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Caring and teaching: only one is difficult

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I recently saw “Freedom Writers“. The reason I hadn’t watched it before then, apart from it’s general unavailability in Japan, was Dan Meyer’s review of it, wow! 3 years ago. Thanks to Google Search, it took me less than a minute to find Dan’s review. After watching the movie, I felt Dan nailed it, especially this paragraph:

I don’t mean to set up this false dichotomy between teaching and caring. Both happen in the same practice; both are essential. But teachers — or rather, Teachers, by which I mean my union proper, the blogosphere in general, and my co-workers in particular — have emphasized caring over teaching. Teachers continuously fail to differentiate us from well-educated au pairs, as evidenced and perpetuated by Freedom Writers’ very existence.Again: teaching and caring (passion, if you want) are inextricably linked.

But: only one of them is difficult.

The reason I watched Freedom Writers was because I’d brought the video of Stand and Deliver to a friend’s house to watch, and as the opening scenes rolled he remembered he’s already seen it. So then we flipped thru his hard-drive to see what else he had that might interest us, and he had Freedom Writers and recommended it. The same Google Search on Dan’s site pulled up this comment of Dan’s about Stand and Deliver, which made me laugh (the comment, not the movie):

Stand and Deliver? Are you people kidding me? That was 1988. Pretty sure I wasn’t even born then.

Okay, so I saw it a long time ago, so long I didn’t feel comfortable introducing it into the post proper. All I remember, in fact, is Edward James Olmos collapsing and falling down a flight of stairs. Which kinda strikes me as par for the teaching movie course.

I mean, Jaime Escalante did some fantastic stuff, no doubt, but we’re talking about creativity and perserverance, primarily, neither of which are very cinematic attributes.

So you overdramatize. Instead of some rowdy bangers, you have the freaking teen slum lord of South Central sitting in the back row. Instead of an intrusive, useless administration you have completely antagonistic dictators. Instead of a strained, joyless family life, you have husband and wife screaming at each, throwing perishable items against walls, and divorcing, in the case of Freedom Writers.

And you have Edward James Olmos falling down a flight of stairs.

None of this is to suggest these tragedies don’t afflict teachers, that they aren’t real, but to see all of them in the same movie, as is par for the teaching movie course, beggars belief.

I think the book has more to teach about teaching and dealing with people than the movie, which tries to pack everything in, and leaves out such important things like Principal Gradillas.

Stand and Deliver? Are you people kidding me? That was 1988. Pretty sure I wasn’t even born then.

Okay, so I saw it a long time ago, so long I didn’t feel comfortable introducing it into the post proper. All I remember, in fact, is Edward James Olmos collapsing and falling down a flight of stairs. Which kinda strikes me as par for the teaching movie course.

I mean, Jaime Escalante did some fantastic stuff, no doubt, but we’re talking about creativity and perserverance, primarily, neither of which are very cinematic attributes.

So you overdramatize. Instead of some rowdy bangers, you have the freaking teen slum lord of South Central sitting in the back row. Instead of an intrusive, useless administration you have completely antagonistic dictators. Instead of a strained, joyless family life, you have husband and wife screaming at each, throwing perishable items against walls, and divorcing, in the case of Freedom Writers.

And you have Edward James Olmos falling down a flight of stairs.

None of this is to suggest these tragedies don’t afflict teachers, that they aren’t real, but to see all of them in the same movie, as is par for the teaching movie course, beggars belief.

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school, teaching, UK

Do people have a right to education?

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On the BBC news website is an article reviewing the British educational scene 2000-2009. At the top is a photo of a banner which reads in part “everyone has a right to education“. This idea seems to have entered common consciousness: it is now almost part of what I would call the dominant ideology. Where did this idea come from? Is it correct?

Ayn Rand wrote an instructive essay on this subject, Man’s Rights. It is an appendix to her book Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal. In it she points out that, to say someone has a right TO something implies that someone else has the duty or obligation to provide it.

She begins by defining “rights”:

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights… the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.

When this definition is not clearly understood (it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object), then statements like that on the banner in the photo are inevitable.

Rand points out that, if someone has a right to something, that means someone, somewhere has to provide it. “Have to” means whether they want to or not, i.e. they will be coerced. However, have to contradicts the basic human right, the freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice.

She further points out that the basic human rights are not granted by governments or monarchs; they arise from the fact that man is a rational being. She then concludes that to force someone to provide a good or service for someone else is therefore to deprive that person of their basic rights, and therefore cannot be morally justified.

