A Note for our Incarcerated Learners

Proactive Disclosure

Administrators at your facility are likely to be suspicous of any activities involving folded paper if they aren't handled the right way.

You could maybe try a proactive disclosure, asking for permission instead of forgiveness.

Ask What you Can Do to Make Administration More Comfortable

 Ask a staff member what would make them feel more confident that the origami is strictly for education, not passing notes or contraband.

For relatively simple origami structures note that staff can ask you to unfold your origami and show them both sides instead of them trying to undo the origami and maybe rip it in the process.

For larger and more complicated origami projects that you don't want to have to un-fold and re-fold over and over again propose a system where you show a guard both sides of a sheet of paper, and a fold that you want to make permanent.  You could ask the guard to witness you glue the origami folds together and then maybe sign the glued paper with their initials and the date.

This doesn't completely eliminate the possibility of notes or contraband being enclosed in origami structures - but it should at least be evident if it has been tampered with because the glue should make it such that it can't be disassembled without tearing the paper somewhere.

Point out how important origami actually is and that other (better) educational institutions are doing it too

Some people might be skeptical of the educational and engineering applications of origami.  But you can point out all of the other various variants of this course, including one through MIT made available for anyone to view online through their Open CourseWare initiative.

MIT is the gold standard when it comes to STE(a)M education and sometimes we literally copy their homework.  Which is encouraged as long as credit is given where credit is due.  And as the popular saying goes:

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.

If you think it's odd that we're describing our educational institution as mediocre, we say even more self deprecating things on our About Us webpage and revel in the mediocrity.

"Ordinarily, this is where an educational institution would brag about the caliber of its faculty and the rigor of its curriculum.

We’re not going to do that.

We don’t pursue prestige.

We don’t optimize for optics.

And we’re not particularly interested in impressing the vast majority of people.  

We’re not like other educational institutions.

We’re worse.

If we were redesigning higher education from scratch, we’d delete most of it.

So we did.

We are objectively worse — and proudly underperforming — at the things that don’t matter.

We are measurably better at the things that do."

Get Administration Involved and Ask Them to Participate

This course has a few friendly competitions.  You can ask prison administrators if they would like to be the judges for the different contests and rate which origami structures performed the best under which circumstances.

We generally don't recommend competing for actual prizes, just bragging rights, because if there is anything important at stake, it discourages teamwork and collaboration between teams.

Emphasize that this is a friendly competition.  You're not opponents, you're all partners in learning showing off what you made in front of the rest of the class.

Recognize and Reward Excellence When You See It

While we don't believe in grades at CM-Tech and virtually all of our classes are Pass / Not Yet (We don't like saying Pass/Fail either).

However, we do believe in recognizing greatness and celebrating student's achievements.

Participation trophies get a lot of flak these days.  We don't really understand it and asked an AI tool to explain it to us:

"The hate or strong backlash against participation trophies stems from the belief that rewarding children solely for showing up—rather than for performance or victory—negatively impacts their development, work ethic, and understanding of competition.

While often initiated by well-intentioned parents or coaches aiming to make children feel included or to avoid the pain of losing, these awards have become a symbol of a shift in parenting and educational philosophies that critics believe are detrimental to long-term success."

We love the concept of participation trophies, just as long as you don't overdo it.  Like a commemorative plaque is tasteful, a massive trophy that you need two hands to hold, like the Stanley Cup, just for showing up seems a bit excessive.  A good middle ground seems to be:

Participation Ribbons

We prefer the term commemoration ribbons.  It's a way to immortalize a moment in time and the fact that the recipient showed up.

Because sometimes the half of the battle is just showing up and putting yourself out there and giving it your best shot even though you know it might fail spectacularly and then try again.

Participation should be celebrated in addition to excellence.

Where to Get Bulk Ribbons

You can buy First Place ribbons in bulk.  When we checked they were 59 cents each (if you buy 1000, anything less than 100 is 65 cents each).

Second Place ribbons are the same price.

Third Place ribbons are also the same price.

Participation ribbons were approximately the same price per ribbon.

This style of ribbon also comes with a card on the back judges can write on saying who won what and when so you will always remember if you look back at the ribbon and the achievement that it commemorated.