unfair. How can you expect me to remain objective after you just showed me Shangri- la?

This was all because of the philosophy that the superintendent and assistant superintendent had in place there for 17 years. The first precept was that the kids come first. Their safety and well being is the absolute standard by which everything else that you do is measured. And then right away you realize that the only way you can deliver on this is to treat the teachers as real professionals. This can't just be lip service. You must care for their development if you want them to be there for a long time. That means paying 100% of further educational costs for your teachers. If you needed to go to a conference for professional improvement, that was also paid. If you needed materials for your class, you had them.

Now the teachers paid a price for this. There was incredible scrutiny. Nothing that went on in those classrooms didn't immediately get back to administrators and parents who demanded very high levels of achievement not just for tests but for good solid learning. And since the staff was in a position to deliver this, the two things went hand in hand. This was a district where people from the outside with 20 years experience and tenure would leave just for an opportunity to experience what we had to offer.

The district's success derived from our being empowered as producers. The curriculum did not come top down. The teachers write the curriculum and they make sure that they coordinate its development where the ones with more skill interest and knowledge in this area take more of a leadership role. They also had a practice that when you went to work there as a new teacher, if you were not excellent, they didn't keep you. Being mediocre or average was not acceptable. Of course the district started out in pretty good shape because it was cloned off of the Princeton District about twenty years ago as the population grew in the area. Cranbury, South Brunswick, Kingston, all these areas used to send their kids to Princeton High.

So they made me an offer. It was predicated on my number of years in the New Jersey school system which were few because I had been teaching in other ways and therefore it was low. Nevertheless I figured I better take it. Then the superintendent got a hold of it and it grew by $6000. He said he wouldn't be able to sleep at night if they got be at the earlier figure.

This man, Dick Willever, is the same one who has just hired me again at the Princeton Regional Schools. He retired from West Windsor and has taken two other jobs as interim superintendent. He's the greatest administrator I have ever seen, treating everyone on his staff as though they were family. Now this is the kind of stuff that, although it may sound corny to other people, without which you have nothing.

Why the Network?

Meanwhile my work in industry convinced me that the power of computers would remained unharnessed in the absence of ubiquitous networking. Even the small Novell LAN that we gatewayed into a System 38, with dial-in access from remote offices revolutionized the way project management was done. Naturally, when I saw the network of Apple IIGS machines in my lab at WWP, in Sept 1990, I was elated.

Some would have seen the glass as half empty (these 16 bit machines are all but considered obsolete by many), but I saw an immediate way for kids to share their work with an audience of 700 of their peers. And this was before we had even one phone line in the lab! During the second year, phone lines were added, to provide access to Prodigy. A crucial point happened towards the end of the year, when a student, who had previously been notoriously hard to motivate, became class hero for finding in the Prodigy online encyclopedia materials about endocrine cancer (which weren't available in the otherwise excellent school media center). The power of reaching out and bringing home the goods was transforming for this young man. We realized we had something here.

The following March, I attended a conference where a teacher did a demo of ScrapbookUSA, still my favorite example of an ongoing telecommunications project which is a paradigm in terms of design, implementation and support. Ted Roth, a visionary teacher in Connecticut, created this project 5 years ago, which has now been shared by over 120 schools and classrooms across the nation. I started a class on a session the day I returned, and we now had 24 excited kids adding their original creative writing pieces and exchanging critiques with 150 peers nationally. During this time, I noticed the modem number for NASA Spacelink, and just as the nightmare of so many administrators would have it, I spent 30 minutes connected to Huntsville, Alabama downloading the most unbelievable array of science curriculum materials I'd ever seen in one place and no one saw the phone bill.

