Quote for the day: Something else teachers need to learn (or unlearn)

"The language of student learning is, on the whole, fairly bloodless. Learning objectives, learning styles, domains of learning, transfer of learning; all these suggest that learning is primarily a cognitive process to do with processing information in various ways. Yet as any teacher knows, learning--particularly that involving risk, discomfort, or struggle--is highly emotional. Sure, there are times when boredom and apathy reign supreme. But there are also times when anxiety, terror, shame, and anger are paramount. Fortunately, too, there are times when students feel joy, pleasure, pride, and love. It is interesting that no assessment protocols I know of make any use of these words or terms like these." ~~ Stephen D. Brookfield, The Skillful Teacher

Learning outside the box

Every adult has particular memories of school, or school supplies. For those of us who started school in the 1970's, it might be Bic Banana pens, or (for the Canadians) packs of Laurentien/Laurentian pencil crayons. Newsprint fliers for Scholastic paperbacks. Library books that had pockets and cards in them. Glue in clear bottles with rubber tips (or, earlier, the ever-discussed white paste in a jar that the bad kids would eat). And of course the also-ever-discussed smell of ditto-machine fluid.

There are times when nostalgia is supplanted by what-were-they-thinking curiosity or even resentment. Times change, and what was thought to be cute or appropriate sometimes takes on a different light. One of the Squirrelings was unimpressed with the Kimmy doll I found recently, because of Kimmy's obviously not-that-authentic Native connections. Yes, Kimmy was a popular Canadian toy fifty years ago, but no, a relaunch of Kimmy wouldn't fly these days.

I've often talked about my "experimental '70's" elementary education. Some parts of that were good, or at least fun; other things we could have done without. The photo above is a 1960 SRA Reading Laboratory (SRA meaning Science Research Associates, which should tell you a lot right there). We used a box like this maybe once a week in the 1970's. I didn't hate it. I liked, somewhat, the challenge of jumping ahead through those coloured levels. Each learning card had a story, which I thought was sort of like reading a Sunday School paper. The activities were a bit like doing word games. And I suppose I thought that it was better than some other things they might have had us doing instead. (This blogger isn't even that charitable, although she does include the fascinating story of where the first "box" came from.)

I found a scanned-in review of this, also from 1960, and this is what it said:

"This is a U.S.A. attempt to individualize reading instruction in a large class with a wide range of reading ability. A triumph of pedagogical ingenuity combined with superb industrial design, it provides, in a container 16 x 8 x 8 inches, sufficient material to keep a class of forty students with a reading range of over six years purposefully busy for at least fifty-four periods...The levels, each of which is identified by a distinctive colour, are very carefully graded and cover a reading range of approximately 7.5-15 years and are designed to interest children from 9 to 12 years. The material, however, is stimulating and so attractively presented that the laboratory would be acceptable to most children up to the age of fourteen years."

Are you excited so far?

"The laboratory consists of:--  150 Power Building Cards, 15 at each of 10 levels, all very attractively illustrated and laid-out, which give carefully planned training in reading for comprehension, word recognition and semantic skills; a Key Card for marking each Power Builder; 150 Rate Builder Cards..."

and so on and so on and so on.

If I told you that the review of the learning kit came from a journal called The Slow Learning Child, would that make a difference?

"I am jealous for the children; every modern educational movement tends to belittle them intellectually; and none more so than a late ingenious attempt to feed normal children with the pap-meat which may (?) be good for the mentally sick..." (Charlotte Mason, Philosophy of Education)

And that, I think, was what was wrong with this attractively presented triumph of pedagogical ingenuity. It taught us to read reprinted stories on folded cards, answer multiple-choice questions about main idea, and work through lists of antonyms. You might become very good at answering main-idea questions and picking out antonyms, just like you might master the technique of shaking chicken parts in a bag of something that comes out of a package and then putting them in the oven for the required time. It's a programmed skill, but it doesn't make you a chef.

And those cards didn't make us readers.