“The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.” (Atlas Shrugged)

To violate man’s rights means to compel him to act against his own judgment, or to expropriate his values. Basically, there is only one way to do it: by the use of physical force….

Jobs, food, clothing, recreation(!), homes, medical care, education, etc., do not grow in nature. These are man-made values—goods and services produced by men. Who is to provide them?

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as “the right to enslave.”

A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one’s own effort.

Observe, in this context, the intellectual precision of the Founding Fathers: they spoke of the right to the pursuit of happiness—not of the right to happiness. It means that a man has the right to take the actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy.

Whether you agree with Rand’s libertarianism or not is immaterial. In any discussion of rights, whether of the “moral” kind which Rand refers to, or the “economic” rights of FDR, it is important to have a clear grasp of the concepts involved. (It’s well worth reading the whole essay.)

(It is a mistake to think of Ayn Rand as representative of libertarian thinking: many present-day libertarians disagree with Rand on some points. To read two articles by someone who disagrees, click the links below to the articles by Stephen Kinsella.)

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book, education, educational philosophy, psychology, teaching

“Why don’t children like school?” and “How to teach critical thinking”

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Why Don’t Students Like School? – Because the mind is not designed for thinking. (pdf)

Don’t be put off by the ludicrous-sounding subtitle (what he means, as he explains later, is that thinking is hard work and we avoid it wherever possible, usually by relying on memory instead). It’s well worth reading. Willingham, professor of cognitive psychology, is not only knowledgeable in his field, he also writes clearly, without condescension or jargon.

He writes for a section in the Washington Post called The Answer Sheet, and has published a book called Why Don’t Students Like School? (The linked pdf file is an excerpt from the book).

The second article, Critical Thinking – Why is it so hard so teach? (PDF) –  is also by Willingham, and this article will be of interest to TPRS teachers. There are certain similarities between his suggestions for effective teaching of critical thinking, and Krashen’s theories of Second Language Acquisition. I’ll write about what TPRS teachers can learn from this article later.

The basic idea of Why Don’t Children Like School is that children don’t like school because they are required to think there, and human beings are not “designed to think”. Well, what Willingham means is two things:

  1. that thinking requires effort and humans prefer to avoid it unless there is no alternative (in particular we prefer to rely on memory),
  2. that, although humans find thinking difficult, they also enjoy it, particularly solving problems, but can only sustain it if there is sufficient satisfaction derived from the effort.

Working on problems that are at the right level of difficulty is rewarding , but working on problems that are too easy or too difficult is unpleasant…. The core idea presented in this article is that solving a problem gives people pleasure, but the problem must be easy enough to be solved yet difficult enough that it takes some mental effort.

Willingham points out three properties of thinking:

First, thinking is slow… Second, thinking is effortful… Third, thinking is uncertain.

Then, Willingham considers the implications for teachers:

What’s the solution? Give the student easier work? You could, of course, but of course you’d have to be careful not to make it so easy that the student would be bored. And anyway, wouldn’t it be better to boost the student’s ability a little bit? Instead of making the work, easier, is it possible to make thinking easier?

… what can teachers do to make school enjoyable for students? From a cognitive perspective, an important factor is whether a student consistently experiences the pleasurable rush of solving a problem. So, what can teachers do to ensure that each student gets that pleasure?

One suggestion he makes is to remember to ask or pose questions. The following paragraph will be interesting for TPRS teachers because a basic TPRS technique is asking questions and using the answers to build a story, or as TPRS teachers say, to ask a story.

One way to view schoolwork is as a series of answers. … Sometimes I think that we, as teachers, are so eager to get to the answers that we do not devote sufficient time to developing the question. But it’s the question that piques people’s interest. Being told an answer doesn’t do anything for you. When you plan a lesson, you start with the information you want students to know by its end. As a next step, consider what the key question for that lesson might be, and how you can frame that question so that it will be of the right level of difficulty to engage your students, and will respect your students’ cognitive limitations.

I was reminded of a difficulty I encounter while blogging, when I read the following:

There’s a final necessity for thinking: sufficient space in working memory. Thinking becomes increasingly difficult as working memory gets crowded.

How many open tags is the max I can handle?

For details, read the (pdf) article.

The second article, Critical Thinking (pdf), also has some points of interest for TPRS teachers. Willingham asks, “Can critical thinking actually be taught?” His conclusion, based on the results of various studies, is that critical thinking training programs are not as effective a was hoped (or as many people think). He then examines possible reasons for this. To explain, he uses the following concepts: surface structure or knowledge, and deep structure or knowledge, critical thinking as a skill, and metacognitive strategies.

