A few years ago I read a book that really inspired me with respect to possible research avenues I could pursue in education. It's called "Religion Explained" by Pascal Boyer. He creates an interesting argument for the neurological basis of religion. A central feature of his argument is that religious myths and ideas are memes that have some tenacity as cultural elements being passed on within a society because they have features that make them especially memorable by creating a form of cognitive dissonance. It occurred to me that there may be a lot to learn about effective education models by exploring the indoctrination practices of religions. One type of religion that particularly interests me is the mystery cult, which indoctrinates devotees through a system of religious rituals and dramatizations. So... for some time I've been thinking about and planning a mystery to induct my students into that would teach them something about biology.
Originally I got two students to learn the ritual who would then help me the next day to induct the rest of them. There was some skepticism and resistance at first. Partially because my co-conspirators anticipated a negative or destructive response to the process. This was of course a major concern I'd been carrying around all along. However, after rehearsing the ritual a couple of times and then showing them meanings of all the symbols, some of this concern was resolved and success seemed more likely.
Anyway, the next day we tried it out and in the effort to give each student a chance to be a direct participant, we tried to go through it a few times. At first it worked out but as they became too comfortable with it, one particular student decided to deliberately mess it up during his turn at participating. The larger group also served to provide lots of opportunities for mutual distraction, particularly during the phase where the symbols were explained.
Anyway, it didn't turn out perfectly. However, it did turn out well enough that I think I need to explore this idea a little bit more and try to refine it.
If you are interested you can link to a pdf of the full text of the ritual here: The Ritual or if that doesn't work you can link to it through here: My Downloads Page
Monday, July 28, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
School of Gardening
It isn’t very often that my students take an interest in gardening. Oh, sure. Most of them ask me if I can teach them how to grow weed. That isn’t really the same thing but, they wouldn’t be able to succeed in that anyway. The problem is that taking care of plants requires attention, patience, and the kind of mindfulness geared towards caring and protecting rather than impulsively destroying. These are traits that very few of my students ever exhibit. Their lack of these abilities is so severe that even if I were to teach them how to grow something as attractive and desirable as their intoxicants, all but a very small number of them would fail.
As an illustrative example, I have one student now who likes to water the plants in the greenhouse. A few times he filled a bucket of water and dumped large amounts onto the pots washing large amounts of soil out onto the ground. Realizing this wasn’t working, he decided to fill containers holding the pots so full with water that the peat pots the plants were in began to turn to mush and several of the plants died. You see, it was easier to just dump large amounts of water into a large container than it was to carefully pour just a little water into each pot’s plant.
We do have one student now, however, who does seem to have some investment in the garden. He has been involved in most of the plantings and has taken a certain amount of ownership for them. The first few beds he planted had sprouted lettuce and spinach, which had impressed him as a real product of his labor. On a certain day he went into the garden to admire his work and check on its well-being when he discovered something that horrified him. Something had been tearing up his lettuce plants.
He was horribly confused that this could happen and determined that the rabbits must have done it. For some reason he did not quite understand the seedlings had been pulled up and left lying on the ground right in front of where they had so recently been growing. He was confused. What could he do?
Taking a closer look at the scene he noticed that someone else had been there before him and after the rabbit, who had attempted to replant some of the uprooted victims. Desperately he tried to continue this task himself but soon gave up in frustration. There were too many plants and he felt uncertain about the survival of those he attempted to save. Those that remained he left sitting in a ball on the garden bed.
Eventually he came in the house and told me the story. He expressed his desire to kill rabbits for what they had done. Finally, he asked me what could have done such a thing. I answered, “I know exactly what happened to your lettuce. I pulled it up.” The energy in the shocked expression on this enervated pothead face was the joy of my day. I explained, “We need to thin the rows.”
As an illustrative example, I have one student now who likes to water the plants in the greenhouse. A few times he filled a bucket of water and dumped large amounts onto the pots washing large amounts of soil out onto the ground. Realizing this wasn’t working, he decided to fill containers holding the pots so full with water that the peat pots the plants were in began to turn to mush and several of the plants died. You see, it was easier to just dump large amounts of water into a large container than it was to carefully pour just a little water into each pot’s plant.
We do have one student now, however, who does seem to have some investment in the garden. He has been involved in most of the plantings and has taken a certain amount of ownership for them. The first few beds he planted had sprouted lettuce and spinach, which had impressed him as a real product of his labor. On a certain day he went into the garden to admire his work and check on its well-being when he discovered something that horrified him. Something had been tearing up his lettuce plants.
He was horribly confused that this could happen and determined that the rabbits must have done it. For some reason he did not quite understand the seedlings had been pulled up and left lying on the ground right in front of where they had so recently been growing. He was confused. What could he do?
Taking a closer look at the scene he noticed that someone else had been there before him and after the rabbit, who had attempted to replant some of the uprooted victims. Desperately he tried to continue this task himself but soon gave up in frustration. There were too many plants and he felt uncertain about the survival of those he attempted to save. Those that remained he left sitting in a ball on the garden bed.
Eventually he came in the house and told me the story. He expressed his desire to kill rabbits for what they had done. Finally, he asked me what could have done such a thing. I answered, “I know exactly what happened to your lettuce. I pulled it up.” The energy in the shocked expression on this enervated pothead face was the joy of my day. I explained, “We need to thin the rows.”
Monday, March 24, 2008
My students and their PFCs
Well, I'm sitting here getting ready for another week out on the island of misfit boys. Our population recently went up to the max and the last week out had me pretty exhausted at the end of it. It is amazing what a difference even one kid can make to the state of things on the island, having three new kids is pretty remarkable. Curiously compared to other times we've had this much change I haven't really seen much in the way of chimpanzee fighting for the top of the heirarchy. This is rather unusual and perhaps says something about the type of kids we have these days.
I'm not really looking forward to going out to the island. I often feel this reluctance, most especially when there are certain risks regarding my proposed learning activities for the week. The last week I went out I thought that I had the perfect stuff planned for one of my most advanced students and he didn't take to it at all. He's one of the few students I've had in recent months who is studying algebra. During previous weeks I'd noticed that he did a lot better when I released the various algebra techniques one relatively small bit at a time. In this particular instance I had found a text that broke up certain work in solving fractions into pieces that were small enough that it would have annoyed the piss out of me when I was in high school, but it seemed to be exactly the kind of steps that he would be able to do and figure the whole thing out. The problem was that it was just enough for him to start having trouble remembering to do all the stuff he'd already been working on. It's that magical point where things get hard and the student starts calling the math work "gay" or "stupid." A kind of irony when it is usually the student who feels stupid at that point. It also seems to be one of two points that my students seem to fairly consistently run into where some kind of real cognitive deficit seems to rear its ugly head. This is the point where we've maxed out the kid's working memory capacity.
I've been reading up on this whole working memory thing lately and it seems that it correlates very strongly with all kinds of intellectual tasks including the sort of reasoning tasks that mathematics requires. The issue is being able to keep simultaneously in mind the ultimate goal of the problem solving venture, a mental roadmap of how to get to that goal, and the performance of the operation immediately at hand. As the road map gets more complex or has more steps added to it, or the immediate operation gets more complex the sort of mental blackboard gets cluttered beyond the individual's ability to read it and they start making mistakes that they actually know better than to make. One way of dealing with this problem is to develop what's called automaticity. Automaticity is the ability to perform certain mental tasks automatically and without thinking. This is the kind of thing marital artists train for in forms practice. It is also the thing your elementary school teachers were trying to give you with all those timed times tables tests. Really the only way to develop automaticity is to do the same things over and over and over a million times. This is something my students really resent me telling them they need to do.
Interestingly working memory is supposedly trainable. There have been a couple studies that have shown that people who practice at it and work on memory tasks of increasing difficulty can improve their working memory and show improvements in all kinds of reasoning tasks. It is one of the few things that can be taught that demonstrates a good deal of transfer into other tasks. The classis way of training this is the old electronic Simon Says game where you have to remember the sequence of flashing colored lights. Another is the Memory card game where you have to remember the location of matching pairs of cards that have been revealed one at a time.
With this in mind I've started up a regimen of memory training tasks for our evening study hours on the island. Sadly I don't think that it is going to be enough to make the kind of difference that we'd really notice. (This whole business underscores another reason I believe we need to rethink our entire system of education, but I digress.) Anyway, I'm giving it a shot and it seems that it has been effective to the point that the kids were willing to do it for a while. They're getting bored of the old task though and so I'm going to shift over to another task.
I mentioned earlier that there are two points of cognitive deficit that my students seem to be regularly afflicted by. If the first is diminished working memory the second is abstraction of proportional reasoning, or maybe just proportional reasoning. This is something that I don't know that much about. How this manifests itself though is that you can demonstrate to a kid with physical objects the concept that if you cut it into halves and then fourths that 1/2 is the exact same amount as 2/4 and they still don't seem to get it, and they certainly can't generalize it to proportions in general. This is a mystery that has been a nuissance for a long time and I really haven't gotten any closer to figuring it out. What I've found myself doing is teaching kids how to work out these and other sorts of fraction problems over and over. Somehow, I always come back around after enough time to giving students the exact same work that I've already given them, they've worked out all the problems but still can't remember how to do it. It may be that part of this is derived from them not having obtained automaticity in division. It may also represent something related to their behavioral problems. If a person cannot intuit about proportions in math can they understand proportionality in behavioral choices and outcomes?
I'm not really looking forward to going out to the island. I often feel this reluctance, most especially when there are certain risks regarding my proposed learning activities for the week. The last week I went out I thought that I had the perfect stuff planned for one of my most advanced students and he didn't take to it at all. He's one of the few students I've had in recent months who is studying algebra. During previous weeks I'd noticed that he did a lot better when I released the various algebra techniques one relatively small bit at a time. In this particular instance I had found a text that broke up certain work in solving fractions into pieces that were small enough that it would have annoyed the piss out of me when I was in high school, but it seemed to be exactly the kind of steps that he would be able to do and figure the whole thing out. The problem was that it was just enough for him to start having trouble remembering to do all the stuff he'd already been working on. It's that magical point where things get hard and the student starts calling the math work "gay" or "stupid." A kind of irony when it is usually the student who feels stupid at that point. It also seems to be one of two points that my students seem to fairly consistently run into where some kind of real cognitive deficit seems to rear its ugly head. This is the point where we've maxed out the kid's working memory capacity.