The stage was already set in April of 1992, when Princeton University offered our district, along with twelve others, one year of free Internet access through JvNCnet. Once I heard that one could telnet to Spacelink, and avoid all long distance charges, I knew I could justify the cost and labor it would be worth to extend this resource to my students and colleagues. I saw how difficult the interface would be, and indeed it was three weeks before I could get onto the listservs I needed to get things moving. Three things helped, however: I kept a log of my efforts and results; I asked everyone online I could find for help, and referred to the log for what I'd already tried. I also got the log files of an online Internet training course from a good friend via America Online, who had just completed the course.

The world of listservs, FTP sites, telnettable hosts, expanded by the addition of Veronica, enhanced gopher clients and most recently Mosaic, have extended the resources available in our district by orders of magnitude. Board members now research education issues and policies equipped with the latest from ERIC. Media center people dip into the Library of Congress and Smithsonian exhibits to augment their "on site" collection. Teachers, preparing for classes or revising the curriculum, are coming to think about what they might find on the Internet as they frame their questions and goals. The slow, steady (sometimes glacial) process has inexorably begun.

Since then we note that Ferdi has been much more like a downhill racer than a glacier. In April 1993 his class entered and won the monthly Internet treasure hunt. By the summer he was playing a significant role in the leadership of the Consortium for School Networking. In August Scientific American published an article on Cyberspace. Included was a color photograph of some of his students gathered round a computer. In late September we brought Anatoli Voronov, the Director of the Russian computer network Glasnet to Ferdi's class. In 45 minutes his students had met and were sending electronic mail to students of their age in Moscow. Less than two weeks later when tanks fired on the Russian White House, the circumstances of their new email friends had changed dramatically. Soon after that the Trenton Times printed a story on page one with a color photograph of Ferdi's students. It was the best such picture we have ever seen. The expressions of rapt attention of the students faces spoke volumes about how their minds were being totally engaged by what they were doing. And finally in early February of 1994 one of Ferdi's sixth grade students won a national essay contest for the 4th 5th and 6th grade level on the subject "networking where have you been all my life?"

Very Significant New Goals for Princeton Regional Schools

Ferdi explained to us: "What generally happens when a person gets the level of skills and the knowledge and marketability that I have gotten recently is that they tear you right out of the classroom and make you an administrator as though you are going to be able to wave a magic wand and somehow empower everyone else. Well to me this is not how it works. You should leave that teacher in the classroom while enabling him or her to branch out.

In Princeton this enabling technology becomes (in part at least) the Internet. In 1990 Princeton University had agreed to assume fiscal responsibility for JVNCnet. The University had instructed JVNCnet to connect the Princeton Regional schools at no additional charge. When Princeton agreed to the privatization of JVNCnet Ira Fuchs had it written into the contract with Sergio Heker the Director of JVNCnet that his new company Global Enterprise Services would continue to provide the Princeton Regional Schools with free Internet connectivity for as long as it exists.

(The Princeton cable TV coax based I-net came within 100 yards of the JVNC NOC which remains on the Princeton Campus where it is remotely monitored from the new headquarters of GES. It was a simple matter to install a router and patch into the I-net by means of a bridge.) As a result the district is getting it right now through C-Tec the regular Princeton cable system. Really only a handful of K-12 sites can rival what we have.

I have come up with five areas of what I am going to do at Princeton. The first one is to teach students. The second is teach teachers. The third is work on the curriculum. The fourth thing is community development. They are opening four homework centers in Princeton. These are mini labs connected to the internet. They will be in the poorer sections of town and in the public library. The High School runs a Mac Centris 650 as a file server where all students and school system faculty have internet ids and email boxes. When students graduate they are allowed to keep their ids on the school system. They and others in the community can reach the server (which also runs BBS software) through four dial up lines. We want the community to become life-long learners by having them participate in the processes going on in the school. Networking will allow them to do this from their home, the local library or from a homework center. The schools are going to get a lot more support for technology if people are feeling the impact right in their own homes.