First,

People who have sought to teach critical thinking have assumed that it is a skill, like riding a bicycle, and that, like other skills, once you learn it, you can apply it in any situation.  Research from cognitive science shows that thinking is not that sort of skills. The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought (that is, domain knowledge). Thus, if you remind a student to “look at an issue from multiple perspectives” often enough, he will learn that he ought to do so, but if he doesn’t know much about an issue, he can’t think about it from multiple perspectives. You can teach students maxims about how they ought to think, but without background knowledge and practice, theyprobably will not be able to implement the advice they memorize.

This has implications for TPRS teachers, as it sounds similar to Krashen’s theories about learning and acquisition. Krashen posits that learning, which he defines as conscious learning about the language, does not result in acquisition; in other words, learning rules of grammar, spelling or vocabulary does not necessarily transfer to actual competence. Krashen actually suggests that conscious learning is a waste of time, if one assumes that the goal is language acquisition, although he does admit there is a place for learning grammar, but only after students have acquired sufficient language.

Willingham then examines surface knowledge vs. deep knowledge. Willinghamwrites that when we read, we tend to take in the surface structure first, and not look more deeply. He provides two mathematical word-problems: although they are both about the same mathematical process – using the least common multiple – experiments show that people are more likely to think about the surface structures of the problems:

Earlier in the experiment, subjects had read four problems alongs with detailed explanations of how to solve each one… One of the four problems concerned the number of vegetables to buy for a garden [the other was about calculating the number in a high school marching band]… When a student reads a word problem, her mind interprets the problem in light of her prior knowledge… The difficulty is that the knowledge that seems relevant relates to the surface structure… The student is unlikely to … think of it in terms of its deep structure…. Thus, people fail to use the first problem to help them solve the second: In their minds, the first was about vegetables in a garden and the second was about rows of band marchers.

Willingham is showing that, first of all, we bring our background knowledge to bear on problems; that our background knowledge relates usually only to the surface structure of problems, not to their underlying deep structure hence we may often miss seeing the common factors and therefore the principles to apply to similar problems. He then examines how knowledge of how to solve a problem gets transferred to similar problems which have new or different surface structures.

He relates an experiment which gave the same math problems to groups of American and Chinese students. 75% of the American students solved the problem compared to 25 % of the Chinese students. It was surmised that the reason was cultural: the problem was similar to one faced by Hansel and Gretel in the Grimms’ fairy tale, which most of the American students knew whereas most of the Chinese students were unfamiliar with it. A second problem was given, this time based on a Chinese folk tale, and the percentage of solvers from each culture was reversed. Willingham continues:

It takes a good deal of practice with a problem type before students know it well enough to immediately recognize its deep structure, irrespective of the surface structure, as Americans did for the Hansel and Gretel problem… The deep structure of the problem is so well represented in their memory, that they immediately saw the structure when they read the problem.

Sounds like evidence for providing lots of cultural background information (including stories and fairy tales) in our language classes. It is also suggests, does it not, that the way to develop familiarity with the grammar of a language is not to teach the grammar directly, but rather to provide lots of comprehensible input: It takes a good deal of practice with a problem type before students know it well enough to immediately recognize its deep structure, irrespective of surface structure.

Willingham also takes a look at Critical Thinking Programs, and his conclusion based on the evidence, is that they take lots of time to implement – three years, with several hours of instruction … per week – and the benefits are modest (actually, he says that the studies that have been done have methodological problems, and only a small fraction of the have undergone peer review.)

Next, Willingham takes a look at metacognitive strategies. Perhaps we can help students learn by teaching them to look for deep structure?

Consider what would happen if I said to a student working on the band problem, “this one is similar to the garden problem.”… you can teach students maxims about how they ought to think… they are little chunks of knowledge… that students can learn and then use to steer their thoughts in more productive directions. Helping students become better at regulating their thoughts was one of the goals of the critical thinking programs that were popular 20 years ago… these programs were not very effective. Their modest benefit is likely due to teaching students to effectively use metacognitive strategies… Unfortunately, metacognitive strategies can only take you so far. Although they suggest what you ought to do, they don’t provide the knowledge necessary to implement the strategy. For example, when experimenters told subjects working on the band problem that it was similar to the garden problem, more subjects solved the problem… but most subjects, even when told what to do, weren’t able to do it.

Much has been written, and many studies done, about teaching language students metacognitive strategies (see Anita Wenden’s classic Learner Strategies for Learner Autonomy, for example, or any of the zillions of  “learning how to learn” books, etc). Although they seemed interesting and the idea is plausible, I could never overcome a deep suspicion that this was snake oil. Ha! Now I have proof.

