20 posts tagged “education”

Homeschooling: A Family's Journey

Martine Millman

Homeschooling: A Family's journey is another one of those books that makes you wish you had either chosen to do things differently, or had the ability to. To this family, education is not education if it is not learning done in the context of personal relationships. Its not about helping children make a better living so much as helping them make a better life. "Homeschooling succeeds," the book states in its signature line, "not because they do school things better but because they do better things than schools." "The purpose of a child is not to ensure that a school will stay open. The purpose of education is to turn a child's potential into reality."

This family started the adventure when their daughter was marked wrong for an answer on a test that was actually correct. When they went to follow up on the matter, they were told that the answer was actually correct for a kid in the fourth grade but that at the second grade level, where their daughter was, not everyone would have gotten it right. Their daughter, had she given the answer that a second grader would have known, would have gotten credit. "It would not be fair" said the principle for their daughter to be given advantages over the students who were not being helped at home. I suspect that it would not take too many experiences like this to give a person a jaundiced view of schools (though I suspect that one could gather anecdotal evidence of neglect in SOME homeschools to make a case against that system as well.) Still, this books makes an effective argument. "Betting on schools to succeed at the mission of education is like betting on a school bus to win the Daytona 500. That hasn't been their mission."

Mmm ... I would like to think that in the schools I have worked in, it has but ... I can't say that the mission hasn't gotten lost in the debris of other things from time to time.

All and all, an excellent book and I left with a feeling of hope for the future and a twinge of grief for what I have felt unable to do that I wanted to do myself.

Question for Comment: To what extent has your education helped to turn your potential into a reality?

Heckler

OK. I don't usually do this but ... tonight I am going to be a movie fascist and tell you one movie to not bother seeing and one that you must see. Let me explain. When I used to teach massively more college courses than any sane person would ever teach in one semester, I found that I often did a better job. To some extent, I think this is the result of the fact that when you cover material in different combinations, you get more insights out of each course you are covering. For example, by covering Ancient Egypt in World Civilizations I in the same week that I am covering the Fascist dictators in World Civilizations II and McCarthyism in Modern American Social History, I get more insights into each of them. In some ways, it can be interesting to watch seemingly unrelated documentaries and ask yourself to make connections. Tonight, I decided to watch two movies. One, entitled Heckler, is just about ... well ... hecklers. Its about how various performers, musicians, comedians, dancers, etc. deal with public humiliation. Making use of interviews with the performers, with hecklers, with film critics, even with the children of performers, it seeks to uncover the causes of heckling and more importantly, stretegies for dealing with them.

Autism - The Musical

The other movie was entitled Autism: The Musical, a documentary that had me in tears for a third, in a state of amazement for a third, and a state of gratitude for a third. This is a MUST see movie. Seriously. Not only is it an excellent movie on autism and the autism spectrum and the ways in whiuch these affected children impact their families and schools, but it also sets the standard, for me, of how essential it is for any work of art to allow for that which one might like to edit OUT of a movie to remain. This is a movie that proclaims to me why so many churches are not places of healing. It reveals people as they are. It says in no uncertain terms that people who love others passionately MAKE MISTAKES. they screw up. They stumble. They mess up. This movie makes it clear that we are ALL dysfunctional and that just maybe we absolutely NEED people who are obviously so to make that clear to us.

We ALL need love. We all need affection. We all need understanding. We all need affirmation. We all need others to cut us a little slack. To let us make our mistakes. We all need to be allowed to mess up on the way to a good goal. The contrast between these people in Autism: The Musical, and their passion for affirmation on the one hand and these JERKS who think that it is their God-given place to tear other people's work down is unfathomable. This woman tries to pull off a musical with autistic spectrum kids. She tells the parents on the first night of the project that she has NO IDEA what is going to happen. Clearly, you have no idea what you can or cannot do with kids who do not themselves know what they can or cannot do.

But as one of the parents in the movie says, no individual can do much better of their tribe does not do better and for that reason, the public needs to be made aware of the potential of that tribe (in her case, kids who share a similar challenge in life). Another parent hits the nail on the head when she says "Its not up to us to judge the quality of [our children's] lives and I find that a challenge. What needs to happen with groups of kids like this is what needed to happen with African Americans, women, people with physical disabilities, and anyone else who the public has gotten used to devaluing. They need to be given a chance to step up to their own homeplates and hit their homeruns for this team we call humanity. Don't let yourself go through life with no accomplishment greater than a cultivated talent for telling other people what is wrong with them. 

"Success and failure are milimeters apart" one of the comedians who has had to deal with hecklers and critics his whole professional life says. "You would have to be a moron to give your emotions to a professional critic." One film maker decided to get a little revenge and offered to pay money to some of his critics who would be willing to face him in a boxing ring. In the film, he takes on four or five of them and pummels them. I mean, he literally beats the tar out of them. I have no idea how much he paid these doofuses to stand in the ring with him and take their cumuppance but you could tell that it was one of the most satisfying uses of his money he ever got. Grin.