A lot of parents just want to know what is going on with their kids Therefore we will publish on the net examples of what the kids are actually doing. Because our dial in BBS will allow telneting out, parents who choose will be able to use the Internet for their own purposes. We will need to run some work shops as a means of getting people familiar with the resources that are there. The goal is to get them trained well enough to get to the point where they can go on line and take advantage of the online training we offer. I can send you in 30 seconds and online lesson plan that will keep you busy for 30 hours. Big Sky Telegraph has influenced my ideas for training and outreach. So indeed I have the benefits now of five years of Frank Odasz's experience of what works and what doesn't.

The fifth and final part of what I'll be doing is seeking grants and selling services to business. I have this idea that if there are good teachers in schools, that means there are effective communicators. And that these are people who can tell by looking at someone whether they are getting it or not and, if they aren't, who can come at it from a different direction until both parties feel that they know it.

There's no regular way of working on picking up grants there. So as we get the other developments under way, one of my activities is going to be working on ways to get a whole bunch of grants to come when we get those other pieces in place like the technology planning and the curriculum improvement. Of course one thing that we are really looking for is examples of how this telecommunications fit really happens within the classroom. How can you take what you are trying to do that is worthwhile and do it better with the technology? If you can show this and do it definitively in a way that people can follow it and learn from it and point the way in doing this, that's the kind of stuff that should be getting funded.

Let me expand on the concept of fee services. A lot of local businesses need to learn about the Internet. If you have some good teachers the fit is natural. Why shouldn't they come to the schools and learn what they need to know instead of paying $300 to 800 a day for fancy commercial seminars? Depending on the business, some interesting barter arrangements could also be worked out with the local schools.

The first time I got on the net was April 1992. Things have gone fast, but the hours have been long -- several thousand in fact. But the training as a musician made it easy for me. For a musician, practicing is a privilege in the sense that it is time allocated from the more mundane but necessary concerns of life. Well right now teaching musical skills is not so socially acceptable where doing the same with internet skills is very socially acceptable. They used to view music as a distraction from the skills needed to get into a good college. But now they do anything to get more of my class so that they will be more prepared as a computer literate person, to get that big job and buy the big house.

Rob Staats the person I work under at West Windsor is a very visionary guy. He negotiated with Apple back when all they were selling was II-Es and got them to put their first computer lab in here. And over eight years or so by the time I arrived he really built a program that had a foundation. That foundation rested on three things.

Communication, everyone needs to communicate some kind of way or other whether its with words, graphics, or multi-media. They must be convincing when they communicate . Finally people need to be in charge of when and how they communicate.

Problem solving comes next. There are environments that you can work in on the computer that will enhance your problem solving skills whether it is logo, or simulations and so on.

The third one is the idea of curriculum integration. Here you are using various software tools that exist to enhance what's going on. Certainly the Internet is the greatest tool for integrating the curriculum that we have yet attained because of the enormous variety of resources to which first hand exposure is available.

Communication, problem solving and integration working together can yield a very good curriculum.

A New View of the Environment

When we asked about his view of the environment necessary to make this creativity flourish, Ferdi replied that the top down or bottom up view of the world was always presented as a dichotomy.

Well I think you can look at it in a different way -- as two triangles inverted towards each other so that their tips meet in the middle like an hour glass. At the very top you have the policy makers and the people who are in charge of the various decisions. These are people who wield great power by virtue of the domains that they have controlled. The power of a bureaucrat is directly proportional to the ability to say no to people who have no means of overturning that decision. So for something to happen at this level a lot of people have to be convinced to allow it to happen -- to withhold their "no"s. These folk determine how time and money are spent, who gets to play the game and under what conditions. Now all this filters down the triangle towards the inverted apex until it eventually hits the classroom and individual teacher. The place where the learning occurs is the place where the student encounters these materials in an environment suitable for learning and this happens - one person at a time.

