Innovating Education
A Proposal for Action
Hello. My name is Burt Savage. My article explores four interconnected proposals designed to enhance elementary education in Math, Science, and Technology (MST) skills: a simple, standardized modification to cereal boxes to create a free, practical building material; a call for greater budgetary/ownership autonomy for individual classroom teachers; and a progressive, free, easy-to-use communication system to share all aspects of the educational curriculum.
We Can... Compel Cereal Companies to Innovate: One of the most valuable, free construction materials available to students is everyday boxboard (cereal boxes). A simple modification could transform this common household item into an educational tool used by students and teachers nationwide: printing a precise, one-centimeter square grid on the interior surface of all cereal boxes.
The Problem with the Current System: Currently, preparing gridded boxboard for a classroom is an inefficient process. A teacher might spend ten minutes drawing a grid on a single box using a drafting machine. This is obviously too time-consuming and complicated for busy elementary educators to do for every student in their class. The result is a missed opportunity for a simple, accessible learning aid.
The Benefits of a Standardized Grid: Studying the metric system is fundamental to learning essential MST skills. The metric system is the international standard unit of measurement, used by nearly every country in the world, and its base-ten structure makes calculation intuitive. By incorporating a metric grid onto the inside of cereal boxes, students would have immediate access to a free, standardized building material. This approach offers several advantages:
·Affordability and Accessibility: Students can easily transport these recycled materials from home to the classroom, ensuring every student has access.
·Environmental Stewardship: While approximately 70% of cereal boxes are currently recycled, the remaining 30% end up in the garbage. Repurposing them for education promotes sustainability.
·Practical Learning: The grid provides a tangible way for students to practice and understand metric linear, area, and volume calculations.
The Cost to Cereal Companies? Micro-Pennies: Cereal companies already utilize the internal surfaces of their boxes for recipes and promotions (e.g., the Rice Krispies Treats recipe). The cost of adding a high-quality, one-centimeter grid would be negligible-mere micro-pennies per box. Furthermore, companies could use part of the exterior packaging to promote the metric system, informing students of proper measurement names, and undertaking the promotion of recycling and repurposing boxboard in the classroom as a community initiative.
Why a Square Centimeter Grid?: The modern world is built on design and technology, and the underlying language of technology is the grid. Everything man-made-the house you live in, the car you drive, the coffee machine that brews your coffee-was visualized and drawn on a two- or three-dimensional grid system.
Designers visualize top, front, and side views simultaneously: Ten-year-old kids need to learn this spatial reasoning skill: A simple metric grid provides the foundational tool for this type of design thinking, creativity, and visualization. The federal government has control over what is printed on food packaging. Public support and pressure are needed to push for this simple, effective change that would give teachers an affordable material to help foster the next generation of inventors and designers.
Money is new ideas fertilizer: Burt Savage
We Can... Establish Classroom Budgets for Individual Elementary Teachers : Effective education also requires efficient resource management. As an elementary classroom teacher, integrating classroom funding into the curriculum was an essential part of teaching practical economics. However, the current budget distribution system is inefficient.
The Current Budget Process vs. A Better Way: Currently, educational budgets are determined by government policy, distributed to school boards, which allocate funds to principals, who then determine where money should be spent within the school. This top-down approach removes the decision-making power from the person who best understands the immediate needs of the students: the classroom teacher.
A better approach is empowering individual teachers to manage their own resources.
The Case for Teacher Autonomy: Every teacher in the system who is actively teaching in a classroom should have supervised control of a healthy yearly budget based on the number of students they teach, with special consideration given to students with special needs.
This budget should be divided into two clear parts:
·Capital Budget: For expensive, one-time items (like tools or computers) that will be used for an extended period.
·Consumable Budget: For items that need timely replacement because they wear out or are used up (e.g., glue, tape, pencils, rulers).
Giving teachers control over their own supervised classroom bank account allows them to plan effectively for today, tomorrow, and the future. This autonomy, combined with practical fundraising lessons (grants, bake sales, raffles, donations, and mass-production projects tied to holiday sales), allows a teacher to build an efficient and productive learning environment.