I often say that we wouldn't worry so much about what people thought of us if we knew how little they did and both these movies prove that. But don't bother with Hecklers. Seriously. It will just put you in a foul mood with respect to humanity. Autism the Musical though is a requirrement for anyone who reads this blog. Don;t make me hack into your netflicks queue.

Question for Comment: Do you have any idea how much work some people put into simply getting their performance up to sub-par? Who can you encourage? How? Why not now? 

For the Children’s Sake: Foundations for Education, Home, and School by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

For the Children's Sake: Foundations of Education for Home and School (Child-Life Book) (Child-Life

Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

Susan Schaeffer Macaulay is the daughter of Christian philosopher, Francis Schaeffer. This book was particularly interesting because I remember distinctly watching the documentary series that Francis Schaeffer produced when I was in high school (How Should we then Live). I can’t say that I will have anything by way of criticism of this book. On most counts that count, she seems to be insisting that children need to be regarded as people who are not simply bodies that brains use for a host. They need to be educated as people in a holistic way, not has workers in training or short tax-payers or buckets of blank brain tissue. “Many adults now have a child in the same way that they have a washing machine or a collie dog” the author bemoans, and the book is an explanation of what to do about it in the lives of one’s own children.

Much of the book is a celebration of the educational philosophy of Charlotte Mason who insists that a child’s mind is the instrument of his education. “His education does not produce his mind.” She insists. P. 15

I tend to think that this is a central dividing point between systems of education and systems of giftedness development. This is why the development of intellectual skills, to the detriment of exposure to experience, nature, and relationship is a recipe for crippling a child. “School hours are like a monster” the author writes,

“however excellent that school maybe, gobbling up the child’s treasure of time.  Careful now!  We only get to be a child once! . . . The children are hungry!  They have an appetite for knowing and experiencing … Life is short and sunny moments need to be snatched. . . . Charlotte Mason’s ideal world for children had nature at the doorstep.  She felt that organized lessons should only take up the morning, so the children could freely play in and enjoy the gardens, meadows, woods, and lanes of England every afternoon.”

In conclusion, I think I will take a moment to comment on two assertions that Susan Schaeffer Macaulay makes throughout the book. One is that children NEED to be challenged and that it is far better to give them the world as it is as early as they can digest it. At some point, we all need to be weaned off simple things and challenged with deeper questions and there is no reason why children should be protected from the intellectual challenges that nourish us as adults.

“If you expect what is good, and are not shocked by the reality of the faltering footsteps towards it, you’ll be well on the way to leading. . . . It stultifies a child to bring down his world to the ‘child’s’ level . . . we should allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual and spiritual life of children . . . “Here’s a word of wisdom.  Charlotte Mason addresses those who have been educating children on nutritious mind food.  These young people are used to reading on frivolous matter so that they can grapple intellectually.  This isn’t talking about stuff that is ‘intellectual for intellectualism’s sake,’ but deep consideration of questions, ideas, and questions . . .”

The other issue is the insistence that the Bible should provide children with their entire world and life view. Both Church and Macaulay insist that the Bible is the portal through which children will discover absolute truth, correct ethical guidance, and moral certainty. More importantly, the Bible is regarded as the portal without which a human being cannot experience God fully.  The following quotes may suffice:

“The child should be given the source material on the subject of right and wrong directly from the Bible.” P. 43

“Do not forget that the reading of the Bible will put the child into direct contact with the person of God himself.” P.85

Both Charlotte Mason and Susan Scaeffer Macaulay are strong advocates for experiencial education but they start with the premise that they know where God can be experienced and make that determination for children in many ways. As I read this, I was reminded of the words of George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends,

Here is what one of Fox's coverts, Margaret Fell, had to say about his message the first time she heard him speak in 1652:

"And so he went on, and said, "That Christ was the Light of the world, and lighteth every man that cometh into the world; and that by this light they might be gathered to God," &c. I stood up in my pew, and wondered at his doctrine, for I had never heard such before. And then he went on, and opened the scriptures, and said, "The scriptures were the prophets' words, and Christ's and the apostles' words, and what, as they spoke, they enjoyed and possessed, and had it from the Lord": and said, "Then what had any to do with the scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth? You will say, 'Christ saith this, and the apostles say this;' but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?" &c. This opened me so, that it cut me to the heart; and then I saw clearly we were all wrong. So I sat down in my pew again, and cried bitterly: and I cried in my spirit to the Lord, "We are all thieves; we are all thieves; we have taken the scriptures in words, and know nothing of them in ourselves."

