At the recommendation of Gary Stager and Chris Lehmann, one of my summer reads is A Schoolmaster of the Great City by Angelo Patri. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. The book was written by Patri in 1917. It rings true, though, with much of what I worry about in our schools today. Patri faced the same problems and shares many of my passions. That’s both troublesome and reassuring. I’ll be seeking out more of his work. In the meantime, here are some of the lines that jumped out at me as I read today:
The antagonism between the children and teachers was far stronger than I had ever seen it before. The antagonism between the school and the neighborhood was intense. Both came from mutual distrust founded on mutual misunderstanding. The children were afraid of the teachers, and the teachers feared the children. (p. 14)
As each day went by, cautiously I put the problem of school discipline before them and they responded by taking over much of the responsibility for it themselves. (p. 15)
In this restless, uncertain sea of motion, noise, color and goings; of constant goings upstairs and downstairs, one learned to ‘go slow’ and watch and wait for his opportunity. (p. 19)
The rod idea was at work. Books, benches, crowded rooms, sitting still, listening; talking only when called upon to recite, teaching where the teachers did the thinking; these conditions have meant and always will mean an imposed discipline, an imposed routine, whereas real discipline is a personal thing, a part of the understanding soul. To replace discipline of teacher-responsibility by the discipline of child-responsibility is a long, slow process. (p. 27)
It was difficult to get teachers away from subject matter, from machinery, and toward children. How could it be otherwise? (p.30)
I wanted ideas expressed in color, movement, fun and not lines, ideas and not perfect papers, every one alike . . . . I wanted nature that would make the child’s heart warm with sympathy . . .that would make him laugh to feel the snow and the rain and the wind beating on his face. (p. 30)
The feeling for the things that I wanted was rather more definite than the knowledge of how to attain the desired results. (p. 30)(Karl - that quote was just for you. We all get stuck.)
(On teaching robins) ‘Suppose you meet the class under the big oak tree in the morning and look for robins. Watch them until you and the children know as much about them as one can learn by looking . . . . Then talk over what you’ve seen and learned. Let everybody say his say sometime or other. . . . Then when you have all the facts about him select those that are most worthwhile, and present them as the robin story. You’ll find you’ll need very little drill.’ (p. 32)
I felt that we had to win the parents as well as the taechers if the changes we were making, our emphasis on the ‘fads and frills’ of education, were to be accepted in the homes. (p. 33)
Many parents believe that this is education. . . . They fear freedom, they fear to let the child grow by himself. (p. 37)
I wanted opportunity for the masses, the best schools for the crowds, the best teachers for the heaviest load. I thought in terms of service, they in terms of tradition. (p. 41)
Plenty more good stuff within. I’d encourage you to read the book.
Clay Burell’s challenged me (or tagged me, or whatever) to engage a meme that he’s passing along. I might. I’m bad about memes. I don’t mean to be. (And I am thinking about a good passion quilt image and will post one. Eventually. Thanks to all who tagged me.) But I did want to encourage you to read his post. Mostly because of this idea about teaching Lolita:
I think I can say they all love it. I also think I can say they can handle it - and if they can’t, they should learn to, now more than ever.
As a high school language arts teacher, I encouraged my students to pick many of their own books in consultation with me and other trusted adults. I would encourage you to do the same. But that’s another post.
But when you do decide to read a book together, I’d ask that you never insult the intelligence of your students, emotionally or intellectually, by hiding the world from them through picking “safe” books. Safe choices are pretty much always about you (or your administrator, or your school board) and not about your students. They live in the worlds being represented in literature. Many educators live in these worlds, too. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Instead, let’s challenge students to engage ideas and concepts that are weighty, essential and enthralling.
Let’s ask them to dream and to dare and to risk by talking about difficult ideas in safe places. Let’s ask them not to agree with the stance of a particular author or book or teacher or administrator or board policy, but instead to struggle through finding their own way. With help, of course.
Most good teaching is all about finding balance. Safe and scary. Old and new. Today and tomorrow. Child and adult. Easy and hard. Choice and “have to.” Too often in schools, we lean way hard on one side of the teeter totter and completely avoid the other side.
I’m seeing lots of opportunities lately, to connect my learning network(s), offline and on. Here’s one - a request from NCTE. Write away, whether you’re an NCTE member or not:
We’re interested in how your teaching has changed�in how you have altered, adjusted, or shifted your habits and expectations�since the time you began teaching. For example, what has changed in your approaches to reading? Writing? Evaluation of students? Use of technology? Confidence level? Rapport with parents? Balance of personal and professional life?
