Blog – Page 2 – Sam Chaltain

My Week with the Great White Sharks

Posted on August 11, 2021 | by Sam | 1 Comment

In the summer of 1975, I was four when my dad took me to see JAWS in a crowded theater.

It was a poor parenting decision — albeit one that resulted in my becoming obsessed (& terrified) of sharks for the rest of my childhood. I read every book I could find. I told anyone who asked that when I grew up, I was going to be a marine biologist. And I remained completely terrified of the ocean.

Now, fast forward four decades.

I am not a marine biologist, nor have I kept up my childhood obsession with sharks. (My fear of the ocean, however, has remained constant.)
So you can imagine my surprise when, a year ago, as my 50th birthday approached and person after person asked me how I was going to celebrate it, I responded with an idea that had never before even occurred to me:

Cage-diving with Great White Sharks.

To Reconnect With Nature, We Need More Organizations Like This One

Posted on June 17, 2021 | by Sam

Two years ago, I visited Indonesia to walk the inimitable bamboo hallways of the Green School, as part of a lifelong search for the best schools in the world.

Almost immediately after arriving, however, I met Tim Fijal — a transplanted Canadian and gentle spirit whose own journey of discovery had gradually taken him out of the classroom, and into the rice fields of Bali.

New Rules for New Schools

Posted on April 15, 2021 | by Sam

As more and more adults get vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus — and more and more students cautiously return to some form of in-person schooling — the desire to “get back to normal” feels like the irresistible lure of Spring after a long and lonely winter.

Tempting as it may be, however, the barrage of warnings we have tried to wish away — spoken in the language of fires, floods, and invisible pathogens — make clear that the norms of the past are no longer tenable.

There can be no return to normal, because normal was the problem in the first place.

This is the hindsight of 2020.

To heed it, however, we must acknowledge the ways our common public world has shifted — and then we must shift the way we think about the structure and purpose of our common public schools.

To Redesign Our Schools, Post-Pandemic, We Need to Remove Some Sacred Cows

Posted on April 8, 2021 | by Sam

Watch this video. What do you see? Literally, of course, it’s a sacred cow. And what strikes me is how everyone around it unconsciously adjusts what they do, to the point that the cow has become all but invisible to the chaos of a morning commute. We have sacred cows here, too — but whereas in […]

How the Arts (& #artseducation) Can Save the World

Posted on January 27, 2021 | by Sam

In Australia, the country of his birth, Thanh Bui learned early on that kids who looked like him faced two possible paths. On one, traversed by the only other Asian student in his school, the cold sting of isolation and ridicule awaited. On the other, however, came the assimilatory embrace of knowing you were “one […]

SEED + SPARK: The Expedition

Posted on December 1, 2020 | by Sam

Now that it’s December 1, the start of our yearlong expedition — the one on which we’ll use nature as a model to reimagine the way(s) we learn and live — is less than two months away. And yet in many ways the expedition has already begun, as we start to establish a plan, an […]

Travelers Wanted for Yearlong Expedition to Change the Story of How We Learn & Live

Posted on November 24, 2020 | by Sam

There is so much wrong with our world, and it’s so easy to feel hopeless in its wake. I was grateful, then, when earlier this week a friend suggested I read a piece Arundhati Roy had written several months back, in the pandemic’s earliest days. “Historically,” she wrote, “pandemics have forced humans to break with […]

After the Election: HUMANS WANTED

Posted on November 8, 2020 | by Sam

Now the real work begins.

As this historic year (and election season) draws to a close, the barrage of warnings we have tried to wish away — spoken in the language of fires, floods, and invisible pathogens — make clear to anyone paying attention that the norms of the past are no longer tenable.

There can be no return to normal — because normal was the problem in the first place.

New book outlines how to apply nature’s principles in (re)designing the human world

Posted on October 15, 2020 | by Sam

Today is a special day. Two years ago, a small group of us set out on a collaborative design project, in search of the irreducible principles of a healthy learning environment — the equivalent of DNA’s A, G, C & T. That search took us deep into an exploration of the natural world, where we […]

White People: This Is On Us

Posted on May 11, 2020 | by Sam | 2 Comments

Four years ago, on the eve of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I made the dispiriting prediction that, regardless of who won (and, at the time, the notion that Donald Trump would win seemed inconceivable to most of us), America was witnessing the birth of a new civic (dis)order.

Four years later, in the shadow of another election, our world is both radically different — and dispiritingly similar. So it’s notable that the storyline of HBO’s dystopian, overwrought, and prescient 22nd-century series, Westworld, once again provides an edifying parallel to the real-life drama of 21st-century American public life.