I've been reading up on this whole working memory thing lately and it seems that it correlates very strongly with all kinds of intellectual tasks including the sort of reasoning tasks that mathematics requires. The issue is being able to keep simultaneously in mind the ultimate goal of the problem solving venture, a mental roadmap of how to get to that goal, and the performance of the operation immediately at hand. As the road map gets more complex or has more steps added to it, or the immediate operation gets more complex the sort of mental blackboard gets cluttered beyond the individual's ability to read it and they start making mistakes that they actually know better than to make. One way of dealing with this problem is to develop what's called automaticity. Automaticity is the ability to perform certain mental tasks automatically and without thinking. This is the kind of thing marital artists train for in forms practice. It is also the thing your elementary school teachers were trying to give you with all those timed times tables tests. Really the only way to develop automaticity is to do the same things over and over and over a million times. This is something my students really resent me telling them they need to do.
Interestingly working memory is supposedly trainable. There have been a couple studies that have shown that people who practice at it and work on memory tasks of increasing difficulty can improve their working memory and show improvements in all kinds of reasoning tasks. It is one of the few things that can be taught that demonstrates a good deal of transfer into other tasks. The classis way of training this is the old electronic Simon Says game where you have to remember the sequence of flashing colored lights. Another is the Memory card game where you have to remember the location of matching pairs of cards that have been revealed one at a time.
With this in mind I've started up a regimen of memory training tasks for our evening study hours on the island. Sadly I don't think that it is going to be enough to make the kind of difference that we'd really notice. (This whole business underscores another reason I believe we need to rethink our entire system of education, but I digress.) Anyway, I'm giving it a shot and it seems that it has been effective to the point that the kids were willing to do it for a while. They're getting bored of the old task though and so I'm going to shift over to another task.
I mentioned earlier that there are two points of cognitive deficit that my students seem to be regularly afflicted by. If the first is diminished working memory the second is abstraction of proportional reasoning, or maybe just proportional reasoning. This is something that I don't know that much about. How this manifests itself though is that you can demonstrate to a kid with physical objects the concept that if you cut it into halves and then fourths that 1/2 is the exact same amount as 2/4 and they still don't seem to get it, and they certainly can't generalize it to proportions in general. This is a mystery that has been a nuissance for a long time and I really haven't gotten any closer to figuring it out. What I've found myself doing is teaching kids how to work out these and other sorts of fraction problems over and over. Somehow, I always come back around after enough time to giving students the exact same work that I've already given them, they've worked out all the problems but still can't remember how to do it. It may be that part of this is derived from them not having obtained automaticity in division. It may also represent something related to their behavioral problems. If a person cannot intuit about proportions in math can they understand proportionality in behavioral choices and outcomes?
Saturday, March 01, 2008
More than a feeling?
When I was a kid we used to swim in a series of geothermal pools at the base of a volcanic hill a short drive east of town. The place was called Warm Springs, which seemed kind of inappropriate in that the water almost always seemed really cold in summer time. In winter time, however, it never froze (at least not to my knowledge) and it would frequently fog up half the valley.
Anyway, there were a few summers when it seemed like we went swimming there almost every day. I was a rather mediocre swimmer and I kind of enjoyed the chance to invest some mediocre efforts at some mediocre improvement. I also liked taking snorkeling gear which I inexpertly used to check out the guppies people had released from their fish tanks as well as the rocky bottom with the sorts of things that at the time only Huck Finn and I could have considered treasures. It was also exciting for the mystique of an abandoned mill for processing minerals or gravel or something mined from mountains out on the western end of the valley. From a distance it looked to me like a ruined castle with a giant green hand painted on a little rock face overlooking it. Eventually I learned that the hand was in fact a representation of a marijuana leaf, but I digress.
On one certain bleak summer day I had been out there swimming with my siblings and a couple of cousins. I call the day ‘bleak’ because it was one of those times when the sunlight has a way of coming down that makes everything look washed out and more barren than usual. At the same time every breeze on our wet skins made the water feel that much colder. It must have been one of those summers we went every day because I remember us getting bored with it sooner than usual. The weather may have been contributing to the fact that I just couldn’t get interested.
So we packed up our gear and our towels and what not and climbed onto the back of my grandmother’s little steel-blue Dodge pick-up so she could drive us back into town. My ears were filled with water producing an eerie sense of balance and an otherworldly half-deafness. As we bounced off the dirt road onto the highway I noticed that my shoes were missing. In those days I ran around barefoot most of the time and had developed some pretty terrific calluses so it was really easy for me to not notice the absence. A strange and uncomfortable sensation started to form in my gut because of it and I asked to go back and look for them.
We went back and looked around. I couldn’t find the shoes and the worry in my abdomen wouldn’t subside. There wasn’t much area to check for them so the search didn’t last long and we again left for home. The strange feeling didn’t go away and I started to identify it as a weird combination of guilt and fear. It’s not the usual kind of fear like that of heights or social anxiety. The fear seemed to me to be more of a supernatural kind of thing. Lovecraft wrote that he tried to create fear in his writing that was not corporeal but confronted the reader with a dread for the chaotic possibilities of an infinite cosmos. I think the fear I experienced was something like that, as if by losing my shoes I had somehow angered unknown gods and should shortly fall victim to the torment of their earthly instruments. I imagined some kind of witches with my shoes in hand using them in a ritual to slowly pick apart my mind like a knitter picking apart some mistake in the scarf she’s making.
The reason I tell this story is because it is the first time I experienced this feeling. It comes back to unsettle me on rare occasions and has done so recently. I purchased the Planet Earth series with my favorite wildlife documentary guy David Attenborough. I took it down to Woods Hole. I’d been showing some of them to the kids and lent them to one of my coworkers to see. One of the disks has come up missing. It was a bit expensive and the fact that I lost part of the set has me feeling a bit guilty. But as with the shoes, the disappearance is so far inexplicable. These facts make the connection pretty obvious and provide some context for explaining the dread I feel. Even so, it seems like too much for the magnitude of a problem like a DVD or a pair of shoes. Maybe the witches really are at work.
Anyway, there were a few summers when it seemed like we went swimming there almost every day. I was a rather mediocre swimmer and I kind of enjoyed the chance to invest some mediocre efforts at some mediocre improvement. I also liked taking snorkeling gear which I inexpertly used to check out the guppies people had released from their fish tanks as well as the rocky bottom with the sorts of things that at the time only Huck Finn and I could have considered treasures. It was also exciting for the mystique of an abandoned mill for processing minerals or gravel or something mined from mountains out on the western end of the valley. From a distance it looked to me like a ruined castle with a giant green hand painted on a little rock face overlooking it. Eventually I learned that the hand was in fact a representation of a marijuana leaf, but I digress.
On one certain bleak summer day I had been out there swimming with my siblings and a couple of cousins. I call the day ‘bleak’ because it was one of those times when the sunlight has a way of coming down that makes everything look washed out and more barren than usual. At the same time every breeze on our wet skins made the water feel that much colder. It must have been one of those summers we went every day because I remember us getting bored with it sooner than usual. The weather may have been contributing to the fact that I just couldn’t get interested.
So we packed up our gear and our towels and what not and climbed onto the back of my grandmother’s little steel-blue Dodge pick-up so she could drive us back into town. My ears were filled with water producing an eerie sense of balance and an otherworldly half-deafness. As we bounced off the dirt road onto the highway I noticed that my shoes were missing. In those days I ran around barefoot most of the time and had developed some pretty terrific calluses so it was really easy for me to not notice the absence. A strange and uncomfortable sensation started to form in my gut because of it and I asked to go back and look for them.
We went back and looked around. I couldn’t find the shoes and the worry in my abdomen wouldn’t subside. There wasn’t much area to check for them so the search didn’t last long and we again left for home. The strange feeling didn’t go away and I started to identify it as a weird combination of guilt and fear. It’s not the usual kind of fear like that of heights or social anxiety. The fear seemed to me to be more of a supernatural kind of thing. Lovecraft wrote that he tried to create fear in his writing that was not corporeal but confronted the reader with a dread for the chaotic possibilities of an infinite cosmos. I think the fear I experienced was something like that, as if by losing my shoes I had somehow angered unknown gods and should shortly fall victim to the torment of their earthly instruments. I imagined some kind of witches with my shoes in hand using them in a ritual to slowly pick apart my mind like a knitter picking apart some mistake in the scarf she’s making.
The reason I tell this story is because it is the first time I experienced this feeling. It comes back to unsettle me on rare occasions and has done so recently. I purchased the Planet Earth series with my favorite wildlife documentary guy David Attenborough. I took it down to Woods Hole. I’d been showing some of them to the kids and lent them to one of my coworkers to see. One of the disks has come up missing. It was a bit expensive and the fact that I lost part of the set has me feeling a bit guilty. But as with the shoes, the disappearance is so far inexplicable. These facts make the connection pretty obvious and provide some context for explaining the dread I feel. Even so, it seems like too much for the magnitude of a problem like a DVD or a pair of shoes. Maybe the witches really are at work.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
The Struggle that has been January
I feel a little apologetic about the fact that I haven’t written any posts in a while. I’ve been busy in some of the most frustrating of ways. I think I heard this concept from Susan: something about paying only the minimum on all of your credit cards of life. That’s what it’s been like for a combination of reasons.
Getting back from Utah, I was asked almost straight-away to cover a half shift for someone on the island. The week after that we had our half-week shift for the magical semi-annual shift-shifting shift. So in the end this has been the first real week off I’ve had since the holidays.
Normally that isn’t such an unusual or problematic thing except for the other things I’ve been pressed to accomplish in my piddly little periods of time off the island. The main point of work and frustration has been getting some lessons ready. I’m in a spot with the maths where it isn’t a problem for me these days. I’ve been doing the 4th grade through Algebra II thing for a while and I think I’ve got a good working curriculum going on. The problem lately has to do with science.
Right now I’ve reached a critical mass of students with really poor reading skills and my usual winter indoor science curriculum is pretty reading intensive. It in fact requires a certain amount of independence in student reading and researching. As far as I’m able to assess right now half of my students are below the third grade in their reading levels and they have serious struggles reading material as basic as a newspaper article. 16-year-old kids can’t read the paper. It’s really frustrating.
This being their situation it occurred to me that perhaps the best service I can do them as a teacher is to try and create my science curriculum for them in such a way that they will secretly be really improving their reading abilities. It seemed pretty reasonable to me. I’m kind of a scientist. Most of the scientific work I do involves reading stuff. Surely there are ways of making them read and learn science at the same time. Right?