Whether you are a 30-year classroom veteran or a new teacher, you have a story, and we’d like to hear it! Email us 150 words or less describing changes you have made in your teaching and your teaching life. Please include your full name, school name, years of teaching, and a preferred email address or phone number in case we need to contact you. Send stories to chronicle@ncte.org.
We’ll consider stories for a future issue of The Council Chronicle, and will inform you and send you a complimentary copy if your story is published.
I‘d love for you to leave your blurb here in the comments, too. Would be fun to read them.
Last week, I received a review copy of Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America. Thought it was worth taking a minute or two to say that I’m definitely a fan of the book. I’m impressed with the way the author, Donna Foote, has captured the different teachers, students, administrators, and classrooms and painted them as actual human beings dealing with complex issues and feelings as opposed to one-dimensional cogs in the educational machine.
While the book’s set in Los Angeles, I recognize many of the folks, or at least the types, she’s written about. Kids who disappear. Teachers who will do anything to see their kids do well. Teachers who burnout. Administrators who try too hard - and aren’t successful. The folks who show up because they’re supposed to, but who’ve given up. I appreciate the portrait. It’s real and honest and captivating and certainly not pretty. A fine example, one with which I’m more familiar than I’d like to be, is this paragraph, a stream of consciousness from one teacher struggling to figure out how to help a student he noticed was cutting herself:
Who am I kidding? I don’t know what I’m doing. The fact that it’s left to me to identify a girl who is on the verge of killing herself is ridiculous. You can fake the teaching, but when it comes to this stuff, you can’t. How can it be that I’m the one diagnosing or even realizing that this girl is in trouble? I don’t even know who her guidance counselor is. If something happens, I could be held liable. I don’t know who to go to. And if I don’t write it on my hand, I won’t remember to even report it. It’s crazy. Oh God, I hope she’s okay.
I’ve been there. Ignore the TFA aspect of this book - it’s an eye-opening account of what it means to be a teacher in a dysfunctional school in the United States. Or maybe in any school in the United States.
As for TFA - any alumni out there want to comment on the program? While I dig their goals, it doesn’t seem to me like the program is necessarily going to result in systemic education reform. Although, I might be getting cynical on the whole idea of education reform - small group of committed citizens, right? And perhaps TFA, as only a 20-ish year old organization, isn’t mature enough yet. Foote, in this interview with U.S. News & World Report, talks about the “two-pronged” approach of TFA as a reform group:
TFA has a two-pronged theory of change. In the short term, it will send smart, energetic, committed young people into these terrible schools. But the longer-term vision, and the one that is most likely to bear fruit, is the idea that, because TFA has culled so carefully for leaders and because these young teachers will be so informed by this unbelievable experience of teaching in underperforming schools, they will go out and make big changes.
Now that the early corps members are approaching their early 40s, we’re starting to see signs that these leaders that have been embedded in society are starting to rise up. If you troll the education reform movements, the big nonprofits, and philanthropies, you’ll see TFA alum[s] in their ranks. I think a real marker was laid down last spring when TFA alum Michelle Rhee was named chancellor of the D.C. schools.
I’d be curious to hear from anyone with TFA experience. And I’m looking forward to the rest of the book. Not because I suspect the ending’s a positive one - but because I so appreciate the humanity of the story.
I recently finished reading Seymour Papert’s book The Children’s Machine: Rethinking school in the age of the computer, and I’ve got lots to say formally about it. But I only have a minute at the moment and I wanted to ask a question. In the book, Papert forwards the idea that we should have as big a body of knowledge about learning and how to learn as we do about teaching and how to teach. (He even postulates at one point that “learning theory” is much more about teaching than it is about actually learning. And I agreed with him. Too often, we think of education that is something that we can do to someone, rather than with someone. We certainly can’t do it for someone.)
Since I’d never actually heard of the word before I read the book, I’m guessing that it’s not a big term/idea in teaching and learning circles. But I don’t know - perhaps I’m out of the academic loop a bit. It seems that the term does surface in some academic arenas, and has for some time, but I can’t get a sense of its meaning in those contexts. I guess I’m writing right now to both ask about your knowledge of the term as well as to ask if you think it’s true that we spend way too much time thinking about teaching without taking the time to think about learning. Or, rather, are we too busy teaching to bother to learn? I’ve read plenty of posts that suggest as much, and in fact, I think I’ve said it myself. If that’s the case, what are we going to do about it?