Finally, Willingham concludes that scientific thinking cannot be taught in isolation, as a separate skill, like reading music. In fact, Willingham states categorically that critical thinking is not a skill, because it does not transfer in the way that skills do. In addition, the ability to think scientifically depends on scientific knowledge: background knowledge is necessary to engage in scientific thinking.

His conclusions:

First, critical thinking … is not a skill… Second, there are metacognitive strategies that, once learned, make critical thinking more likely. Third, the ability to think critically (to actually do what the metacognitive strategies call for) depends on domain knowledge and practice.

Here are two more articles by Willingham on a similar theme: Inflexible Knowledge: the first step to expertise and Students remember what they think about.

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classroom management, education, educational philosophy, teaching, UK

Needs

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Source: Fraser Institute
Image via Wikipedia

Here is a comment I posted to a discussion about Needs, a blog post at Scenes from the Battleground. I suggest you read the original Needs article first. It will hopefully make the following more intelligible.

Update: I have edited this slightly (tho it is still too long and wordy) after reflecting on a comment left by OldAndrew.

**************************

A most interesting and provocative post, with lots of frank-bordering-on-the-plain-rude responses in the comments. I shall try to enter into the spirit of things.

In your original article, you fail to make several, crucial, distinctions; which omissions weaken your argument, whereas inclusion would strengthen it.

1) You fail to distinguish personal needs from social ones; i.e. personal, private needs (such as for food, sleep, sex, etc) which are and should be met by the individual him/herself, on the one hand, and needs which can and should be met by others, e.g. the educational institutions, on the other.
You write, we have the problem of identifying what counts as a need and in particular which needs educational institutions have an obligation to meet. It is indeed difficult, so all the more reason to bear in mind the distinction between personal and non-personal needs. Failure to keep, or perhaps make, this distinction leads you to set up straw men, such as Are we really obliged to make all students happy and psychologically healthy? (“We” here presumably meaning schoolteachers.) Who is suggesting you are so obliged? However, students are people and need to be happy and psychologically healthy. It does not necessarily follow that schoolteachers are responsible for meeting this need. Presumably, you have heard people make this assertion. They are wrong, and need to have their faulty logic pointed out to them (but please see also the point below about the hierarchy of needs).

2) You fail to distinguish between needs and wants: (quoting P.S. Wilson) a young bully, for example, from his point of view may ‘need’ to find victims. Plainly this is a ‘need’ which, though identifiable, should not be met.
This is not a need. A bully may want to find victims, but a want is not a need. Although I am quoting Wilson, not you, nowhere in your post do you make this rather crucial distinction. That omission weakens your argument – “needs” implies some kind of obligation or necessity for someone to do something about it – because your opponents’ argument (that if something is a need, that implies a moral duty to meet it) is seriously weakened once this distinction is made plain.

3) I have discussed the three main explanations given as to why children are blameless for their behaviour.
The three you list are, in my experience, given as explanations for behaviour. An explanation for behaviour is not the same as an excuse for bad behaviour, nor is it a reason not to blame or not to punish. Folks who use these explanations as reasons why children (or adults) should not be blamed or punished for bad behaviour, are failing to make this crucial distinction and guilty of sloppy thinking. An explanation for behaviour (bad or not) does not imply blamelessness; the one does not logically follow from the other.
It seems to be a common human need to explain behaviour. This is not the same thing as explaining away behaviour. Why don’t you point out this distinction to your opponents and detractors? It would seriously weaken their argument, and strengthen yours.

4) You fail to show you are aware of the significance of Maslow’s Theory, A Hierarchy of Needs (the key word is “hierarchy”, it’s right there in the title; that’s a hint. Maslow (as I recall) stated that basic needs must be met first, before higher needs can be attended to. Your apparent ignorance of this key fact, combined with your failure to make the above 3 distinctions, leads you to make the hilarious statement, “Maslow has helpfully included sex as a basic need, a fact forgotten by those who would quote him in an educational context, as the obvious implication would involve turning schools into brothels.” Who is implying this? Only you! Only someone who fails to distinguish between private, personal needs (e.g., sex), and social ones, i.e. needs that should be met by, e.g., an educational institution, could make such a suggestion. Only someone who fails to distinguish clearly that a need does not imply a moral duty to fulfill it, could make such a ludicrous suggestion. In addition, only someone who fails to appreciate the significance of “hierarchy” in “hierarchy of needs”, and someone who fails to distinguish between an explanation for behaviour and an excuse for behaviour, could make such a statement. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is relevant to teachers, I would suggest, because they have the problem of identifying what counts as a need and in particular which needs educational institutions have an obligation to meet.

if it is not possible to identify what needs we should be meeting then we can’t possibly declare that needs haven’t been met. Identifying needs that an educational institution should meet is greatly helped by distinguishing between needs and wants, between personal, private needs and others, and between basic versus higher needs.