But you have the second triangle coming from the bottom up and just as there is incredible power concentrated at the top, so also is there amazing power at the bottom. You have the taxpayers with their contributions causing the schools to get built and so on. And it focuses up and up and up through the neighborhood businesses and so on until you get to the parents and the student. And the challenge here is to create a form where the top down and bottom up processes (both of which culminate with a student focus) will spark creative learning. When the spark at the focal point of the student happens it widens this bottleneck so the learning can flow a little bit more.

The challenge is to create an ever widening flow where more people and processes are brought to bear on the focal point of the student. Networking helps to coordinate communicate and share what's going on. Networking is the tool to use to create this widening flow so we can turn reform into a more systemic process. But it can't happen only from top down or bottom up. Both must be happening together for it to work, Otherwise what you get is the confusion we have now.

What happens if you don't get both these processes flowing well is that people will fund a project designed to accomplish some goal but when the project is over its over and there is no permanent lasting impact. You can have something where a teacher goes in and against all odds creates something and the rest of the people just say "thanks very much but this is just too hard for the rest of us." It doesn't scale.

For things to happen, there must be a desire for change at the top. In turn that desire for it to happen at the top has to be driven for a desire for it to happen at the bottom. People at the bottom have to be saying: we want this! This is vital to our interests! But if the folk at the bottom don't understand what is possible they won't be able to drive the folk at the top. Hence we have just one more need for the community outreach centers to help the people at the bottom understand just what is possible. Give them a taste of it and let them benefit from it. My wife thought I spent too much time on line when I first got on the Internet, - until the Bruce Springsteen concert. We hadn't gone to a concert in years and she went down to get tickets and found that they just laughed at her. "This sold out after the first three hours. People camped out for days. No way. You can't go." So I went on the internet and the next day I had tickets. I had to drive somewhere and pay a little bit more than I should have, but I ended up with tickets. That was her birthday present. Well that made a believer out of her. So with little things like that they can find out why the Internet is good and why it can help them.

My writing processes and computer processes are all informed by my musical processes. I was able to go from a spread sheet to writing code in a matter of a month because of the fact that a code is nothing but an arrangement or a transposition using another symbolic language shaped by an invisible architecture. And most of my stuff that people see on the net is first draft. Just like a jazz solo. There's no over dubbing.

On the state systemic initiative project, we were sitting there thinking, how do we document this process. Does it come down like this? Or does it come up like that? In a flash I saw it and said both. Take the two triangles and put them together and that's what you've got. And when I had this image I started thinking of others where similar juxtaposition occurs in nature. I had some reasonably decent ideas. But in the future, more often that not I'll talk to a student and say here's what I see here. What can you think of that is like that? And he or she will come back with the insights, because I think we have to give up the idea that we have to know it before they do. The days of maintaining such a stance are long gone. What we can do is help them to put ideas and insight together in ways that generate new meaning, in ways that generate personal meaning.

We said that we thought what Ferdi was onto was very important but that he couldn't do it unless someone supportive is in control and understands what you are driving at and is willing to start almost with a blank slate.

True, he said and that's the only reason why I am leaving West Windsor. I was fully prepared to stay in West Windsor forever and the only two things that happened to make me move were, first that they had a change of command over there and Bob Staats the supervisor whom I thought was so great has resigned and is going back to the classroom. For four years he has been doing everything they asked. He's been holding his budget flat, not buying replacement equipment. He's been holding the line and holding the line and then finally he said look, you have increased my work load by 800%, I am now doing this for the whole district. I want you to take my secretary and make her full time. They refused and he said "OK I'll go back to the classroom I am no longer willing to do this."

Now at that point I had a couple of options. I was fairly obvious that they would come to me and say why don't you replace him? But my reaction of course was that if you were going to do right by me, you should have done right by him. The other problem is, I want to be in the classroom. Because just like the musicians who can't play after they become teachers, teachers can't teach after they leave the classroom.

