Looking back (4)
facing the wall Originally uploaded by NEINmeister I began to question my own values and assumptions:* was it necessarily A Good Thing to offer more choices, more autonomy?* what if my cultural values and those of my students were different, like Lisa Delpit describes? If that were true here, too, then I might not be [...]
Looking back (3)
Look Back Originally uploaded by InTheSunStudio The next stage (tho it wasn’t actually so neatly chronological) was reading stuff about empowerment, about language as power, about power differentials, about the classroom as a stage where power plays are enacted. That seemed to make some sense: * were my students perhaps behaving in ways similar to [...]
Phonics or… creativity?
I just re-discovered teachers.tv, a British website (and actual TV programme?) that hosts a host of information about teachers and teaching in British schools. Obviously most of the content is going to be of more interest to people who actually live and teach in Britain, than to people who don’t (like me), but I enjoyed [...]
Freedom: what is it?
Doug “Borderland” has another thoughtful and thought-provoking post, this time on start-of-the-year “class management” problems, also called emergence… To be brutal, I didn’t understand much of it, but I enjoyed the T-shirt, I mean the comments, especially Stephen Downes’, where he discussed the meaning of freedom. I recently read The Road to Serfdom by Austrian [...]
Learning styles? Rubbish!
Harold Jarche shares his scepticism of the learning-styles theory, and I must say I tend to agree. Simple logistics is one objection I have. It sounds great, benevolent and taking into account students’ individual differences and needs, but read this and see if you still agree with it. The list he offers, tho, has much [...]
Cede control to students? Revisited
Dan asks how I’d respond to this solution: Cede instructional control to the student. Let her direct her own learning. Curriculum and student desire will align. I teach university students, not high school; uni students are less easy to convince that they absolutely need what I’m teaching; they are IN (the uni) – the major [...]
When public education, isn’t
The situation in the US just boggles my mind. My first recent brush with it came after reading this post, then after reading Savage Inequalities and Doc, and again after reading this post. Now, after reading this exchange between Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch on the blog Bridging Differences (HT to Borderland for the link), [...]
Broad Prosperity vs zero-sum games
I blogged earlier some of my responses to reading Kozol’s Savage Inequalities. My biggest impression was the “zero-sum game” mentality of almost all of those who either justify the inequalities or argue against any real attempts to rectify the situation. I have a feeling that, while there are strong human, Christian (and I’m not excluding [...]
The Dream Deferred… again
I’m nearing the end of Savage Inequalities. As I am not affected in the slightest by what happens in US schools, I was mainly reading it in order to gain some understanding of the mindsets of the people involved. The first third or half of the book is mainly descriptions of schools Kozol visits, starting [...]
The Education Debate
Dan Meyer posted a thoughtful piece after watching Freedom Writers, an(other) inspirational school movie. I’m unable to post comments on Dan’s blog for some reason, so I’m posting my comment here. Quick update: IMDB offers quotes from the movie, including this: Andre: It’s the dumb class cuz. It means you too dumb.Jamal: Man, say it [...]
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