I believe there are but I have yet to discover them. There is a perennial problem in teaching special education, something I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog. It is the issue of kids who can’t read good detecting that you know they can’t read good and giving them work that they feel is for little kids. It is the shame obstacle.
For whatever reason, I cannot find literature on biology related topics at a second grade reading level composed for teenage audiences. I’ve spent a few hours at the library. I found a book about integrating literature and science instruction, but in browsing it the suggestions for doing it were all pretty commonsensical and all the suggested readings and activities were for elementary school. Readings recommended as being biology related at the lower levels tend to not have any kind of technical information at all. They are usually cutesy illustrated stories about planting a seed and it growing into a tree or the chicken egg hatches and the chick makes noises and eats grain. On the other end are those that are designed to be for kids with lots of good illustrations and information but the language and vocabulary are still too advanced for my students.
So, I’ve been angsting, stressing, and vexing about this stuff with most of my time off and end up going back to the island with yet another couple of episodes from “Planet Earth” with Sir David Attenborough. (I should add that it is a pretty darn good series though I prefer his “Life of ….” or “Life in ….” videos.) And then I leave the island feeling like maybe the kids learned a little something about biology but their reading isn’t getting better. Furthermore I’m not really helping my more advanced students as much as I should be. It appears that I’m going to be moving on to creating a science curriculum more like my math where I have to work with each kid at his own level. This is going to be so much work.
I have thought many times that the whole field of special education could benefit tremendously from the availability of materials that are sensitive to the delicate egos of students such as mine, that very low level academic skills could be developed using materials designed for an adult’s interest and “dignity” if you will. Whenever I get to thinking along these lines it crosses my mind that I might produce some such material but… wow. I think someone could spend their whole life doing things like that, and it’s not really what I intend to do with mine.
Getting back from Utah, I was asked almost straight-away to cover a half shift for someone on the island. The week after that we had our half-week shift for the magical semi-annual shift-shifting shift. So in the end this has been the first real week off I’ve had since the holidays.
Normally that isn’t such an unusual or problematic thing except for the other things I’ve been pressed to accomplish in my piddly little periods of time off the island. The main point of work and frustration has been getting some lessons ready. I’m in a spot with the maths where it isn’t a problem for me these days. I’ve been doing the 4th grade through Algebra II thing for a while and I think I’ve got a good working curriculum going on. The problem lately has to do with science.
Right now I’ve reached a critical mass of students with really poor reading skills and my usual winter indoor science curriculum is pretty reading intensive. It in fact requires a certain amount of independence in student reading and researching. As far as I’m able to assess right now half of my students are below the third grade in their reading levels and they have serious struggles reading material as basic as a newspaper article. 16-year-old kids can’t read the paper. It’s really frustrating.
This being their situation it occurred to me that perhaps the best service I can do them as a teacher is to try and create my science curriculum for them in such a way that they will secretly be really improving their reading abilities. It seemed pretty reasonable to me. I’m kind of a scientist. Most of the scientific work I do involves reading stuff. Surely there are ways of making them read and learn science at the same time. Right?
I believe there are but I have yet to discover them. There is a perennial problem in teaching special education, something I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog. It is the issue of kids who can’t read good detecting that you know they can’t read good and giving them work that they feel is for little kids. It is the shame obstacle.
For whatever reason, I cannot find literature on biology related topics at a second grade reading level composed for teenage audiences. I’ve spent a few hours at the library. I found a book about integrating literature and science instruction, but in browsing it the suggestions for doing it were all pretty commonsensical and all the suggested readings and activities were for elementary school. Readings recommended as being biology related at the lower levels tend to not have any kind of technical information at all. They are usually cutesy illustrated stories about planting a seed and it growing into a tree or the chicken egg hatches and the chick makes noises and eats grain. On the other end are those that are designed to be for kids with lots of good illustrations and information but the language and vocabulary are still too advanced for my students.
So, I’ve been angsting, stressing, and vexing about this stuff with most of my time off and end up going back to the island with yet another couple of episodes from “Planet Earth” with Sir David Attenborough. (I should add that it is a pretty darn good series though I prefer his “Life of ….” or “Life in ….” videos.) And then I leave the island feeling like maybe the kids learned a little something about biology but their reading isn’t getting better. Furthermore I’m not really helping my more advanced students as much as I should be. It appears that I’m going to be moving on to creating a science curriculum more like my math where I have to work with each kid at his own level. This is going to be so much work.
I have thought many times that the whole field of special education could benefit tremendously from the availability of materials that are sensitive to the delicate egos of students such as mine, that very low level academic skills could be developed using materials designed for an adult’s interest and “dignity” if you will. Whenever I get to thinking along these lines it crosses my mind that I might produce some such material but… wow. I think someone could spend their whole life doing things like that, and it’s not really what I intend to do with mine.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Some Student Poetry
I'm not poet or critic of poetry but, I was a little surprised by this piece from one of my students. I think he was assigned to write something about Calcutta.
Monday, December 03, 2007
Trip Plans
I have scheduled the following flights for the forthcoming holiday month.
Boston to Salt Lake City
12/13/07
5:02 pm - 8:35 pm
Delta
Salt Lake City to Boston
12/27/07
9:40 am - 4:12 pm
Delta
Boston to Salt Lake City
12/13/07
5:02 pm - 8:35 pm
Delta
Salt Lake City to Boston
12/27/07
9:40 am - 4:12 pm
Delta
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Photos from New York
This is of course one of the so-called needles of Nefertiti. A total misnomer by my way of thinking in that it is a monument to Ramses. Which one I cannot say though it has a sort of interesting formula for the text calling him "Horus the bull" at the beginning of each column of text. I found this in Central Park and at first thought it looked like it was a cement replica but, low and behold it's granite. Upon discovering that it was the real thing I was a little distressed at first because the first face you can see in the little area where it was put up has most of the inscription worn off of it. I feared that it had suffered all that damage by being moved from the nice protective desert to the acid rain of the east-coast of the US. Turns out however that it had been too worn to read on that side since the time it was first placed in NewYork apparently as a sort of gift from an Egyptian government official during the late 1800s. I played a few tricks with photoshop to make the inscription more legible but, I'm not sure that in this size version of the picture you can see that on this side of the obelisk the writing is almost perfectly intact.
This is a huge wooden mask we saw in the American Museum of Natural History. It was a pretty cool mask but I thought I liked it most for the fact that one of the names for it was the "Fun Mask." It's the sort of thing that starts a chain reaction of thought through Peter Murphy's cabaret version of "Fun Time" to the discovery of one of the coolest things I've seen in a while: Special Peter Surprise If only Keegan were here to share the joy of this one.
This here is a photo by Jed of a pond in Central Park. Isn't it lovely?
My obligatory picture of the Statue of Liberty. The smog you see is all quite real. Here I imagine her not so much as welcoming new people to a free country as waving good-bye to all of us as a society for deserting her as a principle.Saturday, November 03, 2007
The Issue of School Choice
I am frankly very disappointed in the vibe I’m getting that Utah voters are turning around and deciding to revoke implementation of the voucher system. If you are planning to vote on this issue I think that the first thing you should do is read HB 174. It has come to my attention that there are people on both sides of this issue who are promulgating exceptionally nasty and deceptive misinformation in order to lure people their respective ways. I’ve heard that the media debate is surprisingly intense. I’m sure you already know that this is a huge experiment that the rest of the country is watching closely and people in other states have been contributing lots of money to weigh in for which ever side they support.
As for trying to make some kind of fair or insightful argument for why I think you should vote for it… I cannot at the moment do a very good job. As I look at this bill and consider all of my experience working in schools this whole thing looks like a no-brainer to me. I cannot find one honestly good substantial reason for the general citizen to vote against this voucher system. The way I see it is that it boils down to exactly one issue. What do you imagine the role of a school is? If you think schools should be maximizing learning you must maximize the potential for choice. If you think schools should function to control and regulate the behavior of young people so they pop out regressed towards the mean in everything they do, then vote to support the hegemony of public schooling. If you honestly believe in the fact that humans are all unique individuals with unique sets of talents and weaknesses then it should be plain to you that all of these people have different educational needs. No single model of school can meet the needs of everyone. It is not logically feasible. It is a road to assuring mediocrity, which as I translate it means wasted human potential. But, some honestly believe that is what our society needs. We need to put everyone together all the time, at every level, and for every academic task. If we do this, then everyone will suck together and no one will be able to point and say, “Hey it’s not fair, those black kids are doing better than those Hispanic kids!” (I'm going to refrain from my diatribe about race and the obfuscation of cultural relativism.)
Many are trying to put the impression across that the only flavor of private school is the blazer and tie prep school. This is very, super, friggin’, wicked wrong, the place I work being an extreme example. It is also a perfect example of another reason people need to be able to have choice in where they send their kids for school. Some kids have special learning needs. There are many kinds of such needs. The popular thing these days is to try and force every classroom teacher to learn how to work with and provide what’s needed for all of these needs. This is unreasonable. Just as trying to force the same learning situation on every bloody student makes them mediocre, doing this to teachers makes them mediocre in what they can provide for your kids. I have realized in my own development as a teacher that I have the potential of going from absolutely brilliant to bumbling moron in about 7 minutes, the time it takes for the periods to change and for me to get another batch of kids with completely different learning needs. (These days this is more like seven minutes for me to get into my lesson for the day. Different rant for a different day.) Private schools have a power that the public schools tend not to have: specialization and sometimes specialization in providing services for students with special needs.
Part of the magic secret here is something that I think is going to become my slogan or mantra or catch phrase or something: learning is voluntary. You cannot force someone to learn. You can encourage and provide opportunities. You can even encourage to the point of torture but, ultimately learning is an act of will. As much as possible I suggest letting individual students and their families exercise that will, especially when it comes to something that influences a person’s life and happiness as much as their education does.
So… it’s up to some of you folks. What’s more important: maximizing human potential or universal conformity?
Forgive me if certain parts seem kind of hysterical or confusing, I'm famished and not functioning very well. Also I want to point out, this is open for debate. If you think I'm wrong and have some argument that you think is convincing post it up here by all means. Be forwarned that I will gladly listen, discuss, and refute where appropriate.
