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ony Wagner that the world doesn’t care anymore what you know; all it cares “is what you can do with what you know.”

And they increasingly don’t care how those skills were acquired: home schooling, an online university, a massive open online course, or Yale. They just want to know one thing: Can you add value?

Understanding how to use Python, or write code to solve problems, is just a way of having an additional tool to be creative with."

"The old teaching method — you know, where a teacher says something and you write it down and then take a test — that's about as passive as it gets," he says. "This idea pushes kids to be more actively involved since, by and large, it's something we're both learning together. That leads to a lot of innovative teaching — and a lot of innovative learning, for that matter."

"I'm certainly not a coder," says Lisa Brown, an English teacher and head of the English department at Beaver. "But, like anything, the more I've played around with it the more I've realized there's a lot that's really accessible and understandable."

First, there are fewer of them, with 156 standards for grades 9-12. In addition, 38 of those standards are identified as "advanced" standards, which leaves us with 118 standards for all students spread out over four years of high school, or just under 30 per year.

(My not-so-modest proposal is that no state legislature is allowed to require standards that they couldn't demonstrate proficiency on themselves. Since they are clearly successful adults and they are saying that these standards are necessary for all students to be successful, surely they'd be able to demonstrate proficiency by taking the same tests our students do. But I digress.

I'm still not sure whether teaching algebra as a separate course is the best way to accomplish it -- even for that small subset of our student population that is passionate about math and science.

new methods to measure skills like critical thinking, creativity, and persistence.

"A lot of important stuff happens when playing games," Ms. Shute said. "You're just doing. You're in the process."

"Wouldn't it be lovely to actually pass along the log files of what students did in order to look at their scientific-inquiry skills?"

Well, you know, sometimes I think technology just adds a lot of bells and whistles, makes stuff look good without really adding to the learning.

But here’s the thing: that teacher didn’t yet see the value of having his students make those connections outside the classroom even though no one was asking or expecting him to do it. In fact, it took about another seven or eight minutes of back and forth before I think he finally came around to the idea that the connections might matter even though no one was testing for them or writing curriculum for them or demanding that kids understand them. That we may want to consider adding the “bells and whistles” because the world our kids need to be prepared for is opening up in ways that go beyond the long-standing goals and objectives we’ve set up for them. That it’s not just about map making any more.