Papert says it, at one point, this way:
…participants thought of themselves as teachers-in-training rather than as learners. Their awareness of being teachers was preventing them from giving themselves over fully to experiencing what they were doing as intellectually exciting and joyful in its own right, for what it could bring them as private individuals. The major obstacle in the way of teachers becoming learners is inhibition about learning. (p.72 - from this page of quotes, which are worth reading)
It’s frustrating that this isn’t a new idea, but that it’s still revolutionary. Read the book. I’ll give it a more formal review later. Short version: Two thumbs up. Mindstorms is on my nightstand, now, sitting on top of my XO, which is appropriate for so many reasons.
This collection of articles, published as Threshold Magazine - New Directions Spring 2008 by Cable in the Classroom and the KnowledgeWorks Foundation is one of the finest “think bombs” related to education and coming changes that I’ve seen printed on paper. I received a copy by accident, as my predecessor was on just the right mailing list.
There’s a great think piece on open textbooks, and Stephen Downes has a piece in the issue, too, on educational choices and virtual options. Also included is a handy copy of the Future Forces Affecting Education map by KnowledgeWorks. Might be worth getting some extra hard copies to share with your favorite administrator, teacher, school board member, etc. (Here’s the reprint inquiry info. I’ll be calling on Monday.)
We’re getting to a stage in the learning game where we should be thinking about ways to help students create connections to each other and to their learning. Handing students and teacher a device that connects students and serves as a platform for the teaching and learning in a system just makes sense, even though it’s not always a socially or culturally or politically accepted idea. That needs to change. Soon. I feel like the political climate for 1:1 (or even 1:3, or 1:10) continues to improve - but we’re still in a transitional place between analog and digital instruction. I can’t say that the iPhone is THE device - I couldn’t imagine writing anything of substance on the iPhone or any other tool without a reasonable keyboard - but I understand why they featured it, as I do think it’s a game-changer, in terms of its functionality and ease of use. Of course, there are plenty of othergame-changers coming to the table at the moment.
Today’s podcast, one of several recorded today, is a reflection about my upcoming session for Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, recorded on my way home from the Colorado Podcast Summit. I hope to post more audio from the summit as time allows. (But, since time won’t ever allow, I’ll try to do so anyway.)
I’ve been reading lots of folks lately writing to the effect that this whole read/write web world is not about the tools, it’s about how we use them. I agree with that notion. Mostly. In some of the conversations I’ve been having recently, I’ve been arguing that, at least at some level, the focus should be on the tools, for a couple of reasons. One, we need to have a handle on what the tools can do so that we can apply them to our particular teaching and learning situations. If I don’t know how to publish to the web (or that it’s completely safe for students to do so), then I can’t consider it as a possibility in my classes. Further, if I don’t know that most wikis won’t allow for same-time multiple edits/editors, then I won’t realize (until it’s too late) that having everyone edit the same piece of text in class is just won’t work.
The second reason is a little trickier, but was really brought home to me this week as I was involved in some training on a web-based gradebook. This particular tool, the one that our district provides to teachers as an electronic gradebook, appears to require a letter grade as an output. What I mean is that, as it’s currently configured, the only possible output for a student grade is a percentage tied to a letter. While we could tinker with what percentages resulted in what letter, that was all the tinkering that we could do. So this particular tool (certainly, not a read/write tool, but a technology tool nonetheless) only allows for a particular type of output. Not using letter grades is not an option with this tool. (I know - I’ve really, really stated that - but I think it’s very important.)
While I’m not going to make a case right now for eliminating letter grades, I want to point out that, if my school system decided tomorrow to eliminate letter grading, we couldn’t. Our computer system would not "allow" it. Currently, many of our middle schools have assessment systems that are standards based and don’t involve letter grades. The software that creates those is aging and might not be compatible with the new system. See the potential for a problem?
I’ll end this post for fear of beginning to lose my point, which is this: Sometimes, it is about the tools, and about how those tools shape what is and is not "possible" in particular situations. The tools and their use (or misuse) can completely drive a classroom or management scenario. Pretending that it is never about the tools, and is only about the pedagogy or philosophy, is shortsighted and ultimately problematic.