We Can... Implement a Progressive Communication System: Effective education thrives on collaboration and the seamless exchange of ideas and resources. The current system often isolates teachers within their own classrooms or schools, relying on inefficient methods like email or word-of-mouth for sharing valuable curriculum materials and best practices. A progressive, free, and easy-to-use communication system can revolutionize this, creating a vast, interconnected professional learning network (PLN) where educators nationwide can contribute and benefit from a collective knowledge base.
The Problem with Silos: When teachers operate in isolation, they are forced to "reinvent the wheel" for every lesson plan or teaching strategy, which is a significant waste of time and energy. The lack of a standardized, accessible platform means that successful teaching innovations in one school rarely reach others, limiting overall educational improvement and student outcomes.
The Benefits of a Centralized, Open Platform: A provincial, open-access platform, potentially integrated with existing tools like or built using existing frameworks like “TVO” would offer immense value.
·Curriculum Enhancement: Teacher collaboration not only saves time but also improves the quality of curriculum by exposing educators to new ideas, content, and methods.
·On Line Professional Development: Immersing teachers in a community of peers from whom they can learn from professionals; moving beyond formal training to real-time, peer-to-peer support.
·Resource Management: Teachers can upload and download high-quality resources, lesson plans, and project ideas, filtering by subject, grade level, and specific standards, ensuring all materials are relevant and effective.
·Feedback and Refinement: The platform could incorporate peer-review or rating systems, allowing the community to identify the highest-quality materials and for creators to receive feedback to improve their work.
·Parental Engagement: Features could extend to parent-teacher communication within a secure environment, providing a cohesive approach to learning at school and at home using tools like announcements, private messaging, and shared calendars, all potentially with multi-language support.
Implementation: A Free and Easy Solution
Call to Action: We can achieve a more effective educational system by rethinking material sources, funding structures, and communication platforms. We need to examine and think critically about who controls these essential resources. implementing these changes, we better equip the next generation with the MST skills needed to innovate their future.
Hello. My name is Burt Savage. My article explores four interconnected proposals designed to enhance elementary education in Math, Science, and Technology (MST) skills: a simple, standardized modification to cereal boxes to create a free, practical building material; a call for greater budgetary/ownership autonomy for individual classroom teachers; and a progressive, free, easy-to-use communication system to share all aspects of the educational curriculum.
We Can... Compel Cereal Companies to Innovate: One of the most valuable, free construction materials available to students is everyday boxboard (cereal boxes). A simple modification could transform this common household item into an educational tool used by students and teachers nationwide: printing a precise, one-centimeter square grid on the interior surface of all cereal boxes.
The Problem with the Current System: Currently, preparing gridded boxboard for a classroom is an inefficient process. A teacher might spend ten minutes drawing a grid on a single box using a drafting machine. This is obviously too time-consuming and complicated for busy elementary educators to do for every student in their class. The result is a missed opportunity for a simple, accessible learning aid.
The Benefits of a Standardized Grid: Studying the metric system is fundamental to learning essential MST skills. The metric system is the international standard unit of measurement, used by nearly every country in the world, and its base-ten structure makes calculation intuitive. By incorporating a metric grid onto the inside of cereal boxes, students would have immediate access to a free, standardized building material. This approach offers several advantages:
·Affordability and Accessibility: Students can easily transport these recycled materials from home to the classroom, ensuring every student has access.
·Environmental Stewardship: While approximately 70% of cereal boxes are currently recycled, the remaining 30% end up in the garbage. Repurposing them for education promotes sustainability.
·Practical Learning: The grid provides a tangible way for students to practice and understand metric linear, area, and volume calculations.
The Cost to Cereal Companies? Micro-Pennies: Cereal companies already utilize the internal surfaces of their boxes for recipes and promotions (e.g., the Rice Krispies Treats recipe). The cost of adding a high-quality, one-centimeter grid would be negligible-mere micro-pennies per box. Furthermore, companies could use part of the exterior packaging to promote the metric system, informing students of proper measurement names, and undertaking the promotion of recycling and repurposing boxboard in the classroom as a community initiative.