As for trying to make some kind of fair or insightful argument for why I think you should vote for it… I cannot at the moment do a very good job. As I look at this bill and consider all of my experience working in schools this whole thing looks like a no-brainer to me. I cannot find one honestly good substantial reason for the general citizen to vote against this voucher system. The way I see it is that it boils down to exactly one issue. What do you imagine the role of a school is? If you think schools should be maximizing learning you must maximize the potential for choice. If you think schools should function to control and regulate the behavior of young people so they pop out regressed towards the mean in everything they do, then vote to support the hegemony of public schooling. If you honestly believe in the fact that humans are all unique individuals with unique sets of talents and weaknesses then it should be plain to you that all of these people have different educational needs. No single model of school can meet the needs of everyone. It is not logically feasible. It is a road to assuring mediocrity, which as I translate it means wasted human potential. But, some honestly believe that is what our society needs. We need to put everyone together all the time, at every level, and for every academic task. If we do this, then everyone will suck together and no one will be able to point and say, “Hey it’s not fair, those black kids are doing better than those Hispanic kids!” (I'm going to refrain from my diatribe about race and the obfuscation of cultural relativism.)
Many are trying to put the impression across that the only flavor of private school is the blazer and tie prep school. This is very, super, friggin’, wicked wrong, the place I work being an extreme example. It is also a perfect example of another reason people need to be able to have choice in where they send their kids for school. Some kids have special learning needs. There are many kinds of such needs. The popular thing these days is to try and force every classroom teacher to learn how to work with and provide what’s needed for all of these needs. This is unreasonable. Just as trying to force the same learning situation on every bloody student makes them mediocre, doing this to teachers makes them mediocre in what they can provide for your kids. I have realized in my own development as a teacher that I have the potential of going from absolutely brilliant to bumbling moron in about 7 minutes, the time it takes for the periods to change and for me to get another batch of kids with completely different learning needs. (These days this is more like seven minutes for me to get into my lesson for the day. Different rant for a different day.) Private schools have a power that the public schools tend not to have: specialization and sometimes specialization in providing services for students with special needs.
Part of the magic secret here is something that I think is going to become my slogan or mantra or catch phrase or something: learning is voluntary. You cannot force someone to learn. You can encourage and provide opportunities. You can even encourage to the point of torture but, ultimately learning is an act of will. As much as possible I suggest letting individual students and their families exercise that will, especially when it comes to something that influences a person’s life and happiness as much as their education does.
So… it’s up to some of you folks. What’s more important: maximizing human potential or universal conformity?
Forgive me if certain parts seem kind of hysterical or confusing, I'm famished and not functioning very well. Also I want to point out, this is open for debate. If you think I'm wrong and have some argument that you think is convincing post it up here by all means. Be forwarned that I will gladly listen, discuss, and refute where appropriate.
Monday, October 08, 2007
Casual Update
What’s going on in my life right now that’s worth writing about? Not much I’m afraid. There are a couple of highlights I could mention I guess.
At work we’ve been low on students so folks have been forced into taking extended time off. Because I’m a teacher and my work is not optional I’ve been kind of protected from this. This is something that has been convenient but I feel kind of bad about. This is especially so because I have enough vacation time that I’ll hopefully be taking a trip to New York City for Thanksgiving and then have three week vacation for Christmas. I could take some time off and let someone cover school for a bit but… I don’t know.
Last weekend the ward had a trip up to Camp Joseph, that’s in the Sharon VT area supposedly the old Smith homestead up there. I had the responsibility of making sure people had tents to stay in which was kind of obnoxious due to folks not sharing info with me about whether they needed space or had extra space. Nonetheless it all seemed to turn out okay.
Sword practice is going okay. I may have mentioned earlier that I’ve moved on from the defense series to the attack series. The attack forms are pretty fun. The last week I was off the island I learned my 22nd form. I like it but it has a couple things I haven’t figured out yet. Between forms 21, 22, and some kind of yoga-ish classes I’ve been taking from one of my sword teachers I’m finding out what kind of problems decades of slouching has caused for me. Somehow or other if I want to make a mastery of these techniques I’m going to have to learn to walk with my back up straight. Yikes.
The plants are doing well. The cashew tree has a whopping 10 leaves with another on the way on top. It also has some nodes appearing that suggest branches will be forming soon. I’ve moved my tomato plant indoors. I’ve of ancient times heard rumors that under the right conditions tomatoes are perennial so, I’m going to see if I can make that happen. Also, I brought home a venus flytrap from work. The kids were abusing it rather than taking care of it so… I’m going to see if I can get it pretty big and durable and take it back out there. So far it’s got about 4 or so of those little gadgets they catch the flies with but it hasn’t caught anything. Some of them are surely still too small and immature to work, and it might be that all of them are still.
In the cooking universe I’m deeply thinking about going back to getting set up to make beer. Oh the scandal, I know. But as for what I’m actually DOING, I’m making a lot of pizza. I’m trying to come up with a recipe for sauce that will cause the taster to faint for its deliciousness. Also I’m getting stoked for all the fall pies. I’m going to go back and try the pumpkin from the actual pumpkin with bourbon… so good. And I’m going to make advances in the apple department. I’m going to try and come up with a caramel curry apple pie. Oh yeah. Delanie’s fancy schmancy curry chocolates may have ruined me. I’ve got to figure out a good way for increasing my caramel amounts though. My mouth is watering thinking about it.
I tried a while ago to develop a contraption for distilling volatile oils out of various plant materials. I was thinking of specifically bayberry leaf because there’s a ton of it on the island and it smells really surprisingly good. It seems like the kind of project that would be cool for the kids too but, I’ve had little luck. One of the things I’m seriously considering in this vein to try now is to modify a stovetop espresso maker. They work by a different principle but I think if I cut a certain piece off and successfully seal the lid I might pull something off. I don’t know, it still seems kind of sketchy. I may just have to give in and buy a glass apparatus and threaten the kids with major fines if they break it.
Speaking of distilling, I decided for personal entertainment purposes to start saving my sourdough hooch until I have enough to distil it. There’s a contraption I saw on the internet using a big kettle and a wok full of ice for distilling Franzia. I figure the same could work for me considering I don’t want it to drink or anything, it’s just taking a while to save up enough hooch. I need like a half gallon or so and I’ve been getting about ¼ cup per week off of my culture.
I think that’s about all I’ve got to report or at least care to right now. I hope you enjoyed.
At work we’ve been low on students so folks have been forced into taking extended time off. Because I’m a teacher and my work is not optional I’ve been kind of protected from this. This is something that has been convenient but I feel kind of bad about. This is especially so because I have enough vacation time that I’ll hopefully be taking a trip to New York City for Thanksgiving and then have three week vacation for Christmas. I could take some time off and let someone cover school for a bit but… I don’t know.
Last weekend the ward had a trip up to Camp Joseph, that’s in the Sharon VT area supposedly the old Smith homestead up there. I had the responsibility of making sure people had tents to stay in which was kind of obnoxious due to folks not sharing info with me about whether they needed space or had extra space. Nonetheless it all seemed to turn out okay.
Sword practice is going okay. I may have mentioned earlier that I’ve moved on from the defense series to the attack series. The attack forms are pretty fun. The last week I was off the island I learned my 22nd form. I like it but it has a couple things I haven’t figured out yet. Between forms 21, 22, and some kind of yoga-ish classes I’ve been taking from one of my sword teachers I’m finding out what kind of problems decades of slouching has caused for me. Somehow or other if I want to make a mastery of these techniques I’m going to have to learn to walk with my back up straight. Yikes.
The plants are doing well. The cashew tree has a whopping 10 leaves with another on the way on top. It also has some nodes appearing that suggest branches will be forming soon. I’ve moved my tomato plant indoors. I’ve of ancient times heard rumors that under the right conditions tomatoes are perennial so, I’m going to see if I can make that happen. Also, I brought home a venus flytrap from work. The kids were abusing it rather than taking care of it so… I’m going to see if I can get it pretty big and durable and take it back out there. So far it’s got about 4 or so of those little gadgets they catch the flies with but it hasn’t caught anything. Some of them are surely still too small and immature to work, and it might be that all of them are still.
In the cooking universe I’m deeply thinking about going back to getting set up to make beer. Oh the scandal, I know. But as for what I’m actually DOING, I’m making a lot of pizza. I’m trying to come up with a recipe for sauce that will cause the taster to faint for its deliciousness. Also I’m getting stoked for all the fall pies. I’m going to go back and try the pumpkin from the actual pumpkin with bourbon… so good. And I’m going to make advances in the apple department. I’m going to try and come up with a caramel curry apple pie. Oh yeah. Delanie’s fancy schmancy curry chocolates may have ruined me. I’ve got to figure out a good way for increasing my caramel amounts though. My mouth is watering thinking about it.
I tried a while ago to develop a contraption for distilling volatile oils out of various plant materials. I was thinking of specifically bayberry leaf because there’s a ton of it on the island and it smells really surprisingly good. It seems like the kind of project that would be cool for the kids too but, I’ve had little luck. One of the things I’m seriously considering in this vein to try now is to modify a stovetop espresso maker. They work by a different principle but I think if I cut a certain piece off and successfully seal the lid I might pull something off. I don’t know, it still seems kind of sketchy. I may just have to give in and buy a glass apparatus and threaten the kids with major fines if they break it.
Speaking of distilling, I decided for personal entertainment purposes to start saving my sourdough hooch until I have enough to distil it. There’s a contraption I saw on the internet using a big kettle and a wok full of ice for distilling Franzia. I figure the same could work for me considering I don’t want it to drink or anything, it’s just taking a while to save up enough hooch. I need like a half gallon or so and I’ve been getting about ¼ cup per week off of my culture.
I think that’s about all I’ve got to report or at least care to right now. I hope you enjoyed.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
A Morning Sporting Event
Do you remember how to play horse? I might have eternally forgotten except that we had a rousing game on the island Wednesday. You see, basketball was something I played a bit of when I was quite young. It was fun sometimes and frustrating sometimes for several reasons, not the least of them my diminutive stature. Anyway, I was in junior high school, probably 8th grade though I forget for certain. At that time a certain something began happening to the bodies of my peers that made the stature issue of rapidly increasing concern. I don’t remember why I wasn’t playing myself but, one day in gym class, I was watching a game from the sideline. There was this kid who was at least a head taller than who dribbled in for a lay-up. When he was about to jump and shoot he crashed into a substantially larger kid who was guarding the basket. Now I say “crashed into” but it was more like “bounced off of” and he fell directly to the floor with the ball rolling slowly across the key. Something about the way little David bashed himself against that wall of human flesh penetrated my mind in a way that few things have and I decided then and there that whatever God had made me for it was not this game. As a consequence I’ve seldom played since and then only when pressed to. That being said I’m sure you have some idea why I might have altogether forgotten to play horse had I not been in fact pressed by my job and played with the boys the other day.