According to the blog post I linked above, the teacher who first came up with the idea was working with seventh graders and had too limited a budget to get fancy consumable materials, so he cut and pasted some workbooks to make them re-useable. (Shades of some homeschoolers, yes?)  But here's the thing...he could have used books. He could have done what Marva Collins did (without a box). He could have asked the students to narrate, to tell and write about the books they were reading. He could have taken advantage of the natural world around them.  Maybe I have the completely wrong impression, and they spent every afternoon reading classic novels and going out for nature walks. He could have done a lot of things, and maybe he did, I have no idea.

But I think he should have skipped the box.

At any rate, we can. Our boxes these days may look like computer pages instead of shiny cards, but they're no more real or necessary than SRA kits were in my classroom. Don't buy or do the things that make you feel more like a teacher. Do what matters for the students. Do the things that really feed mind-hunger. Nurture the readers and writers, curious human beings, creative spirits, and care-takers of all kinds.

That's my back-to-school post.

Linked from the Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival, Fall 2016.

Two weeks till L'Harmas!

In two weeks, some local CMers and I will be travelling to the 2nd L'Harmas retreat in Kingsville, Ontario.

In case you can't guess, I'm excited!

Teacher training this week (one week till school starts)

One week to finish my "summer education?"

Old Mortality is on hold, temporarily, and that's okay; it's not on the schedule until the third term anyway.

I am in the middle of several library books, trying to finish them all at once.  I'm also reading The End of Ignorance, not from the library but one that I had postponed reading for too long.  It is both method-confirming and method-changing...kind of like a driving clinic that tells you how well you're doing but then points out all the times you were looking at something else or taking too long to make a turn.  I don't drive but I can still make a driving simile, right?  There are so many places where John Mighton echoes Charlotte Mason on education, it's uncanny.  (I know I said that a few years ago.  I still think so.)

There are several John Mighton and JUMP Math videos on You-Tube, but I particularly like this one.

Teacher training this week (two weeks until school starts here)

Reading:

Don Quixote (done!)

Charlotte Mason's Formation of Character

The End of Ignorance, by John Mighton

Watching:

Tesla: Master of Lightning (with Mr. Fixit)

Teacher training this week

Still reading:

Why Geology Matters
Charlotte Mason's Formation of Character (re-reading)
Old Mortality

Just started:

The One World School House: Education Reimagined, by Salman Khan

Hoping to get to:

Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, by Mark Frauenfelder

Teacher training this week

Still reading:

Why Geology Matters, by Doug Macdougall
Old Mortality, by Sir Walter Scott

Planning to read or reread:

Time as History, by George Grant (CBC Massey Lectures 1969)  (short book)
Formation of Character, by Charlotte Mason (that will probably keep me busy until school starts)
Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves

Watching:

TED Talk: Charles Leadbeater, Education innovation in the slums.

"So time and again, I found people like this. This is an amazing guy, Sebastiao Rocha, in Belo Horizonte, in the third largest city in Brazil. He's invented more than 200 games to teach virtually any subject under the sun. In the schools and communities that Taio works in, the day always starts in a circle and always starts from a question. Imagine an education system that started from questions, not from knowledge to be imparted, or started from a game, not from a lesson, or started from the premise that you have to engage people first before you can possibly teach them. Our education systems, you do all that stuff afterward, if you're lucky, sport, drama, music."  ~~ Charles Leadbeater

Teacher training this week

"Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools. But teaching is a creative profession. Teaching, properly conceived, is not a delivery system. You know, you're not there just to pass on received information. Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. You see, in the end, education is about learning."  ~~ Sir Ken Robinson

Reading:

Consider This, by Karen Glass (done re-reading)
The Seashell on the Mountaintop, by Alan Cutler (done and reviewed)
All for Love (done)
Why Geology Matters, by Douglas Macdougall
How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, by Edward Hirsch

Watching:
Sir Ken Robinson, How to escape education's death valley  (TED talk)

Teacher training this week

Reading:
Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (done that; lots of discussion about women's education)
Re-reading the last half of Charlotte Mason, School Education (got through that in one morning)
Making Sense of Adult Learning, by Dorothy MacKeracher (taking me longer)
Wendell Berry's poems
A surprisingly relevant newspaper column today about the science of relations (maybe I'll write a post about that)

Listening to:
Dr. Gwendolyn Starks, "Creative Writing with the Inklings and Friends"

Using all that to:
re-edit some of our Grade Eight plans.