Reaching Across District Lines

And so I see a new problem. If we are going to reform education, lets look at the whole picture starting with the way we use the time of our professionals. So I say don't make me a full time teacher. Make me part time and pay me to have continued employment over the summer and whatever money I bring in from grants and consulting you keep and put it towards the technology budget. So if I write and succeed in getting a 200,000 dollar grant that is 200,000 that can be used for a technology program and I don't have to worry about selling my services to JVNCnet for $90 an hour. I can sell my time for $90 an hour but if I do so, I can't determine what I'll be working on. This way I can determine a single project that is focused and builds over a period of four or five years.

So when these people asked me to describe my vision in technology I told them what I have told you and said it is going to take four or five years to do this and what I am looking for is a platform to operate from. Whatever you offer me is what I am going to make and I am going to give up consulting. I think that districts must take this kind of look at their staff and at bringing people like me in who can help develop their staff and show their teachers that there is something to shoot for -- pride of ownership taking far more control over their professional lives. Many of the problems we are facing are going to require cooperative action by parties who feel that they are usually working in opposition.

I have my replacement in West Windsor in mind and have reason to think I might be able to get an ISDN line installed between our two districts. I have a good enough sense of what the program is over there that we could institute some distance collaboration between the two groups. We could use the technology for staff development because I could train that teacher remotely. I am writing a grant right now for apple. It will involve Ryder College which prepares teachers for West Windsor and Lawrence township - 24 teachers total. What we do is give them all internet accounts and put them on PRESTO. This is Larry Anderson's list - PRESTO ( Preservice and Student Teachers on Line). Anderson is the guy who does the National Technology Learning Center. He collects technology grants from all over the country and in addition to this he is involved in teacher training. So he thought: wouldn't it be really great when new student teachers come out they could go online on the internet and discuss the experiences they are having in their classrooms with each other?

Ant any rate I said that we would divide the machines so that each teacher could go online from home or the classroom and that they all link up with the PRESTO list not only to talk but also to do research projects. This grant will deliberately fall across boundary lines. I also hope that both West Windsor and Princeton can provide teachers who can train their counterparts elsewhere in the state for the NJ Systemic Initiative for the Reform of Math and Science Education from the National Science Foundation. These other teachers can become Internet trainers who are as good as I am. They will enable themselves. I 'll just show them the basic mechanics of how. If I show them that it can be done, then they will feel confidence to do it themselves - even if it be at their own speed. It helps tremendously to see someone else do it. So I will be working with a lot of teachers in this district, helping them with the technical stuff, helping them with planning and helping them through a couple of projects.

We asked whether administrators who might be a bit mistrustful of these developments still might not dare to get in the way. Ferdi replied: I don't know how it will play out. In the best of all possible worlds people do things because they realize that they are beneficial. In a less better of all possible worlds they still do it because they are afraid of what's going to happen if they wind up on the wrong side. In my old school we now have eight internet lines coming in. The reason this happened is that when the Scientific American article came out, parents of students who were in the other wing were saying well my kid is never going to get on the Internet. We need it in this wing too. They said to some of the other teachers: "is there any reason why he can do it and you can't?" So the Internet was soon in both wings!

We asked Ferdi to what he attributed the ability for making outstanding use of the Internet at what some would consider a rather early grade level - given the foreboding of reputation of the network. He replied: "Its very hard to know. I see teaching as a creative art. The kids on the network are producers and not just consumers. Computers are basically communication boxes and mirrors for the way we think. Their value is in allowing us to make contact with each other. The grade levels that I am working are partially an accident of where Rob Staats the computer coordinator happened to be. But it was also a fortunate accident too. I prefer this age level, because very soon there after they begin to get very definite senses of those subjects in which they can and cannot excel in school.

At this age the students are malleable and much can be achieved. On the delivery end we have different sorts of problems with the teachers. Everyone faces the same problem. The teachers are so overburdened with what they are doing that they don't have time to do something else. Nevertheless we had best work with what is there now. Experience shows that for most people it takes 7 or 8 years of working with the technology to begin to get proficient enough in it to create material for others to use. OK we better get people started because the 7 or 8 years starts from whenever the downbeat occurs not when hardware gets cheaper or bandwidth wider.