Having not had great skills in the first place and certainly not maintained what I had I was the first person out. This was especially the case as Matt (Yes! I get to use code names again!) was in line before me. I didn’t know this about Matt but it turns out he’s a pretty good ball player who has a pretty good sense for the whole calculus of the game. One of the first things he did was ask if I was right- or left-handed. Telling him was a mistake because then he made every shot left-handed. These weren’t regular shots either. Everything involved some weird angle, or required putting the spin just so on the ball, or shooting without seeing the basket. My only hope was that a couple of times he made them complicated enough that he missed them himself. It was nowhere near good enough for me to last however.
Anyway, one by one people were shot out, mostly by Matt until no one was left except Percy. In order to appreciate the rest of this you have to know something about Percy. He’s a tall lanky kid but may be in the second to last place of all kids I’ve known on the island for motor coordination. In other words he’s about as awkward as they get. But because he had been the last in line and Matt was first he had been protected through the game and had not acquired any letters. It was thus that the competition began when Percy shot from the top of the key and made the basket. Matt failed to duplicate and got his first letter. Percy missed his next shot (not dexterous) but Matt missed his as well. They went back and forth a couple of times when Matt finally chose a shot he could make without too much trouble and against odds Percy made the shot himself. Matt became very concerned about this situation and his shooting suffered for it. The two went back and forth making odd shots but somehow Percy kept up and the two were neck and neck. Finally it came down to the last letter. Who would get the ‘e’? Matt made a left-handed lay up that required bouncing off of the right side of the backboard. Percy had been missing this sort of shot so it seemed to be done. He dribbled up and nearly tripped over himself but the ball went in. Matt’s next shot was an underhanded “granny” shot from very close to the basket but he missed and Percy got a free shot. He stood up next to the key on the left side and made a casual jump shot. In the ball went, and the line of players who were out made slight gasps. “Don’t let it get in your head, Matt” somebody said. He got into position to make the shot and the ball hit the front of the rim rolled off to the other side. Percy won.
Having not had great skills in the first place and certainly not maintained what I had I was the first person out. This was especially the case as Matt (Yes! I get to use code names again!) was in line before me. I didn’t know this about Matt but it turns out he’s a pretty good ball player who has a pretty good sense for the whole calculus of the game. One of the first things he did was ask if I was right- or left-handed. Telling him was a mistake because then he made every shot left-handed. These weren’t regular shots either. Everything involved some weird angle, or required putting the spin just so on the ball, or shooting without seeing the basket. My only hope was that a couple of times he made them complicated enough that he missed them himself. It was nowhere near good enough for me to last however.
Anyway, one by one people were shot out, mostly by Matt until no one was left except Percy. In order to appreciate the rest of this you have to know something about Percy. He’s a tall lanky kid but may be in the second to last place of all kids I’ve known on the island for motor coordination. In other words he’s about as awkward as they get. But because he had been the last in line and Matt was first he had been protected through the game and had not acquired any letters. It was thus that the competition began when Percy shot from the top of the key and made the basket. Matt failed to duplicate and got his first letter. Percy missed his next shot (not dexterous) but Matt missed his as well. They went back and forth a couple of times when Matt finally chose a shot he could make without too much trouble and against odds Percy made the shot himself. Matt became very concerned about this situation and his shooting suffered for it. The two went back and forth making odd shots but somehow Percy kept up and the two were neck and neck. Finally it came down to the last letter. Who would get the ‘e’? Matt made a left-handed lay up that required bouncing off of the right side of the backboard. Percy had been missing this sort of shot so it seemed to be done. He dribbled up and nearly tripped over himself but the ball went in. Matt’s next shot was an underhanded “granny” shot from very close to the basket but he missed and Percy got a free shot. He stood up next to the key on the left side and made a casual jump shot. In the ball went, and the line of players who were out made slight gasps. “Don’t let it get in your head, Matt” somebody said. He got into position to make the shot and the ball hit the front of the rim rolled off to the other side. Percy won.
Friday, August 31, 2007
A Story About Sword Training
One of the great challenges in trying to keep up on my sword training since I moved out of the temple is finding good places to practice that are near my new home. There are two main requirements for this: enough open public space, a relatively low traffic unexposed location. From my early days of studying martial arts I learned that there are a lot of people in the world with strange ideas about it, ideas I do not fully understand, that result in them harassing you about it. I think it might have something to do with what people think of as the audacity or arrogance of the martial arts student. Their feeling may be, “How dare this guy walk around claiming he knows karate! He’s nothing special.” I’m not sure what it is. It still confuses me but I’ve learned to try and keep my hobby under wraps as much as I can, at least among people I don’t know or trust. (There’s an additional story about how this complicates my life on the island but that is not for here now.)
So anyway, it took me a little while to figure out some places where I could train around here and all of them are a little bit of a hike from my house. It is perhaps less convenient than I might have hoped but not too bad. Part of the trick with these training locations is not just the place but the time of day. There’s a certain school nearby where if I go really early on a Saturday morning or late on a week night there’s a bit of lawn and parking lot I can swing my sword around in. There’s another place along an abandoned railroad behind and abandoned warehouse that is very private all day during weekdays but becomes a spot at night where underage folk seek that privacy to smoke and drink. Another spot I found is a seldom used park near a highway where most of the time cars are flying by fast enough they don’t seem to see what I do out on the lawn.
One day I went to train in this location and came to realize that the issue of timing applies there as well. I guess it must have been during the afternoon rush hour. The traffic got backed up and instead of flying by a few drivers became an audience. Concentrating as I was on my forms I didn’t notice until I heard someone shouting from the road. I didn’t quite get what he said at first. So between forms I heard more clearly, “You’ve got to be joking! You’ve got to be kidding us! What, are you crazy!?” So there it was, my first heckle and a reminder why I hide to do this stuff. I kind of looked for the guy out of the corner of my eye as I went to do my next form just to be sure he was directing it at me. There he was, with his head hanging out of his window and an angry expression on his face looking at me and shouting “You’ve got to be kidding us! What are you crazy!?”
He drove on and I have to confess this sort of itched in my mind for a while. Two things sort of stuck out for me. First of all, who is this “us” he keeps referring to? Is this guy presuming to speak for everyone else on the road? Did he somehow come to think that I was out there training with the hope of benefiting him with a show? Mostly I was just confused as to why he’d even care enough to say anything at all.
It was as I tried to continue in this confused mental state that my next distraction came. this day. A couple of apparently Chinese folks came to the park with a little kid. The kid was also fascinated with what I was doing but in a much more positive way. “What are you doing? Why are you fighting?”, he’d ask. He kept hanging around me getting sometimes dangerously close to getting clobbered. I had a couple of short sticks with me in addition to my sword and I gave him one to play with. I told him, “You can play with this one but you’ll have to stay at least this far away so you don’t get hurt, okay?” He agreed and what I thought might become a sword for him instead turned into airplane wings. Oh well.
Let us just say I don’t practice there during rush hour any more.
So anyway, it took me a little while to figure out some places where I could train around here and all of them are a little bit of a hike from my house. It is perhaps less convenient than I might have hoped but not too bad. Part of the trick with these training locations is not just the place but the time of day. There’s a certain school nearby where if I go really early on a Saturday morning or late on a week night there’s a bit of lawn and parking lot I can swing my sword around in. There’s another place along an abandoned railroad behind and abandoned warehouse that is very private all day during weekdays but becomes a spot at night where underage folk seek that privacy to smoke and drink. Another spot I found is a seldom used park near a highway where most of the time cars are flying by fast enough they don’t seem to see what I do out on the lawn.
One day I went to train in this location and came to realize that the issue of timing applies there as well. I guess it must have been during the afternoon rush hour. The traffic got backed up and instead of flying by a few drivers became an audience. Concentrating as I was on my forms I didn’t notice until I heard someone shouting from the road. I didn’t quite get what he said at first. So between forms I heard more clearly, “You’ve got to be joking! You’ve got to be kidding us! What, are you crazy!?” So there it was, my first heckle and a reminder why I hide to do this stuff. I kind of looked for the guy out of the corner of my eye as I went to do my next form just to be sure he was directing it at me. There he was, with his head hanging out of his window and an angry expression on his face looking at me and shouting “You’ve got to be kidding us! What are you crazy!?”
He drove on and I have to confess this sort of itched in my mind for a while. Two things sort of stuck out for me. First of all, who is this “us” he keeps referring to? Is this guy presuming to speak for everyone else on the road? Did he somehow come to think that I was out there training with the hope of benefiting him with a show? Mostly I was just confused as to why he’d even care enough to say anything at all.
It was as I tried to continue in this confused mental state that my next distraction came. this day. A couple of apparently Chinese folks came to the park with a little kid. The kid was also fascinated with what I was doing but in a much more positive way. “What are you doing? Why are you fighting?”, he’d ask. He kept hanging around me getting sometimes dangerously close to getting clobbered. I had a couple of short sticks with me in addition to my sword and I gave him one to play with. I told him, “You can play with this one but you’ll have to stay at least this far away so you don’t get hurt, okay?” He agreed and what I thought might become a sword for him instead turned into airplane wings. Oh well.
Let us just say I don’t practice there during rush hour any more.
Thursday, August 02, 2007
The Retreat
So… I took the train and made a three mile hike carrying my eight days worth of clothes etc down to the center. I had recently purchased a new bag so that I could fit one of my full sized swords in it. I thought training might be appropriate and having not had a chance yet to talk to my director I took the sword in case. It turned out that he encouraged my sword training and this was a form of meditation that provided a couple of insights useful to the retreat.
The center (http://www.campioncenter.org/index.htm) is a rather large building and is currently used primarily as a residence for aging or hospitalized Jesuits. When it was originally built it was a school for training novices to become Jesuit priests. It has a nice big chapel with a dome and a half dome in the middle front of the building. The grounds are quite large and are used by retreatants for meditative nature walks.
When I arrived the director’s secretary, a woman I had talked with trying to get set up with this retreat, took me up to my room. It was one of the old dorm rooms of the Jesuit school. Eventually I met my director Fr. Mattaliano and he scheduled to meet with me each morning at 10 am. Our morning meetings consisted of him asking how my meditations and prayers of the previous day went and me telling him as I felt it appropriate or useful to do so. We would then discuss the potential meanings and importance of the things I observed in my own thoughts and feelings. Then he would sort of assign me passages of scripture to read and a direction for meditating on them. He would also direct me to pray for what he called a grace, which in Mormonism we might call a spiritual gift. An example of the type of grace he would suggest praying for might be a deeper understanding of some aspect of God’s love in a certain context. He would of specify the aspect and context. Then I would try to do it and we would talk about it again.