Finally, students are people and have emotional needs which must be met. One such need is for attention. For a baby, attention or lack of it means the difference between life and death, because a baby cannot feed itself. Some children learn that a sure-fire way to get attention is to do something naughty. This puts the adult, who is aware of this, in a dilemma when considering how to deal with the bad behaviour: paying attention to the behaviour merely re-inforces it, yet not paying attention to it may encourage the behaviour, a) because the student thinks they can get away with it, and b) because the person’s need for attention is still unsatisfied.

The knowledge that emotional needs are basic needs, and it can be useful to bear in mind that one key emotional need, particularly with young children (but not limited to them)  is attention. It helps satisfy the teacher’s/parent’s/adult’s need for explanation for behaviour. Explanation for behaviour is useful when deciding how to respond. But it does not excuse bad behaviour. (Did I already mention that?)

Now imagine we accepted the belief that meeting this need was not, a moral duty, or an act of charity, but a method of treating the underlying cause of poor behaviour. We would cease looking for the most famished child to feed first and start feeding the worst behaved.
A very good point. And your final paragraph is particularly powerful.

For the record, I agree with OldAndrew. People who fail to distinguish between needs and wants, who bundle human behaviour up into all-encompassing “needs”, then further simply assume (without justification or explanation) that some or all of these “needs” must be met (“because they’re needs!”) by the educational institution generally and by teachers in particular – such people are using sloppy thinking, faulty logic, and they should be exposed without mercy and as soon as possible, because their ideology is seriously damaging.

I don’t live in the UK so I have no idea how dominant the ideology is which OldAndrew is arguing against. Judging from his blog, it sounds like he (and a handful of other crazies) are the only dissenters. Is there a big debate going on about this? Or is he, in fact, a minority of one?

Suggested further reading: Go For It! by Dr. Irene Kassorla;
How To Talk so Kids Will Listen, and Listen so Kids will Talk, by Faber & Mazlish;
anything by Dr. Haim Ginott

By the way, I usually vet the related articles listed below by Zemanta. Not all of them are relevant, and of those that are, not all are interesting or well written. This one is particularly interesting.

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classroom management, education, educational philosophy, pedagogy, teaching

Facing The Future

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Facing The Future
Originally uploaded by duncmc


[Update: Comments have been closed.]

So, where to, now?

I tried direct instruction. It “worked” in that,
* students meekly did what they were told
* it gave students a feeling that they were in a “proper” class, taught by a teacher “in charge”
* it was easy to sort the sheep from the goats.

It didn’t work, in that,
* students were still not producing anything approaching higher order thinking (that’s a lot of -ings in one sentence!)
* they did as they were told, but there were few if no signs that they were joining the dots, making discoveries
* students were no more enthusiastic than in previous semesters
* there was little or no time for talking to students one-to-one, something that I found increased motivation and discouraged dropping out
* students made little or no use of the great array of resources that were available to them
* students remained in the “group” mode, i.e. restrained/suppressed individuality in favour of the group
* I still didn’t feel like I was making the best use of my skills, knowledge and experience.

This wasn’t what I wanted to be doing, at least not with these students.

My original problem was to identify and understand the various forces at work on my students and myself in the classroom: what determined our behaviour? Not the minutae, but the general attitudes and tendencies? And then, what to do about them?

I learned about educating the disenfranchised, how language and education are used by ruling elites to perpetuate the status quo. That seems to be the case, however, it did not find this explanation sufficient, nor did it provide me with enough tools to come up with practical “chalk-face” solutions (altho An Unquiet Pedagogy was very interesting and helpful).

I also investigated cultural and linguistic imperialism and critical pedagogies. Again, interesting, and made me aware of some important issues, but I felt there was more going on, and did not wish to take the time required to work out an entire critical pedagogical approach, which in terms of cultural imperialism was just as problematic (if not more so) than teaching autonomous language learning.

A further difficulty was that many of the above approaches required extensive dialogu and negotiations with students, all of which would have to be done in Japanese, which would require a great deal of work on my part. I do not have that kind of time for something which I was not sure would yield the kinds of results I was looking for.

