Day: January 20, 2025

J.M. Bara, a former corporate banker turned street photographer, delivered an enlightening presentation on the art of street photography at the Retired Men's Association, sharing insights from his transition from finance to artistic pursuit. His distinctive photographic style combines an engineer's precision with an artist's eye, focusing on capturing candid moments in public spaces while emphasizing ethical considerations and the importance of maintaining authenticity. Bara's approach to street photography is characterized by sophisticated visual techniques, such as using frames within frames, exploring ambiguity, and creating images that challenge viewers' perceptions through unusual perspectives and layered compositions.

Human-scale education—it’s a phrase that almost feels redundant. Should we really have to specify that the education we are after is designed for the cultivation of people? As a school leader, I would argue that too much of what happens in schools is driven by a different set of design standards. Sometimes that means we reduce our expectations of who we actually know kids to be: complex and plagued by setbacks but extraordinary in their capacities and growth. If you haven’t recently been utterly taken aback by the creativity and synthetic thinking of a child (of any age), then I encourage you to slow down and listen with this intent to one of the children in your life. Or, it could mean that we don’t plan ahead for the setbacks that are inevitable. Have you ever met a person who didn’t experience some ups and downs in their lives? Of course not! Why would we allow schools to not take this into account? As just one example, think of a report card that tallies to an overall cumulative GPA. No wonder we are stressing out our kids. The system has no capacity to acknowledge even one bad term for a student and set it to the side, capturing only that kid at their best. I hope my point is beginning to be clear: we need schools that continually ask themselves whether what they are doing is great for the overall cultivation of children as we know them in all of their wonderful complexity. We need schools that are adaptive to any evidence that they are not living up to this ideal. To accomplish this, we need to acknowledge that schools lose too much of their humanity when they are not designed to be human-scale.