Perhaps ItÕs Time to Bury the Image of the Information Superhighway?

What Ferdi is describing multiplied out over 50,000 school districts would yield its own National Information Infrastructure. It would be we think a much more healthy infrastructure that we are hearing about from the Administration and the mega corporations. It would be one that because it is defined by every community belongs to every community in a way that an industrial age data superhighway laid down through that community by big business and big government could never achieve. Indeed we agree that the information superhighway is the wrong descriptor describing the wrong mechanism. It is shaping up as an inanimate fast track laid through a community by outsiders and quite possibly dividing it as the railroads did 100 years ago and the interstate highways did 40 years ago.

Instead perhaps the best way to understand what is wrong with this image is to view an alternate mode of development as a living growing organic process. Perhaps a national information environment. In an environment the proper role of government is much more that of a referee than an agent that hands out rights of way and attempts to preempt the interests of the localities in the name of an national interest chosen and inaugurated behind closed doors in Washington DC.

Ferdi is struggling to redefine the terms in which the national agenda is laid out. Here is a early draft of that redefinition.

Bringing the Breath of Lifelong Learning to Bodies of Knowledge

The image of an Information Superhighway is inadequate as a model for our efforts at systemic reform both of education and commerce in an information society. While the transportation revolution of the 1950's added to commerce and the fluidity of our society, it also brought us smog, oil shortages, urban blight and suburban flight, and changing us from collections of communities to strips of malls. We must look to science, particularly biology, for metaphors which can serve to illuminate our goals and the resultant activities.

Learning as Mitosis - the organism lives or dies on the success of processes occurring at the cellular level: learning happens, or does not, one student at a time. Just as mitosis doesn't happen in a vacuum, the support structures provided educators and their students represent the cellular level of education reform. Seen in this way, debates between "top down" or "bottom up" fade in significance to consideration of needs and relationships between the total organism.

One state, scores of counties, hundreds of districts, thousands of schools, tens of thousands of administrators, hundreds of thousands of educators, millions of students, seeking to turn knowledge and skill to capabilities.

One state, scores of industries, hundreds of disciplines, thousands of companies, with tens of thousands of managers, hundreds of thousands of employees, millions of customers, seeking better lives and livelihoods.

One state, scores of counties, hundreds of municipalities, thousands of offices, tens of thousands of workers, hundreds of thousands of taxpayers, millions of citizens, seeking effective policies and productive use of public resources.

Our goal is to bring these into a single organism dedicated to, and capable of, lifelong learning.

Two Ferdi Essays and two interview side bars

Another View of the Internet

For many educators, the first glimpses of the Internet create an aversion reaction similar to vertigo, as layer upon layer of potential and limitless perspective replaces the feeling of being "grounded" that we unconsciously rely upon for security.

When we find ourselves in a new environment, moving to a new home, new job or even on vacation, we need to know where things are and how to make them work for us. Hotel ads extolling the virtues of "no surprises" show the "value added" aspect of stress reduction through predictability. Those who live in a small town, as I do, have a situation that has almost passed from the scene: I walk to town, where I must go to a mailbox to pick up my mail, everyone knows each other on sight, getting lost would be a 15 minute proposition even if you went down *every* street. It is quiet enough to hear the sound of snow falling on snow at 3 AM, when it says of itself: ssssshhhhhhh!

Of course this town has become surrounded by suburbs. The functionality required by "modern life" includes demands for shopping centers, malls, commuting and the like. The effect on our streets provide another metaphor for bandwidth (what happens when you try to fit T1 levels thru a dialup 2400 modem connection!), except that no one ever got run over by a bit. Yet, these changes have been absorbed by the new people (who escaped the cities for the clean, safe "country") and locals alike. We know where to go for tires, textbooks or tempura. We know which roads will be impassible at rush hour or after a heavy rain. We know how to get to New York or Philadelphia.