Gatto wrote, “You teach who you are”, and in searching for ways to “beat the system”, he had gone back into his own childnood and found there gems that gave him valuable clues as to what to do.

Perhaps influenced by that, I stopped seeing my own private, personal life as distinct and separate from my work: a cross-fertilization began to take place. What was going on in my life, my career, my family, was perhaps similar to what was going on in my work.

One of the things going on at work was an increase in surveillance cameras. Another was a private initiative which I had started (a bookcase of second-hand English books) had been taken away without my permission, and I was told it was unacceptable to have unattended “rubbish” (that’s what my boss called it) in the hallways.

In a talk to the parents, a school administrator spoke of the rise in the number of students with low energy, little enthusiasm, lack of self-expression. Did he not pause to consider how actions, policies and organization by the institutions that these children have grown up in, might be contributing factors in this equation? What was even more ironic was that he himself was in poor health, probably a result of stress (he said) from his work. If his work does that to him, what does it do to the students? Apparently, this was not a question that anyone raised.

Generally, there has been a trend towards a less democratic work environment. Autonomy, anyone?

More recently, I’ve been reading and thinking about individualism and collectivism. I had thought of these as two cultural variables, two different ways of dealing with how humans can get along to create what they need to survive and thrive: different but equal. However, I no longer take such a benignly cultural-relative view, not since reading Hayek and watching The Fountainhead.

Their anti-collectivist philosophy seems to match Gatto’s: Gatto and Hayek warn that centrally planned, compulsory systems lead inevitably to a severe curtailment of personal freedom and that will lead to a nation of slaves, of uncritical, obedient automata (Hayek’s famous booklet is called The Road to Serfdom). Gatto adds that not only is liberty curtailed under compulsory education, but also the minds of children (and of everyone in the system) are dumbed down.

How is all this relevant to me in my classrooms? I am employed by an institution, and it behooves me to remember that that institution, like others, is intended to maintain the status quo and the elites who run the country and its systems. I should know that status quo and the systems, understand what they look like and how they operate, because I am, witting or unwitting, a tool of those systems.

Not only am I looking for a suitable, relevant approach, I will also need to be aware of what I my own values are, what I really want to do as a teacher, and then I will need to stop doing things which are harmful or contrary to what I really believe, things which I might have taken for granted or never thought about, like taking attendance, for instance.

“Rubbish! What could be the harm in taking attendance?”

Well, what is its purpose? To make sure students are where they are supposed to be. It’s part of the tracking mechanism of schools. It has become so ingrained in this society that a large majority of people equate attending a class with education, with learning (or perhaps, even more cynically, they equate “education” not with learning but with simply spending time in a classroom! It would not be easy to argue against such a position, given the reality in many schools); such that many will expect a passing grade simply on the basis that they have a good attendance record. Is this the kind of philosophy you are happy to promote? Because that is what you are doing when you take attendance.

Many (most?) schools in Japan will balk at allowing students to test out of a class, i.e. award them the credits on the basis of a proficiency test without requiring them to attend all the sessions of that class (a case where this would be merited might be, for instance, a returnee who is required to take Basic English but who can already speak English with a high degree of fluency). Chinese students at my university, for instance, have, since 2 years ago, been forbidden to register for Chinese language classes. There is a fundamental reluctance to allow someone to obtain credits or to graduate merely on the basis of merit, unless “merit” includes spending a minimum amount of time with your bum on the classroom seat. (I have written elsewhere about teachers being conned into playing the role of the cop in the classroom; at least at university level, I don’t think this is appropriate, unless the role of the university teacher is to make sure students are in class, in their seats, for the required number of hours.)

Students are given not only a minimum amount of credits they must take in a year, but also a maximum. At my university, the minimum is 48 credits per year, the maximum is 52! That tells you all you need to know: it ensures that no student can graduate in less than 4 years.

I started this entry with a question: Where to, now? I don’t have a definite answer yet, although I think I see the glimmer of a light ahead (the photo at the top of this entry expresses my feelings well). One thing I am investigating is the power of imagination. (As an example, click on the photo at the top of this entry to see a larger version; what do you feel, think, remember, as you look at this photo? Draw a sketch, write something, anything, that expresses what you feel. You just created something entirely new, and you did it autonomously; in fact, you could not have done it otherwise.)

Anyway, if I decide to write about it, it will be on a new blog. It looks like it will be fun, whatever I do. And this blog entry has gone on quite long enough.

Good night, and good luck.

classroom management, education, educational philosophy, pedagogy, teaching

Looking back (5)

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Where To Now?
Originally uploaded by Katelyn Gibson

Gatto and Holt made the most convincing arguments, and provided the most practical help.