I found this interesting and useful for a couple of reasons. First, we discussed things in my spiritual experience that I very seldom have talked about with other people. It was sort of like having someone else there to listen to my thoughts and reflect them back at me in ways that helped me to see what was going on with a bit more clarity than I could have accomplished on my own. In the Zen temple this is not something we got much chance to do as discussing things experienced in meditation was pretty discouraged. Why this is the case has something to do with sacredness but, I think there is more to it than I understand. I have experienced some difficulties in having discussions like this with people who are LDS too, I think particularly of my mission but at other times as well. Part of this I think has to do with a strange sort of cultural corruption of our faith where people are afraid to believe in taking instruction from the Holy Ghost. It’s sort of like a denial that we as common random individuals, “non-prophets,” might have interesting and important revelations. The other part of our difficulty may lie in not having much in the way of training or teaching on how to have these conversations. Not knowing some appropriate method, we may feel inordinate fear or hesitation to having these sorts of dialogues.
The second major benefit I found from having spiritual direction, as it is called, was to be directed. The way I know the scriptures is different from the way that he knows them. Of course he’s trained to do this stuff and has been through a formal and rigorous theological education but that’s not really what I’m referring to. The scriptures that have the most interest to me, that I know well, and the sorts of interpretations I’ve put on them are different than those of my director. So, when he hears about my meditations and assigns me passages, he is doing it from his background and experience. Because it is different from mine it offers me a new perspective on the issues at hand, or his suggested prayers and meditation offer me a new perspective on old scriptures. I found this to be valuable as well.
Now, some may wonder about the Jesuit aspect of this whole experience. Now because of my knowledge of St. Ignatius, the Exercises, the way that it seems Jesuits seem to have a certain thing for schools, education, and the sciences, as well as an evangelical function I have felt a certain kinship or relationship with them. To some degree I wondered if this trip might not further tempt me with the idea that I had played with a little of joining their order. Somewhat to my surprise it did exactly the opposite. Being surrounded by these men, who had so dedicated their lives to the service of God as they understood it, I realized that I could never do it. On the grounds there is a cemetery for Jesuit fathers that they suggest walking through as a sort of meditation where one can contemplate the number of people who have served as witnesses of Christ. However, this is not at all how it felt for me. The identical grave markers in perfect rows gave me a sense of extreme loneliness. These were all men whose lines had ended. They were not with their ancestors, they had no descendants. It was quite sad. As I saw them around the center and overheard them talking in the dining hall I had much the same impression: theirs was in many ways a life of loneliness, grandfathers with no grandchildren.
Now as for the content of my meditations… let us say that I feel the experience was a good one. I learned new things and sort of relearned things I’d forgotten. It has also been interesting spending these last few days in the wake of the retreat because I see with greater clarity the meanings of the things I derived from my meditations and by and large what I have to do about them. I found a lot of my vulnerability exposed to myself and certain of my strengths, things I depend on daily but don’t give much thought to. A greater appreciation of these things and a desire to grow in strengths by allowing myself to experience vulnerability may be a fruit of this experience.
The center (http://www.campioncenter.org/index.htm) is a rather large building and is currently used primarily as a residence for aging or hospitalized Jesuits. When it was originally built it was a school for training novices to become Jesuit priests. It has a nice big chapel with a dome and a half dome in the middle front of the building. The grounds are quite large and are used by retreatants for meditative nature walks.
When I arrived the director’s secretary, a woman I had talked with trying to get set up with this retreat, took me up to my room. It was one of the old dorm rooms of the Jesuit school. Eventually I met my director Fr. Mattaliano and he scheduled to meet with me each morning at 10 am. Our morning meetings consisted of him asking how my meditations and prayers of the previous day went and me telling him as I felt it appropriate or useful to do so. We would then discuss the potential meanings and importance of the things I observed in my own thoughts and feelings. Then he would sort of assign me passages of scripture to read and a direction for meditating on them. He would also direct me to pray for what he called a grace, which in Mormonism we might call a spiritual gift. An example of the type of grace he would suggest praying for might be a deeper understanding of some aspect of God’s love in a certain context. He would of specify the aspect and context. Then I would try to do it and we would talk about it again.
I found this interesting and useful for a couple of reasons. First, we discussed things in my spiritual experience that I very seldom have talked about with other people. It was sort of like having someone else there to listen to my thoughts and reflect them back at me in ways that helped me to see what was going on with a bit more clarity than I could have accomplished on my own. In the Zen temple this is not something we got much chance to do as discussing things experienced in meditation was pretty discouraged. Why this is the case has something to do with sacredness but, I think there is more to it than I understand. I have experienced some difficulties in having discussions like this with people who are LDS too, I think particularly of my mission but at other times as well. Part of this I think has to do with a strange sort of cultural corruption of our faith where people are afraid to believe in taking instruction from the Holy Ghost. It’s sort of like a denial that we as common random individuals, “non-prophets,” might have interesting and important revelations. The other part of our difficulty may lie in not having much in the way of training or teaching on how to have these conversations. Not knowing some appropriate method, we may feel inordinate fear or hesitation to having these sorts of dialogues.
The second major benefit I found from having spiritual direction, as it is called, was to be directed. The way I know the scriptures is different from the way that he knows them. Of course he’s trained to do this stuff and has been through a formal and rigorous theological education but that’s not really what I’m referring to. The scriptures that have the most interest to me, that I know well, and the sorts of interpretations I’ve put on them are different than those of my director. So, when he hears about my meditations and assigns me passages, he is doing it from his background and experience. Because it is different from mine it offers me a new perspective on the issues at hand, or his suggested prayers and meditation offer me a new perspective on old scriptures. I found this to be valuable as well.
Now, some may wonder about the Jesuit aspect of this whole experience. Now because of my knowledge of St. Ignatius, the Exercises, the way that it seems Jesuits seem to have a certain thing for schools, education, and the sciences, as well as an evangelical function I have felt a certain kinship or relationship with them. To some degree I wondered if this trip might not further tempt me with the idea that I had played with a little of joining their order. Somewhat to my surprise it did exactly the opposite. Being surrounded by these men, who had so dedicated their lives to the service of God as they understood it, I realized that I could never do it. On the grounds there is a cemetery for Jesuit fathers that they suggest walking through as a sort of meditation where one can contemplate the number of people who have served as witnesses of Christ. However, this is not at all how it felt for me. The identical grave markers in perfect rows gave me a sense of extreme loneliness. These were all men whose lines had ended. They were not with their ancestors, they had no descendants. It was quite sad. As I saw them around the center and overheard them talking in the dining hall I had much the same impression: theirs was in many ways a life of loneliness, grandfathers with no grandchildren.
Now as for the content of my meditations… let us say that I feel the experience was a good one. I learned new things and sort of relearned things I’d forgotten. It has also been interesting spending these last few days in the wake of the retreat because I see with greater clarity the meanings of the things I derived from my meditations and by and large what I have to do about them. I found a lot of my vulnerability exposed to myself and certain of my strengths, things I depend on daily but don’t give much thought to. A greater appreciation of these things and a desire to grow in strengths by allowing myself to experience vulnerability may be a fruit of this experience.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Cashew Tree
So, it has been over a year since I first got the idea to try and do this and at long last I have had some success. Below is a cashew tree seedling, I sprouted in my room. I'm excited enough that I'm posting this before I talk about my retreat. Normally I'm opposed to naming inanimate things but in this case I'm going to make an exception so, I'm offering anyone with ideas a chance to discuss names for a cashew tree.
Though, I've discussed this with some people I should explain part of the reason I decided to try to grow a cashew tree. First is the obvious: I like cashews. Second: When I first read about doing it, I thought it to be a rather unique, interesting, and cool thing to try. Third: I found out that the cashew tree grows a fruit sometimes called a cashew apple that you can never buy in stores because when it is ripe it is too delicate to withstand any packaging or shipping. You have to have the tree to eat this forbidden fruit.
When I tried this before it failed for a couple of reasons. First New England isn't all that terribly sunny in the summer compared to Utah. My mistaken assumption. Also, I think I may have overwatered them. Apparently these guys like the desert. So, I think I planted 7 or so seeds then and got nothing. This time around I modified a sort of cabinet so that it is covered with reflective insulation on the inside and rigged a fluorescent coil light that comes encased in a plastic device that alters the light spectrum that's emitted to imitate natural light. I planted the seeds in some little contraptions designed to water the plant without human attention (important considering my job) with lots of food and a special chemical called gibberellic acid that stimulates seed germination and stem growth. I rigged the whole thing with a timer so that the seeds (and now plant) get 13 hours of sunlight a day. And.... voila. If you look closely at the picture you can see the two cashew-shaped cotyledons.
It's supposed to be a year or so before it starts to produce fruit.
Though, I've discussed this with some people I should explain part of the reason I decided to try to grow a cashew tree. First is the obvious: I like cashews. Second: When I first read about doing it, I thought it to be a rather unique, interesting, and cool thing to try. Third: I found out that the cashew tree grows a fruit sometimes called a cashew apple that you can never buy in stores because when it is ripe it is too delicate to withstand any packaging or shipping. You have to have the tree to eat this forbidden fruit.
When I tried this before it failed for a couple of reasons. First New England isn't all that terribly sunny in the summer compared to Utah. My mistaken assumption. Also, I think I may have overwatered them. Apparently these guys like the desert. So, I think I planted 7 or so seeds then and got nothing. This time around I modified a sort of cabinet so that it is covered with reflective insulation on the inside and rigged a fluorescent coil light that comes encased in a plastic device that alters the light spectrum that's emitted to imitate natural light. I planted the seeds in some little contraptions designed to water the plant without human attention (important considering my job) with lots of food and a special chemical called gibberellic acid that stimulates seed germination and stem growth. I rigged the whole thing with a timer so that the seeds (and now plant) get 13 hours of sunlight a day. And.... voila. If you look closely at the picture you can see the two cashew-shaped cotyledons.
It's supposed to be a year or so before it starts to produce fruit.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Before the Retreat
So, today is kind of a special day for me. I'm going on my vacation in a couple of hours. I need to get a shower and pack a couple more things. But then it will be done. I'm going on a meditation retreat to a little Jesuit center near here. I will be spending hopefully 8 days engaged in religiously oriented meditation under the direction of a Jesuit priest. He is the director of the center that provides such retreats and after talking with me on the phone he decided to direct my retreat personally. I'm not sure exactly why but, I think it may be that I'm a confusing and unusual case.
