Bird Droppings August 8, 2012

Are we going in the right direction?

 

“I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. I believe that the school must represent present life-life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground. I believe that education which does not occur through forms of life, or that are worth living for their own sake, is always a poor substitute for the genuine reality and tends to cramp and to deaden.” John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed, 1897

 

I recall many years ago nearly forty eight now, taking a test that would indicate what we were suitable for and getting called in to the “guidance” counselors who in my day were the wives of the football coaches. I never quite figured that out at our high school I was told I should look at technical training because of my grades and such. I was not a very good student in high school somewhere in the bottom end of my senior class. It seems I was side tracked somewhere in elementary school about education, and periodically I would have a few flare ups of wisdom. The little flare ups during standardized tests were just enough for me to remain in college prep and high functioning classes all through high school.

 So I was amused by the guidance recommendations. I was reminded recently of my turmoil in high school of trying to place me in a job before I knew what life was about and what was out there as we venture into career planning in our advisements. I was thinking about Special Education and in our IEP’s we do a transitional plan at 14 years of age. What do you want to do is asked and I have had three want to be a rappers on transitional plans over the years. I have had a professional soccer player, basketball and football players all from students who have not even played on the high school teams.  

 

“I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.” John W. Gardner

 

“Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.” John W. Gardner

 

For nearly forty years I have had a Chinese proverb hanging on my wall.

 

“You can give a man a fish and feed him for a day: You can teach a man to fish and feed him for life.”

 

Having been to teenager’s funerals more than once and then thinking about all the kids I talked with there and on emails I really wondered, as I sat thinking this morning about trying to figure out what these students will be doing in twenty years. It made me think of my own life. I was thinking about what we really need to teach. With the advent of federal and state legislation demanding certain standards be met it is interesting how teachers and parents get left out of the loops and legislators decide. Although we are instituting in our county a new program to involve parents.

As I look at John Dewey and John Gardner’s comments while differing in philosophies there is a point of interest. Dewey mentions a process of living, give your teaching context making it meaningful. Gardner says not just cut flowers but to teach them how to grow the flower, not give simply facts. What does this mean to me as a teacher?

 

“The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.” John W. Gardner

 

“When most people think of the word ‘education,’ they think of a pupil as a sort of animate sausage casing. Into this empty casing, the teachers are supposed to stuff ‘education.’ But genuine education, as Socrates knew more than two thousand years ago, is not inserting the stuffing’s of information into a person, but rather eliciting knowledge from him; it is the drawing out of what is in the mind.” Sydney J. Harris, Strictly Speaking, What true education should do?

 

It has been nearly ten years since I did this lesson and it was quite an experience. It seems like yesterday I had two students in my class room and several were out during second period suspended or in our In School Suspension (ISS) program, this was a really rough group of kids. I had decided to do a class project that the class wanted to do. I set parameters that were relatively simply.

 

1. Project had to be of interest to all students

2. Project had to be school appropriate

3. Students had to be able to learn academics in the context of the project

4. As the teacher I had to be able to measure learning

5. There had to be a culminating project and end point during the semester

 

So a day or two later when everyone was in school we started by first coming up with ideas for the project. The class came up with several, wrestling, girls, cars, animation, photography, building and several very inappropriate for school if not in violation of state and federal laws.

As an integral part of my class I use digital photography daily and every student has taken a camera home and taken literally hundreds of thousands of pictures over the years. As the discussion progressed photography seemed to be the choice and eventually the project became a photography contest within the school sponsored by my second period class.

 While tedious in the beginning as ideas it all started and soon took on a life of its own eliciting thinking from these kids. Naturally thinking was the big word and was the main task and for a few of them it was tiring but then on to next step. How do we get permission? Actually after the class decided on a project I had gone and gotten permission but the students would have to proceed as if they do not have it and formally get permission.

Watching the thought process evolve from students who often simply do worksheets and or get in trouble into thinking and wondering students was amazing. For many of the students who read several grades below their actual level throwing ideas around and about and having a voting process and different categories and digital versus film it was a pretty amazing discussion. I argue day in and day out about having context to a lesson. When a student has context for the content it has life and meaning.  

 

“I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living” John Dewey

 

We have to as teachers go beyond in many cases what we have been taught in education classes, which has been to do what is expedient versus real. It has been to try and not just teach “stuff” as Harris indicates. We have to bring life to education make it alive. As a parent this comes home as well and parents need to be involved we need to wake up parents instead of simply letting them sleep through their child’s school experience. This is a community effort not simply one teacher and one student. Even though that is where it starts. Sydney J. Harris uses an illustration of an oyster and a pearl.

 

“Pupils are more like oysters than sausages. The job of teaching is not to stuff them and seal them up, but to help them open and reveal the riches within. There are pearls in each of us, if only we knew how to cultivate them with ardor and persistence.” Sydney J. Harris

 

I got a bit carried away today. So can we as a society begin to look at each other as potential pearls instead of just sausages? I wonder as the new school year gets started can we do this as a school and as a community. Try today to please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your hearts and to Always Give thanks namaste.

Wa de (Skee)

bird

 

 

PS. I used a portion of this as my essential question one week at school; it is one of my favorite quotes from Albert Einstein. “The real difficulty, the difficulty which has baffled the sages of all times, is rather this: how can we make our teaching so potent in the motional life of man, that its influence should withstand the pressure of the elemental psychic forces in the individual?“ Albert Einstein