Holt pointed out that children (people) learn most from what they themselves actually do, rather than from what teachers do (or don’t do): “Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.” (from Holt’s Wikipedia entry).

Both Gatto and Holt seemed to have come, independently, to the same conclusion (here in Holt’s words, though they could easily have been written by Gatto): “Education… now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and ‘fans,’ driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve ‘education’ but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves.” (from Holt’s Wikipedia entry).

When I first read Holt, I found it hard to accept his bitter anti-school conclusions. I had a similar reaction to reading Gatto at first. If Gatto is right (and he’s not the only one to have pointed out the roots and motivations of compulsory, state-sponsored educational systems, by any means), then I am part of that social engineering: I’ve gone through it, and am now implementing it. How can that be, when schools are so full of good, nice, sometimes even inspiring, passionate people? Like me, for instance! I’m not a bad person; my teachers weren’t bad people.

I had to admit, tho, that some things rang true:
* my students certainly behave like people who know that they are being asked (and will inevitably be asked) to do essentially meaningless things in school. That’s what happens in school: you do meaningless things. Hence the lethargy, the lack of enthusiasm, the boredom;
* they do seem to be being trained to move at certain times, to be grouped together with other people they don’t know and haven’t chosen to be with, according to criteria they have no say in; they accept this as “normal”;
* school (here I mean the universities where I work) seems to be more a matter of keeping people managed than actually educating them – hence the memos warning teachers of dire consequences for letting the students out early.

Although I could feel anger and outrage while reading Gatto, I could not sustain it. I didn’t hate the system as much as he did. And without that sustained fury, I was unable to invent my own strategies. The ones that Gatto described (and he describes only in broad outlines for the most part; there are no easy-to-follow instructions in his books) required a great deal of courage, determination and crazy inventiveness, more than I had.

I still could not see clearly what the roles, systems, schedules, mentality of school were doing to my students, although I was beginning to; I was unable, equally, to see what they had done to me. But I did not look in that direction until later.

Reading Gatto forced me to ask myself some difficult, disturbing questions:
1) What do I really know of freedom?
2) What kind of freedom or autonomy do I have?
3) Am I really free? Or do I assume I am because of certain symbols I’ve been accustomed to associate with freedom?
4) Do I have real autonomy? Or is it merely an appearance, like being in a spacious and comfortable cage?
5) Am I a slave unwittingly perpetuating an enslaving system?
6) If I’m not really free, how can I “teach” autonomy? Talk about the blind leading the blind.

Where to, now?

classroom management, education, educational philosophy, pedagogy, teaching

Looking back (4)

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facing the wall
Originally uploaded by NEINmeister

I began to question my own values and assumptions:
* was it necessarily A Good Thing to offer more choices, more autonomy?
* what if my cultural values and those of my students were different, like Lisa Delpit describes? If that were true here, too, then I might not be doing them the favour I thought I was;
* what if all this, the “freedom, autonomy, choice, fun, reflection” schtick, were a monumental waste of time? Actually making learning more difficult for them, and less likely?

For a while, discouraged by student response including written feedback that suggested many were confused about what they were supposed to do, at a loss when faced with choices, and not impressed with the general lack of direction, I went “back” to direct instruction:
* much more lock-step work;
* more lecturing with students taking notes;
* a final exam.

Students (mostly) did the work, although attendance was no better (or worse) than before. However, enthusiasm, real learning, curiosity, initiative, signs that people were joining dots on their own, coming to conclusions of their own, seeing patterns in the language that they had not seen before and that no-one had pointed out to them – none of these made their appearance.

And I wasn’t having much fun, either.

So, all in all, not a very satisfying semester, although it did seem more in line with what students (and other faculty staff) expected.

classroom management, educational philosophy, pedagogy, teaching

Looking back (3)

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Look Back
Originally uploaded by InTheSunStudio


The next stage (tho it wasn’t actually so neatly chronological) was reading stuff about empowerment, about language as power, about power differentials, about the classroom as a stage where power plays are enacted.

That seemed to make some sense:
* were my students perhaps behaving in ways similar to disenfranchised groups like those Paulo Freire talked about?
* Even tho they are not a discriminated minority but children of the overwhelming majority?
* If so, in what ways are they disenfranchised?
* How does this work?

I also explored the politics and psychologies behind various approaches:
* what values underlie the “project method”?
* how might the white, liberal values I held be different from those of my students?
* how might those differences play out with my students?
* what are the arguments for and against “traditional” instruction?
* how valid are those arguments?