When I tell people about this vacation I tend to get one of two responses. Either A) "You're a freak. Why would you ever want to waste your time doing something like that?" This is a response that is pretty typical at work. Or B) "That sounds pretty cool. I think it's really great that you are the kind of person that could both want and actually follow through and do something like that. " I have my suspicions that those in group B are polite members of group A but... oh well. I have been wanting to go on such a retreat for several years, ever since I studied the founder of the Jesuit order or Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and his Spiritual Exercises. The very concept of a spiritual excercise intrigued me, and I look forward to giving this a try.
So anyway, I'm hoping to have a valuable learning experience and will be sure to post my reflections when I return.
When I tell people about this vacation I tend to get one of two responses. Either A) "You're a freak. Why would you ever want to waste your time doing something like that?" This is a response that is pretty typical at work. Or B) "That sounds pretty cool. I think it's really great that you are the kind of person that could both want and actually follow through and do something like that. " I have my suspicions that those in group B are polite members of group A but... oh well. I have been wanting to go on such a retreat for several years, ever since I studied the founder of the Jesuit order or Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and his Spiritual Exercises. The very concept of a spiritual excercise intrigued me, and I look forward to giving this a try.
So anyway, I'm hoping to have a valuable learning experience and will be sure to post my reflections when I return.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Answer for Surly Temple
Why am I opposed to a law which requires kids to stay in school to the age of 18? There are many reasons and so far I’ve not had quite the chance I desire to articulate them in a way that I want to send on to relevant legislative individuals. And even now I’m not sure how I ought to articulate them all. A lot of it has to do with my reasons for thinking that our system is evil and bad in the first place. It follows that I wouldn’t want to require anyone to spend up to two more years undergoing this sort of education than they might otherwise.
A major piece of my opposition is rooted in a belief in good old-fashioned freedom and self-determination. As it is now, a 16-year-old student may with the permission of parents withdraw from school. Students may do this for many different reasons but, one way or another the students and parents make a determination that schooling is not consistent with the said student’s life goals and prefer to do something else with these years. What they do, as long as it is legal is up to them. It could be home-schooling. It could be entering the workforce. It could be any number of things but ultimately it is the exercise on the part of the individual families to pursue happiness for themselves. To pass this not only violates this right, it insults all parents and students in the state by claiming that they are not competent enough to figure out what to do with their own lives.
The case of one of my students always comes to mind when I think about this issue. He had dropped out of school before entering our program. He had some very serious behavioral problems that made it near impossible for him to function in a classroom. Forced to take school, as it was part of our program, he experienced limited success and was frequently a deficit for his influence on other students. In a traditional school, in a traditional classroom it would have been that much worse. Required to stay in school by the law he would be the sort of person to bring drugs and weapons onto school campuses. That is assuming he would even bother going to school at all. Because he is required to go to school, getting a job would be out of the question because any employers would be complicit in his truancy. This means a kid with no self-control and a great deal of free time on his hands.
Part of the assumption posed by this legislation is that it is possible to somehow force a kid to learn stuff. This line of thinking annoys me a great deal. Learning is voluntary and a student who is not motivated becomes both a wasted investment and an impediment to the education of others around him. When you have a kid that has been to school (as all have) and has had little success and a lot of frustration you can expect that he will develop a certain amount of resentment towards the society that is doing this to him. If you take away his last recourse to choose another path for himself and criminalize his potential means for finding satisfaction you have galvanized this resentment and have significantly increased his capacity for deviant, even criminal behavior.
Now, it has been suggested that there ought to be a place in the school system for such kids, like mechanic school, or something. I agree that there ought to be and if more of such choices were available I would be less aggrieved by this bill. The problem is that there are very few, and those that do exist are very selective of their students. Boys like mine (those I might suggest need it the most) tend not to be able to get into such programs because they refuse to enroll kids with a history of truancy, drug abuse, criminal behavior, etc. Now the law in question provides funding for investigating the possibility of increasing the numbers of internships, school-to-work programs, and possibly even increasing the availability of technical high schools. The problem is that it imposes the requirements before the investigation of these sorts of programs is finished. Note that it is the investigation. We aren’t even close to talking about actually increasing the range of services provided. We are merely talking about talking about increasing the services. I believe the saying goes “putting the cart before the horse” or something like that.
Anyway, these are few bits and pieces, odds and ends for reasons I am opposed to this legislation. I am about to read a book that proposes an hypothesis that I’m interested in because I suspect that if it is not on the right track it might represent a perspective in this discussion that doesn’t get much voice. It’s called “The Case Against Adolescence.” The primary thesis is that the social roles of teenagers has been infantilized through history. This means that the competence of adolescents is being under-estimated and that they have not been given the sort of responsibility that both satisfies their changing psychological needs and conditions them to perform as adults. I suspect there is a certain amount of truth in this but I’m not sure how much or what it would ultimately mean in the end. I’m sure that it would not support legislation that only extend this infantilization. However, I don’t know for sure yet and maybe I’ll comment on it after I’ve studied it more.
A major piece of my opposition is rooted in a belief in good old-fashioned freedom and self-determination. As it is now, a 16-year-old student may with the permission of parents withdraw from school. Students may do this for many different reasons but, one way or another the students and parents make a determination that schooling is not consistent with the said student’s life goals and prefer to do something else with these years. What they do, as long as it is legal is up to them. It could be home-schooling. It could be entering the workforce. It could be any number of things but ultimately it is the exercise on the part of the individual families to pursue happiness for themselves. To pass this not only violates this right, it insults all parents and students in the state by claiming that they are not competent enough to figure out what to do with their own lives.
The case of one of my students always comes to mind when I think about this issue. He had dropped out of school before entering our program. He had some very serious behavioral problems that made it near impossible for him to function in a classroom. Forced to take school, as it was part of our program, he experienced limited success and was frequently a deficit for his influence on other students. In a traditional school, in a traditional classroom it would have been that much worse. Required to stay in school by the law he would be the sort of person to bring drugs and weapons onto school campuses. That is assuming he would even bother going to school at all. Because he is required to go to school, getting a job would be out of the question because any employers would be complicit in his truancy. This means a kid with no self-control and a great deal of free time on his hands.
Part of the assumption posed by this legislation is that it is possible to somehow force a kid to learn stuff. This line of thinking annoys me a great deal. Learning is voluntary and a student who is not motivated becomes both a wasted investment and an impediment to the education of others around him. When you have a kid that has been to school (as all have) and has had little success and a lot of frustration you can expect that he will develop a certain amount of resentment towards the society that is doing this to him. If you take away his last recourse to choose another path for himself and criminalize his potential means for finding satisfaction you have galvanized this resentment and have significantly increased his capacity for deviant, even criminal behavior.
Now, it has been suggested that there ought to be a place in the school system for such kids, like mechanic school, or something. I agree that there ought to be and if more of such choices were available I would be less aggrieved by this bill. The problem is that there are very few, and those that do exist are very selective of their students. Boys like mine (those I might suggest need it the most) tend not to be able to get into such programs because they refuse to enroll kids with a history of truancy, drug abuse, criminal behavior, etc. Now the law in question provides funding for investigating the possibility of increasing the numbers of internships, school-to-work programs, and possibly even increasing the availability of technical high schools. The problem is that it imposes the requirements before the investigation of these sorts of programs is finished. Note that it is the investigation. We aren’t even close to talking about actually increasing the range of services provided. We are merely talking about talking about increasing the services. I believe the saying goes “putting the cart before the horse” or something like that.
Anyway, these are few bits and pieces, odds and ends for reasons I am opposed to this legislation. I am about to read a book that proposes an hypothesis that I’m interested in because I suspect that if it is not on the right track it might represent a perspective in this discussion that doesn’t get much voice. It’s called “The Case Against Adolescence.” The primary thesis is that the social roles of teenagers has been infantilized through history. This means that the competence of adolescents is being under-estimated and that they have not been given the sort of responsibility that both satisfies their changing psychological needs and conditions them to perform as adults. I suspect there is a certain amount of truth in this but I’m not sure how much or what it would ultimately mean in the end. I’m sure that it would not support legislation that only extend this infantilization. However, I don’t know for sure yet and maybe I’ll comment on it after I’ve studied it more.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Call for Reviewers
In this state there is a bill that has been proposed to require students to attend school till the age of 18. This means that students will not be able to legally drop out at 16 or 17 anymore. I don't know if anyone who reads here will agree with me but I'm pretty opposed to this policy. Anyway, I'm trying to write a letter to the relevant legislators etc. to express the opinion that it shouldn't happen. I'm a little emotional about this issue and I cannot guarantee the quality of my writing. I'm going to have to come back to it but, if anyone is willing to volunteer I would like to e-mail a copy and get some comments before I send it out. Just post here or e-mail me if you are willing or interested. Thanks.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Some recent student artwork
I think this piece conveys the free-thinking and innovation of current high school math students. Notice the artist's use of color in the flames constrasting the black and white in which the math book and teacher are depicted.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
False Curriculum Reform
The time has come for my latest rant on education. It has been observed so many times (I’m thinking primarily since the ‘80s) that there is some kind of need for us to improve something about the way we teach math and science in this country. Professors have been complaining about the skills students come to college with in recent years. A lot of testing has been done comparing our students to those in other countries showing that as a nation we have certain deficiencies. A lot of people in the schooling process (i.e. students, parents, and teachers) observe that low relevance in traditional and mandated curricula contributes to student apathy resulting in poor learning performance.
In order to respond to this lots of little groups have formed to produce curricula intended to be innovative, and reform oriented. These groups tend to be composed of university professors, researchers, educational administrators and others I couldn’t identify who often have three or four motivated charismatic individuals with the “brilliant idea” for making kids in public school learn the things that they want them to know when they get to college. Often they are people who’ve gotten some kind of government grant to do the job and the materials they produce are supposed to be made available to the public in a non-profit sort of way.
In the last few years I’ve looked at a lot of these sorts of materials and programs. I happen to be reviewing one for potential use in my school right now. The lot of them tend to be terribly rife with a certain set of problems that make them pretty much worthless.
The first and most obvious problem for anyone to notice is the production values of the curriculum materials. They tend to be paper backed at best and are often bound in that cheep nasty spiral binding you can get done at the po-dunk copy shop down the street. They are sometimes obviously printed from type-written material or your typical word processing software fonts and formatting. The black and white graphics are always blatantly the cartoons of an untrained artist or cheesy awkward computer clip art thingies. It’s the kind of thing you put in front of a kid and have already lost them because they can’t take this “fake” school work seriously.