Some things don't automatically come with the suburban scene. "Culture" is one of them. If you want to see a foreign movie, modern dance, a jazz concert, you need to find a place that such events gravitate to. Typically, you will find a place of higher learning nearby (just as you will find Internet access!) Such institutions act as a magnet for people, who bring along their special interests, talents, experiences, and find ways to share them within communities. As much as I like my little town, I had no one to discuss bebop or the I Ching with until folks moved in who worked in research or education near Princeton.

Sometimes, however, you "just have to go to New York". This global magnet is your only recourse, other than global travel. Almost anything you want finds its way to New York, along with a lot you don't want. It's all there, somewhere.

Herein lies the metaphor. When we introduce teachers to the Internet, we are taking them from their room, the place where they live out their professional lives, and relocating them. Should they choose to keep their doors and windows locked, they may never realize that they have moved, and life can proceed safely as before. Once they venture outside, they will surely realize "this doesn't look like Kansas anymore, Dorothy!"

The sense of disorientation is equal to waking up in Manhattan. Once you realize that the even numbered streets usually go east and even numbered avenues usually go uptown, you can begin to find your way around. Landmarks will claim space in your consciousness, as will alternate means of arriving at them (when is it faster to walk than get in a cab? Which subway does the job?). There are probably as many destinations on the Internet as there are addresses in New York; there definately are more people!

Who would expect to get off a bus in the Port Authority and know everyone in New York, or be able to meet the leaders and luminaries that give the city its reputation? Yet, we treat "clueless newbies" with the same jaded matter of factness that New Yorkers are accused of, even if unintentionally. Some of us even argue against making the trip, what with the danger, cost and objectionable offerings that would cause blushes on 42nd St.

We need to be honest.

We are asking teachers to enter a new world, to relocate to a state of mind which is far removed from a "one room world" classroom, to a place where the entire world is the classroom. In my opinion, the vastness of the Internet is not the real problem. It is the organization of this immensity into communities which are closer to a "human" scale that will make the Internet as popular as the suburbs (with hopefully a better design!). People will want to move there, knowing that they are safe, supported and can learn their way around, to find and use things they really need to make a better life.

What do we need? Welcome Wagons?

As we make our first steps, we need to be constantly aware of designelements that organize us into communities, virtual and otherwise. Common interests, needs, goals must be supported by means to share, exchange and react. Tools arrive daily to make searching and retrieving informationeasier on the Internet, and surely new tools can help meld disparate listservs and newsgroups as veronica and gopher have done for archie and ftp.

The potential for virtual communities to create actual results requires mechanisms for person to person collaboration, which has implications at local, state, regional, national and international levels. These interactions and functions must take precedence over technical considerations, indeed must direct development of new capabilities. We do what is possible, and define what is possible through the filter of our experience. We (who are here) are amassing experiences, becoming acclimated to possibilities our peers can't even imagine.

Just like my neighbors, who react in shock: "You're going to New York? To Central Park? By subway? With your children?"

November 2, 1993

Who's disappearing now... after the holocaust

Friends,

A day after visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC with my daughter's sunday school class, I'm haunted by echoes unspoken. With trepidation and preparation we made the trip, knowing the story but unsure of what the toll confronting this portrayal of the worst human beings are capable of would exact. I was proud of the questions these young people asked, of the courage they displayed in facing the horrors, and was equally admiring of the job the designers of the museum did in tackling the challenge of telling the story without succumbing to any number of pitfalls of sensationality, gore, etc.

A few moments stand out in my reflections: on display was one of many early computers (Holerith tabulators, then the most advanced machines available) which was used by the Nazis to locate all of the future victims of the death camps, and vastly facilitated the efficient operations of locating, then disappearing, large numbers of the population. But it seems to me that before these people could physically disappear, they had to be "psychologically disappeared" from the consciousness of the rest of the population. It seemed as though no one noticed they were gone. There was a display of a scale model made by a resident of one of the ghettos (which preceeded the relocation to the death camps) which showed in detail how walls had been constructed around the designated zones, preventing knowledge or contact between one side or the other. For a time, life continued as a new kind of "normal" on both sides of the walls.

