We Are Making a Square Peg Go Into a Round Hole
I've always enjoyed the movie "Apollo 13." There are so many good messages in it - about hope in a seemingly hopeless situation, about courage in the face of danger (and possibly even death), about creative problem solving for problems that are not "contingencies we remotely looked at." This scene is where we are right now with education - We have been asked to "invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole - quickly." And now we are in the room (or this course) looking at what is available to make that happen. We have the resources, we have the tools...we now need to make it happen. We are going to be innovative, creative, and make this work. We are going to fail and have inelegant, imperfect solutions, but we will get solutions. And we will continue to refine them until the emergency is over. One of my concerns is - and this is something often seen with students working on a problem - if we spend time on a solution that we think is goi...