Teacher Equations #1

Richmond (Rich what?) + Shaft - Afro = Coach Carter

Elbow on Contrary Teachers

1.) Students are our allies we instruct and care. In doing this we create a learning community. This can often be chaotic / messy (see 'Bamboozed' p.85) but not necessarily unhelpful.

2.) 'Our commitment to knowledge and society asks us to be guardians or bouncers: we must discriminate, evaluate, test, grade, certify. ' (p.143)

Some images:

p.147

'I think of the medieval doctrine of poetry that likens it to a nut with a tough husk protecting a sweet kernel. The function of the poem is not to disclose but rather to conceal the kernel for many, the unworthy, and to disclose it only to the few worthy (D. W. Robertson, 61 ff.).'

'Late Henry James may be pearls, but when students yawn, that doesn't make them swine.'

p.148

'In Piaget's terms, learning involves both assimilation and accommodation.'

Question: in this assimilation, who must bend and deform so that learning can take place?

Look at Socrates and Christ as archetypal good teachers - archetypal in being so paradoxical. They are extreme on the one hand in their impulse to share with everyone and to support all learners, in their sense that everyone can take and get what they are offering; but they are extreme on the other hand in their fierce high standards for what will past muster ... I am struck with how much they relied on irony, parable, myth, and other forms of subtle utterance that hide while they communicate. These two teachers were willing in some respects to bend and disfigure and in the eyes of many to profane what they taught, yet on the other hand they were equally extreme in their insistance that learners bend or transform themselves in order to become fit receptacles.

It is as though Christ, by stressing the extreme of sharing and being an ally - saying "suffer the little children to come to me" and praising the widow with her mite - could be more extreme in his sterness: ... 'I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand'... Christ embeds the two themes of giving away and guarding - commitment to "students" and to "subject matter" ...

I have yet to comment on this.

The reading list so far...

A brilliant book. Concise chapters containing tasty chunks of great novels such as
Hardy, Dickens,
Austen, Amis,
Fitzgerald, Woolf,
Eliot, James
and novel conventions for the begining to the end via topics such as suspense, showing not telling, chapters, lists, monologues, the unreliable narrator. Whether you are blagging a topic amongst your literary friends or teaching your year 10s, this book is greatness.

More Elbow. A collection of essays. One article I particularly empathised with was called 'Pedagogy of the Bamboozled' and the essay from which the book gets its title promises to be a good read.

This is all about free writing - whether Elbow is comparing the exercises to growing (a developmental process -- I like organic imagery) or cooking (interacting with people, ideas, metaphors and symbols) as a writer of creative works and academic essays (there is a great personal testimony of Elbow's essay writing method as an 'autobiographical digression') I know what he is talking about. The actual exercises might be sophisticated for some low ability writers, but there are some experiments which I would love to try.

Return of the Native: 'Harnessing the Power of Technology' in Pictures

Finishing off John and Wheeler's 'The Digital Classroom: Harnessing the Power of Technology' with some illustrations.

Image #0:

p.126

Great comparisons between 'digital immigrants' and 'digital natives'. See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c05E6kyHu8E

Image #1 Chariot Racer:
p.124 - 'harnessing power'. We hope that this title generates an evocative image of a team of horses drawing a carriage, with each animal working with the carriage driver, travelling

towards a common goal or destination ... We also intended that it should convey a sense of momentum of change and to encapsulate the debate about whether education is being driven by, or is it driving, technology towards educational transformation.

We could extend the metaphor further and ask what extent the carriage driver is in control and what skills he or she requires, or whether he or she is merely 'holding the reins'.

p.129 - None of use can predict what the world will be like in the future ... We ... can be certain that those who learn how to harness technology effectively will be best prepared to meet its challenges.


Image #2 The Swamp:

p.125

... the interplay that exists between learners, teachers, technology and the curriculum ... is not only complex and with many layers, it also play out in what Schon (1986) calls the 'swamp' - the often murky and messy scenarios of everyday teaching and learning, in which little can be quantified and where much is unpredictable.




Image #3: Digital Literacy

p. 127
Digital literacy as 'new literacy' or 'second orality' (Ong, 1982). See also the work of Ferris (not Bueller) and (not Van) Wilder (2006).


P.S. I REALLY like the above image. For more of the same see: wordandimage.wordpress.com/category/made-by-me/

Image 4: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia-man

p.128

'Image a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we are doing.'