Another problem that comes up pretty consistently has to do with the choice of content. For some reason almost all professors in the sciences think that kids in high school need to know about optical illusions. Why? Is it because they think that the illusions are engaging and will get kids interested? One thing it certainly doesn’t do is lead into any relevant topic that kids need to know in order to pass state-wide tests for graduation. It’s also too light-weight and obvious (having already been used several times in the elementary grades) to make it useful information when preparing high school kids for college. Dumb, dumb, dumb. It’s a piece of evidence for my “brilliant idea” theory of educational reform. (Maybe some day I’ll write a book about this theory.) If it isn’t the optical illusions it’s something else of similar caliber and relevance with some silly “high interest” hook: breaking rocks, being blind-folded and smelling grass, "imagine you were an alien from another planet", etc.
The thing that I find bothers me most though is something I think of as entrenchment. A lot of theory in educational reform suggests that students should be engaged in learning activities that are highly authentic. That is to say that students should be learning how to do real things in the real world. Almost all of these innovative curricula projects present themselves as being highly authentic and having a great deal of relevance. It kind of makes me sad to sense that these authors have a correct spirit in trying to produce this sort of learning material. The problem is they do not have the right kinds of heads and what they produce is horridly contrived and anything but authentic. For example one math book I looked at had a lot of great activities that kids could learn from. I thought several of the activities were interesting and engaging and I think they might have been usable. The problem is that all of the materials were put together in a way that stripped them from their authenticity because the authors were so entrenched in thinking about the problems in terms of “school.” For example one of the lessons involved students finding out something about the cost of bread in local supermarkets. But instead of contextualizing the exercise in market research, or humanitarian aid, or making a personal grocery budget the context for the project was: “Imagine your teacher asked you to find out how much bread costs…..” Dumb, dumb, dumb.
A curriculum I’m looking at right now is for teaching philosophy in middle school and high school. The way it is supposed to function is the students read a short novel where the characters are kids that encounter philosophical issues in their real lives. The chapters of the novel are then supposed to be used to engage students in philosophical discussion. The problem is the same. The story in the book is all about kids sitting around in school having philosophical discussions. Almost never do the issues come up in naturalized living contexts. Furthermore the characters are totally unrealistic and talk more like college professors trying to teach little kids about philosophy than like little kids trying to understand life and the world around them. It is yet another example of the “brilliant idea” and a curriculum that has the right spirit but the wrong head.
In order to respond to this lots of little groups have formed to produce curricula intended to be innovative, and reform oriented. These groups tend to be composed of university professors, researchers, educational administrators and others I couldn’t identify who often have three or four motivated charismatic individuals with the “brilliant idea” for making kids in public school learn the things that they want them to know when they get to college. Often they are people who’ve gotten some kind of government grant to do the job and the materials they produce are supposed to be made available to the public in a non-profit sort of way.
In the last few years I’ve looked at a lot of these sorts of materials and programs. I happen to be reviewing one for potential use in my school right now. The lot of them tend to be terribly rife with a certain set of problems that make them pretty much worthless.
The first and most obvious problem for anyone to notice is the production values of the curriculum materials. They tend to be paper backed at best and are often bound in that cheep nasty spiral binding you can get done at the po-dunk copy shop down the street. They are sometimes obviously printed from type-written material or your typical word processing software fonts and formatting. The black and white graphics are always blatantly the cartoons of an untrained artist or cheesy awkward computer clip art thingies. It’s the kind of thing you put in front of a kid and have already lost them because they can’t take this “fake” school work seriously.
Another problem that comes up pretty consistently has to do with the choice of content. For some reason almost all professors in the sciences think that kids in high school need to know about optical illusions. Why? Is it because they think that the illusions are engaging and will get kids interested? One thing it certainly doesn’t do is lead into any relevant topic that kids need to know in order to pass state-wide tests for graduation. It’s also too light-weight and obvious (having already been used several times in the elementary grades) to make it useful information when preparing high school kids for college. Dumb, dumb, dumb. It’s a piece of evidence for my “brilliant idea” theory of educational reform. (Maybe some day I’ll write a book about this theory.) If it isn’t the optical illusions it’s something else of similar caliber and relevance with some silly “high interest” hook: breaking rocks, being blind-folded and smelling grass, "imagine you were an alien from another planet", etc.
The thing that I find bothers me most though is something I think of as entrenchment. A lot of theory in educational reform suggests that students should be engaged in learning activities that are highly authentic. That is to say that students should be learning how to do real things in the real world. Almost all of these innovative curricula projects present themselves as being highly authentic and having a great deal of relevance. It kind of makes me sad to sense that these authors have a correct spirit in trying to produce this sort of learning material. The problem is they do not have the right kinds of heads and what they produce is horridly contrived and anything but authentic. For example one math book I looked at had a lot of great activities that kids could learn from. I thought several of the activities were interesting and engaging and I think they might have been usable. The problem is that all of the materials were put together in a way that stripped them from their authenticity because the authors were so entrenched in thinking about the problems in terms of “school.” For example one of the lessons involved students finding out something about the cost of bread in local supermarkets. But instead of contextualizing the exercise in market research, or humanitarian aid, or making a personal grocery budget the context for the project was: “Imagine your teacher asked you to find out how much bread costs…..” Dumb, dumb, dumb.
A curriculum I’m looking at right now is for teaching philosophy in middle school and high school. The way it is supposed to function is the students read a short novel where the characters are kids that encounter philosophical issues in their real lives. The chapters of the novel are then supposed to be used to engage students in philosophical discussion. The problem is the same. The story in the book is all about kids sitting around in school having philosophical discussions. Almost never do the issues come up in naturalized living contexts. Furthermore the characters are totally unrealistic and talk more like college professors trying to teach little kids about philosophy than like little kids trying to understand life and the world around them. It is yet another example of the “brilliant idea” and a curriculum that has the right spirit but the wrong head.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
The Place v 3.0
Well I've been here for a while already so, it seems kind of late to be talking about this now but I suppose I can do so anyway. I suppose I did it without telling a lot of people what was up. I decided to move out of Shim Gwang Sa for a lot of reasons, many of which I will not get into. Suffice it to say that I started to realize that living as a monk was not exactly creating the type of social life I needed or wanted. So, I got a place that is now technically outside of the town of Boston but allows me to get downtown considerably faster. The area is called Davis Square and it's on the edge of Somerville near the Tufts University campus.
The area is pretty good for my culinary obsessions. There are at least three Indian restaurants within walking distance. One is literally around the corner. Add to that a choice barbecue joint, and a couple of Tibetan and Thai places and you can start to get an idea how much trouble I'm in. This is not all however. There's a butcher, a farmers' market, a kitchen supply store, and an Indian grocer (which happens to be closer than the Indian restaurant) as well.
Kind of the sad thing is that in conjunction with my failure to post I've not had much chance for taking advantage of the benefits all of this provides. It has only been this week that I've done any cooking and it has of course been a lot of Indian food and a key lime pie. (I hope there is at least a little laughing and a little cringing when I say that.) I still have a bit to do to get used to my kitchen. That's something that just seems to be the norm every time I move. Every cabinet, every stove, every space seems to have a different feel to it and requires some adjusting.
This morning was kind of exciting. I was baking the pie rather early hoping to have it done before I had to leave for work this morning. Well, the smoke alarm went off. It seems that the oven needs some cleaning or something. Anyway, I was a little worried because I thought I had probably pissed somebody off. Fortunately nobody noticed. Lucked out.
I'm still studying the sword. In fact I just learned my 20th form a couple days ago. With the assistance of a friend I found a nice little spot nearby where I can practice. It's on this abandoned railroad behind an abandoned warehouse. It's this big trashed up place filled with pigeons and I train next to these to big rusty water tanks next to an overpass. It's pretty secluded which is nice so I don't get harrassed by people going by. But I enjoy the environment itself because it kind of makes me feel like a martial artist in a movie. You know the one: where the hero is training in secret to sharpen up his skills for when he's going to break into the bad guy's compound and rescue his girlfriend, little brother, and the sacred artifact that gives him magical martial arts powers.
The sad thing is that somehow I seem to have failed in some way to achieve one of my major goals of moving. I thought I'd have more free time and opportunity for socializing. This is overall I suppose technically true. But at the same time I find myself working for the school more with my time off which makes me feel like I'm not any better off. Ah well. What can I do?
The area is pretty good for my culinary obsessions. There are at least three Indian restaurants within walking distance. One is literally around the corner. Add to that a choice barbecue joint, and a couple of Tibetan and Thai places and you can start to get an idea how much trouble I'm in. This is not all however. There's a butcher, a farmers' market, a kitchen supply store, and an Indian grocer (which happens to be closer than the Indian restaurant) as well.
Kind of the sad thing is that in conjunction with my failure to post I've not had much chance for taking advantage of the benefits all of this provides. It has only been this week that I've done any cooking and it has of course been a lot of Indian food and a key lime pie. (I hope there is at least a little laughing and a little cringing when I say that.) I still have a bit to do to get used to my kitchen. That's something that just seems to be the norm every time I move. Every cabinet, every stove, every space seems to have a different feel to it and requires some adjusting.
This morning was kind of exciting. I was baking the pie rather early hoping to have it done before I had to leave for work this morning. Well, the smoke alarm went off. It seems that the oven needs some cleaning or something. Anyway, I was a little worried because I thought I had probably pissed somebody off. Fortunately nobody noticed. Lucked out.
I'm still studying the sword. In fact I just learned my 20th form a couple days ago. With the assistance of a friend I found a nice little spot nearby where I can practice. It's on this abandoned railroad behind an abandoned warehouse. It's this big trashed up place filled with pigeons and I train next to these to big rusty water tanks next to an overpass. It's pretty secluded which is nice so I don't get harrassed by people going by. But I enjoy the environment itself because it kind of makes me feel like a martial artist in a movie. You know the one: where the hero is training in secret to sharpen up his skills for when he's going to break into the bad guy's compound and rescue his girlfriend, little brother, and the sacred artifact that gives him magical martial arts powers.
The sad thing is that somehow I seem to have failed in some way to achieve one of my major goals of moving. I thought I'd have more free time and opportunity for socializing. This is overall I suppose technically true. But at the same time I find myself working for the school more with my time off which makes me feel like I'm not any better off. Ah well. What can I do?
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