I read E.D. Hirsch,
James Herndon,
Neil Postman,
Maxine Greene,
Lisa Delpit,
William Perry,
Jacques Barzun,
Robert Leamson,
Dennis Littky,
Theodore Sizer,
several books by Henry Giroux.
I re-read John Holt.
I read Melanie Philips.
I read and re-read and re-read John Taylor Gatto.

(To be continued).

classroom management, pedagogy, teaching

Looking back (2)

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the look back.
Originally uploaded by theshanghaieye


What was going on? And what should I/could I do about it?

My razor-sharp mind soon (after a few years) noticed a few things:
1. students need to be told what to do
2. they try to blend in with the group, try not to stand out
3. they are afraid of making mistakes.
4. they seem bored of school (even if they just got here)
5. many of them shuffle along, like prisoners shuffling between their cell and the exercise yard.

At first, I searched for socio-cultural explanations:
* this is Japan
* in Japan, the group rules
* people are shy (afraid of the retribution of the group, what they call “the eyes of others” hito no me ひとの目）
* high school education focuses on passing entrance exams, not teaching communicative English.

One strategy:
* break up the group into pairs, threesomes, quartets
* tell them exactly what to do and make them all do it together (no-one stands out, then, no-one’s in the spotlight)
* focus on communicative English
* get them out of their desks and moving around

I used a dramatic story written by some friends of mine. That seemed to work more successfully than other textbooks or approaches, tho it was not perfect.
* students enjoyed learning real (as opposed to “exam”) English
* they gradually relaxed and became more spontaneous (their movements opened up, speeded up, became less inhibited).

I used this in some classes, but I also taught other subjects with many of the same students. So I developed another strategy, together with a colleague:

* provide a variety of materials and activities (this includes demonstrating them)
* let students choose materials and/or activities
* make the goal the creation of a portfolio of work which students must present at the end of the semester
* include materials that contain communicative English
* provide self-study materials, i.e. materials that are self-explanatory, that include the answers, e.g. listening cloze exercises that with the answers in a separate file, an SRA reading kit
* provide materials that are fun to use, that don’t seem like highschool study, e.g. games (Cluedo, Scrabble, Crazy Eights, Pictionary), movies on DVD (so they can switch between English and Japanese subtitles), popular songs, etc

This worked OK with some students: about a third. The rest didn’t understand it:
* what am I supposed to do?
* why do I have to make all these choices?
* it looks like the teachers are just goofing off
* then I’ll goof off, too
* no-one seems to care
* no-one’s watching me or standing over me making me do stuff? Then I’ll just go to sleep or maybe sneak out when no-one’s watching…

How did I know?
* by observing students in class
* by talking to some students in class (one muttered under his breath “Why’s he bugging me with all these questions?”)
* through written feedback (tho this was hard to come by; students did not understand why I needed their feedback, “This dude seems real insecure about his teaching…”)
* by the number of nearly empty portfolios at semester’s end

(To be continued)

classroom management, pedagogy, teaching

Looking back

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looking back
Originally uploaded by jennypenny26


I started this blog as a doodling-pad – a place to write in order to more clearly see what I want to say – as I blundered along attempting to “teach” autonomous language-learning at a private Japanese institution of higher education. I hoped also to attract comments and observations, because I was not/am not getting enough of that where I work.

Basically, I was trying to understand what was going on in my classroom, what was going on in my students, and what was going on in me. Why did we behave as we do? Especially as some of that behaviour is
a) counter-productive,
b) illogical,
c) downright weird, given the circumstances.
(Oh, and what exactly are the circs? That question did not occur to me until much later.)

Teaching a foreign language, one might think, should be pretty straightforward: you offer a class, people sign up, you teach the class, people follow your directions, they practise, they learn, they improve. Voila. In the words of Pappas (Point Break), “How hard can it be?”

Well, it was a lot harder than that.

People signed up (or were signed up automatically), but then didn’t show up for weeks, sometimes never.
Of the ones that DID show up, some
never brought any paper, dictionary or writing implements;
some collapsed across the desk, hid behind their bag and did not resurface until the class was over;
some brought the requisite tools, but refused to open their mouths;
some stalked non-stop, only not in English;
almost all, without exception, never did homework – they did not refuse or object, they just never did it;
the majority, even the ones that seemed genuinely interested went right along with everyone else in subverting the practical purpose of the activities.

What was going on?

Chats and comments in the staff room suggested that this was a normal state of affairs. Although I did not want to, I came around to believing them.
(To be continued).