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We’ve created Pine Tree Poetry to interlace students, their peers, parents, teachers and school librarians in a quest for poetry writing excellence. Rarely do students earn kudos or trophies for their writing, but at Pine Tree Poetry, we are dedicated to rewarding the fine writing achievements of students who are 5 – 18. Pine Tree Poetry contributes four important elements to the realm of student poetry. We: 1. Receive, read, evaluate, pick (a few) and publish the best poems written by poets ages 5 – 18. 2. Support schools by awarding thousands of dollars each year for much-needed library materials. Some awards are based upon the number of poems submitted while others are selected at random from among all particiipants. 3. Give a free copy of The Pine Tree Poetry Collection to the library of every school that has one or more students published. 4. Highlight the life lesson that many will write and the best will be chosen. We are not a vanity publishing company! We’re out to change the world one poem at a time and we invite students, parents, librarians, teachers and those who love the written word to join us.

The Holy Grail in learning and education is context. The problem is that education is focused on generic outcomes. And as soon as you shift to that conversation, you forget about context of the learner. You forget that learning is social, and about identity, and fundamentally connected to what the learner cares about.

I saw a video of you talking recently. You said starting with outcomes and working backward was a big mistake. You said we should start thinking about the student and then design forward. What does that actually mean, and is that related to what you’re saying about context? In education, we traditionally think about content. We think about content as the outcomes we’re striving for. Does a kid know X? That’s what all our tests measure, and that’s how we lose the kid.  We lose the kid to our focus on content—we talk more about STEM than we do about kids. 

People talk about kids learning content and then testing them on that content. People like Katie and Will are thinking about designing the context for participation. That’s the Holy Grail.  Its through participation that learning happens. 

dialogue is far removed, however, from the intensely heated conflict that exists at the smaller, more personal scale. On the one hand you have the millions of Americans who play games, whether on a console or a smartphone, and have been raised in a time where such things are ubiquitous. On the other is a (generally older) population whose exposure to games has been limited to the most visible examples of the medium, including billion-dollar series like Call of Duty and notorious time sinks like FarmVille that paint a limited portrait of gaming's full range.

"You’re not wrong to be concerned about the time your son spends playing video games," wrote Moody. "But let me ask you this: If there were no video games here, wouldn’t there be some other stimulus that could threaten his time by diverting his attention away from, wait, what did you call it? 'What I feel are much more worthwhile and ultimately rewarding pursuits.’ 

fears about video games are understandable. Like anything else, they can become the focal point of unhealthy behavior all too easily, a point Moody is quick to emphasize. As Moody says again and again, though, that’s hardly the fault of video games.

When you separate the different types of screen out, the effects start to vary.

"It doesn't say anything about what you're using that time for."