Bird Droppings March 16, 2021
Are we going in the right direction?

A year ago, today I was sitting reviewing the status of my student’s online work. A couple of surprises and some that were not. I thought to myself when the virus finally moves on and the smoke clears some grades will be going up and some will be dropping. We were told we needed to allow time for makeup work. I found it interesting that it was easy to divide students into two groups. Students who were engaged in class before pandemic, and students who did virtually nothing. As I thought more, I realized that schooling as we tend to do is socialized education. Students who were engaged in their education took the pandemic in stride while the majority of students without those students to copy sit next to and or borrow work floundered. The second group came to school to socialize. There is so much floating around some pro-education and some criticizing and demeaning teachers as the culprits.

“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 taking a test that would indicate what we were suitable for and then getting called in to the “guidance” counselors who in my day were wives of the football coaches. I never quite figured that out. In 1965 at our high school I was told I should look at technical training because of my really poor grades and such. I was not a very good student in high school 597th 0f 795 students. It seems I was sidetracked 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. I was thinking about Special Education and in our IEP’s we do a transitional plan at age fourteen. What do you want to do is asked and I have had quite a few want to be a rapper, pro football player or basketball player on transitional plans over the years?

“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 thirty 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 teenagers’ funerals far too many times and thinking about all the kids I talked within that setting 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 do 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.

As I look at John Dewey and John Gardner’s comments while differing in philosophies a point of interest. Dewey mentions a process of living gives your teaching context making it meaningful. Gardner says not just cut flowers but to teach them how to grow the flower, not 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 pursuing 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 a few years since I did this lesson and it was quite an experience. It seems like yesterday I had two students in my classroom and several were out during the second period suspended or in School Suspension (ISS), 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 borrowing on my Foxfire teachings and trying to set up a democratic classroom.

1.The project had to be of interest to all students
2. The 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 endpoint 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.

One however that continued to pique interest and has been an integral part of my class as I use digital photography daily and every student has taken a camera home and taken literally tens of thousands of pictures. 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 the next step. How do we get permission? Actually, after the class decided I went and gotten permission but 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. For students who read several grades below their actual level throwing ideas around about 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, it is a process of living” John Dewey

“If we are succeeding in our efforts to establish an excellent quality of present experience, people, teachers, students, administrators, parents should enjoy being in school; there should be fewer incidents of violence and nastiness; there should be more acts of kindness, more expressions of concern for others; more open conversation and fewer acts of control on the part of adults.” Nel Noddings

As a teacher, I get frustrated knowing that information, understanding, and knowledge of what is education and learning are out there in the nebulous but get rejected by a cookie-cutter mentality that requires easy quick fixes and various publishers’ approval. I found this article from Nel Noddings and was amazed at her suggestions that follow many European and Asian approached to schooling. First that excellence in schooling is not that everyone meets a collegiate curriculum and succeeds in it but that individually we are providing and excelling in directions that we are suited for that individual student to be that art, music, technology, industry or academics. This was written several years ago and if you get serious John Dewey was writing about this in 1897 over one hundred years ago and why do we never pay attention. The article is Excellence as a guide to Educational Conversation by Nel Noddings, Stanford University, 2004.

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 to make it alive. As a parent and now grandparent 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

“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

I got a bit carried away today. But as I read this last quote by Einstein who was left behind more than once in his educational experience at an early age can we as a society begin to look at each other as potential pearls instead of just sausages? I wonder as this school year is winding down and a new school year approach all too soon. Try today to please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your heart’s namaste.

 
My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,
Mitakuye Oyasin
(We are all related)
bird