Why a Square Centimeter Grid?: The modern world is built on design and technology, and the underlying language of technology is the grid. Everything man-made-the house you live in, the car you drive, the coffee machine that brews your coffee-was visualized and drawn on a two- or three-dimensional grid system.
Designers visualize top, front, and side views simultaneously: Ten-year-old kids need to learn this spatial reasoning skill: A simple metric grid provides the foundational tool for this type of design thinking, creativity, and visualization. The federal government has control over what is printed on food packaging. Public support and pressure are needed to push for this simple, effective change that would give teachers an affordable material to help foster the next generation of inventors and designers.
Money is new ideas fertilizer: Burt Savage
We Can... Establish Classroom Budgets for Individual Elementary Teachers : Effective education also requires efficient resource management. As an elementary classroom teacher, integrating classroom funding into the curriculum was an essential part of teaching practical economics. However, the current budget distribution system is inefficient.
The Current Budget Process vs. A Better Way: Currently, educational budgets are determined by government policy, distributed to school boards, which allocate funds to principals, who then determine where money should be spent within the school. This top-down approach removes the decision-making power from the person who best understands the immediate needs of the students: the classroom teacher.
A better approach is empowering individual teachers to manage their own resources.
The Case for Teacher Autonomy: Every teacher in the system who is actively teaching in a classroom should have supervised control of a healthy yearly budget based on the number of students they teach, with special consideration given to students with special needs.
This budget should be divided into two clear parts:
·Capital Budget: For expensive, one-time items (like tools or computers) that will be used for an extended period.
·Consumable Budget: For items that need timely replacement because they wear out or are used up (e.g., glue, tape, pencils, rulers).
Giving teachers control over their own supervised classroom bank account allows them to plan effectively for today, tomorrow, and the future. This autonomy, combined with practical fundraising lessons (grants, bake sales, raffles, donations, and mass-production projects tied to holiday sales), allows a teacher to build an efficient and productive learning environment.
We Can... Implement a Progressive Communication System: Effective education thrives on collaboration and the seamless exchange of ideas and resources. The current system often isolates teachers within their own classrooms or schools, relying on inefficient methods like email or word-of-mouth for sharing valuable curriculum materials and best practices. A progressive, free, and easy-to-use communication system can revolutionize this, creating a vast, interconnected professional learning network (PLN) where educators nationwide can contribute and benefit from a collective knowledge base.
The Problem with Silos: When teachers operate in isolation, they are forced to "reinvent the wheel" for every lesson plan or teaching strategy, which is a significant waste of time and energy. The lack of a standardized, accessible platform means that successful teaching innovations in one school rarely reach others, limiting overall educational improvement and student outcomes.
The Benefits of a Centralized, Open Platform: A provincial, open-access platform, potentially integrated with existing tools like or built using existing frameworks like “TVO” would offer immense value.
·Curriculum Enhancement: Teacher collaboration not only saves time but also improves the quality of curriculum by exposing educators to new ideas, content, and methods.
·On Line Professional Development: Immersing teachers in a community of peers from whom they can learn from professionals; moving beyond formal training to real-time, peer-to-peer support.
·Resource Management: Teachers can upload and download high-quality resources, lesson plans, and project ideas, filtering by subject, grade level, and specific standards, ensuring all materials are relevant and effective.
·Feedback and Refinement: The platform could incorporate peer-review or rating systems, allowing the community to identify the highest-quality materials and for creators to receive feedback to improve their work.
·Parental Engagement: Features could extend to parent-teacher communication within a secure environment, providing a cohesive approach to learning at school and at home using tools like announcements, private messaging, and shared calendars, all potentially with multi-language support.
Implementation: A Free and Easy Solution
Call to Action: We can achieve a more effective educational system by rethinking material sources, funding structures, and communication platforms. We need to examine and think critically about who controls these essential resources. implementing these changes, we better equip the next generation with the MST skills needed to innovate their future.