Over and again, the plea "Never again" was implicit. Yet I'm afraid.

It seems to me, it has already happened again. Certainly in the 1970's when two million Cambodian's "disappeared", and more recently, in death squads on every continent. But even more subtly, it may be happening now, as the barriers of poverty, lack of education, cultural hatred and fear mount invisible walls ghettoizing ever larger numbers of people, who begin to "psychologically" disappear from our consciousness. Whether "we" are walled in or "they" are walled out, the one possibility which can begin to change the situation becomes more remote.

Until and unless each of us finds a way to reach beyond our normal comfort levels of association to extend the help of sharing what we know with another, (and in so doing learn where unity transcends appearances) the walls will grow. It doesn't matter much how simple the act of giving, the care of sharing skills and enabling someone, anyone to move even a single step beyond where habit and custom would anchor their options can build the bridges which alone may decrease the certainty of our repitition of historical mass insanity.

I have no call to arms, or call to action, just the wish to find a way to join our "good intentions" in the cause of healing acts. After sharing these thoughts this morning, a friend approached me saying she will be working in an evening class tutoring research skills in Trenton as a volunteer. I know I can add online searching skills to what she can offer, and maybe first steps like this are all we can hope for.

Let's start looking, moving, choosing while there is still time. Peace,

Ferdi January 30, 1994

My Own School & College Experience

I stayed with music and got into student government. When Kennedy was assassinated I was in 7th grade. I was taken with his ideas of social service and the way he spoke. I discovered that I could put words together pretty well too, and when I made some speeches I ended up getting elected. One of the things I did then was to empower the students. We ran these dances after school, and we were very successful, so successful in fact that the administration stepped in and took over because they didn't want the amount of money we were raising to be totally under our control. This was in Greatneck Long Island junior high in 1966-67. I soon found that I would get burned politically by saying whatever was on my mind. Well that led to a period of self imposed exile where I stayed with music and poetry pretty much all the way to college.

In college at NYU I was a philosophy major until prospects looked so poor there that I went back to music. This was the early 70s at the peak of the Vietnam thing. When I was 18 I considered going for Turkish citizenship. But my lottery number came up 324 and made the issue moot. At this point I had become a music major and saw the divisiveness of society. I wanted to do my student teaching in Harlem. But my advisor told me ÒI am not going to let you student teach there. Don't waste your time trying to bring culture to those people.Ó And he refused to let me do it. So being somewhat obstinate I went to Newark.

Some Early Struggles with the "System" 1976-1979

I left under very sad circumstances. They let go 120 music teachers the year I got tenure. A teacher from Broadway Junior High was let go. They pulled me out of the school where I had gotten to know the community. We had taken up buying our instruments from a pawn shop by selling tickets for our concerts at 25 and 50 cents and filling a 300 seat hall. Once we had to move from a little hall into a big church and I had to watch strangers from Newark whom I had never met carry a Volkswagen bus filled with my own personal instruments at night through the streets into this church. I didn't even lose a drumstick. I walked through that community every day for 3 years with a nice electric guitar and no one every mugged me or did anything to me because they new I was doing something for their kids.

Well they pulled me out of here and put me into Broadway Junior High School where they told me I was not allowed to teach music because it was too violent since when it brought all these kids together fights always resulted. Well I left the school system pretty quickly as you might guess.

I decided I wanted to start a non profit school for music for kids. meanwhile I took a job with Music for America. It was a Music Man job. It was owned by Selmer & Co. I went around to various catholic schools and helped start bands. I had about 385 students who blew a horn. I taught them each the first note they ever played all they way up to when they won the talented teen award the second year.