burgers on the grill

Cool Baffler article

Yet organizing is what the left must cultivate to make its activism more durable and effective, to sustain and advance our causes when the galvanizing intensity of occupations or street protests subsides. It is what the left needs in order to roll back the conservative resurgence and cut down the plutocracy it enabled. That means founding political organizations, hashing out long-term strategies, cultivating leaders (of the accountable, not charismatic, variety), and figuring out how to support them financially. No doubt the thriving of activism in recent decades is a good thing, and activism is something we want more of. The problem, rather, is that the organizing that made earlier movements successful has failed to grow apace.

I can’t always remember where we get the language we use. For some years we’ve been using the term deliverables instead of evaluaions, assessments or projects, but I always assumed it came from the business world. Looking at the amazing High Tech High site today, I see that they use the term deliverables, so maybe we got it from them.

Then I had to poke a little bit more. The OED (one great reason to continue to teach at University level is to have access to the databases there) reveals a 1948 entry in the Journal of Marketing that exemplifies this definition:

Chiefly in pl. Something which may be delivered or provided; spec. a tangible result of a development process.

I wanted to know when this became common in business world and when it made the transition to education circles. I searched Phi Delta Kappan and there were only five results. The first hit where they talked about deliverables in this way seems to imply that this term had been around for awhile:

“Finally, there’s more documentation now: accountables, measurables, deliverables, performance charts, and imperatives, all in the strange language of the new pedagogy.”

Brezicki, Colin. “The Pilot Light: Teaching for Life.” Phi Delta Kappan 92, no. 6 (March 1, 2011).

I did the same full-text search in Educational Leadership and got two results, one from 2001 where this language was used in a survey of how exploratory time could be used:

“Deliverables. This idea comes from a teacher I know, Brenda Kraber. If a teacher has 28 students working on different projects, he or she might have difficulty keeping track of student progress. Deliverables have specific due dates. For example, the teacher and Angela can agree that her research notes on chimpanzees are due on October 18, which means they need to be delivered to the teacher by that date.”

Wolk, Steven. “The Benefits of Exploratory Time.” Educational Leadership 59, no. 2 (October 2011): 56–59.

Regardless of where the word came from, we spent some time today talking about the hard part of designing deliverables for projects. I wanted to begin by seeing how well they’ve internalized this process and what we have to worry about for next year.

Questions about being realistic, the evolving nature of deliverables, how to sequence them, and the necessity of research emerged…

Gone. All gone. All accounts deactivated. Worried I’ll turn to a pillar of salt.

1. Open Scratch Account (www.scratch.mit.edu)
2. Click on More Blocks, then add extension. You should see several options to add Lego WeDo 1.0. (We have the older versions).
3. Restart Firefox
5. I found this wiki to be helpful.

Here’s the first bit of “code” we put together:

What’s the difference between an expectation and a requirement?

“An expectation and a requirement are different because an expectation is something expected of you, meaning it’s what you should do, not what you have to do.” MH

“An expectation is something that someone thinks you should do or how you should act. But if can be completely disregarded if you don’t care about that person. A requirement is basically an expectation that has to be met.” QG

(MC response: what if I said your expectations need to come from yourself?)

The difference between an expectation and a requirement is that when people expect something of you, they are merely setting a guideline that you could follow but it’s not something you have to do. It’s almost like people want you to do something, but they want you to do those things yourself. A requirement…means there is a set of rules that you have to follow in order to reach some kind of pre-meditated goal that has been laid out. Requirements aren’t something that can be negotiated. JR