What is one to do when they have discovered that God can talk to them through the Bhagavad Gita, the Doa Te Ching, a Chaim Potok Novel, a U2 Song, or a Ken Burns Documentary? Indeed, I some of the best sermons I have ever heard came from the mouth of a child.

Macaulay speaks of the need to be wary of “Christian books” that promote legalism for example.

“One aspect of life is not more Christian than another.  So it is Christian to enjoy a juicy melon.  That is because I am eating, it is a real event, and I made so that I enjoy cool melon on a hot day.  It is Christian to put my arm around someone to love her comfort them.  That is because this is a way human beings relate, show they care, enjoy each other.  More than this; it must be said that certain Christian books are in fact not so.  For instance, some go beyond biblical teaching and, like the Pharisees, burden to people with weighty rules and regulations.” P. 20

And yet, within the Bible itself, there seems to be things that are … well … to the observant, “unbiblical”. When the Apostle Paul says to the church at Corinth that they should not allow women to speak in churches “as the law says” … is he not being “unbiblical”? When Nehemiah starts pulling people’s beards out and splitting families for not being sufficiently apartheid, is he not being “unbiblical”?

It is always assumed that Biblical authors never challenge each other or permit anyone to challenge anything that came before but … I wonder if that is so? Maybe what she says of literature about heroes who are all too perfect and villains who are too entirely bad applies to the Bible:

“Perhaps we are so made that the heroic which is all heroic, the good which is all virtuous, palls upon us.” P. 120

I will close with a great quote from Charlotte Mason:

“Children should have relations with earth and water, should run and leap, ride and swim, should establish the relation of maker to material in as many kinds as may be; should have dear and intimate relations with persons, through present intercourse, through tale or poem, picture or statue; through flint arrowhead or modern motorcar: Beast and bird, herb and tree, they must have familiar acquaintance with.  Other peoples and their languages must not be strange to them.  Above all they should find that most intimate and highest of relationships, the fulfillment of their being.  This is not a bewildering program, because, in all these and more directions children have affinities; and a human being does not fill his place in the universe without putting out tendrils of attachment in the directions proper to him.  He must get rid of the notion that to learn the “three R’s” or the Latin grammar well, a child should learn these and nothing else.  It is as true for children as for ourselves that, the wider the range of interests, the more intelligent is the apprehension of each.” P. 147

Preach it.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

In Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, actor, comedian Ben Stein plays the part of a History Teacher droning on about the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930. The function of the scene in the movie is to make it clear that when Ferris Beuller decides to skip school for a day of frolicking, he misses nothing of any importance whatsoever. I confess, as a history teacher myself, the scene is both hilariously funny and tear-jerkingly sad at the same time. It is painful to watch one’s profession roasted so effectively on the spit of a good caricature. But it makes one want to rise to the challenge and show people that in actuality, the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill could be taught in such a way as to enlighten high school students about important issues relating to their lives and futures.

In essence, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff story is a classic tale in American economics and civics. It has antecedents back to the days of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson (if not further) who battled over the question of Federal economic support for certain sectors of the economy. Hamilton had argued that the country would be best served if its economic elites were made the primary concern of Federal economic policy. Hamilton had a vision for an America that could rival Europe in the manufacture of goods. His policies leaned towards the support of business interests and manufacturing interests and urban interests at the expense of rural interests, agricultural interests, and the interests of the common unskilled laborer. Hamilton was not a “No child Left Behind” sort of guy. He was an “Every Talented Elite Gets Ahead” sort of guy. Thus, he argued for the creation of a National Bank that could loan money to powerful business interests. He also argued for a tax on whiskey, a commodity that Western farmers made heavy use of as it was a primary way of converting crops into something that could be transported and sold even over bad roads for cash.  In short, the blue collar workers would work to fund the projects of the white collar workers.

The argument between Hamilton and Jefferson over some of these issues was essentially an argument about competing visions of America. And it is not an argument that is foreign to us today. Are we better off as a country when our resources are invested in each person equally? Or should we invest more heavily in some? either the most talented, bright, and ambitious OR conversely, the least talented, bright, and ambitious? Should we identify certain sectors of the economy to favor with public largesse or public bailouts and others to tax more heavily and regulate more heavily? Should we, for example support agriculture with subsidies and then tax corporations with confiscatory tax rates? Should airlines and banks get bailouts? Should manufacturing get protection from foreign competition? Should Walmart be allowed to provide consumers with low cost goods at the expense of American manufacturing wages?

The Smoot Hawley Tariff question sits smack dab in the middle of this debate and what it should say to a high school student is that those who control the rules under which economic decisions are made will, in most cases, control the economic benefits of the workforce’s labor. Representatives Reed Smoot from Utah and W.C. Hawley from Oregon created this measure originally to protect American farmers from global competition but once the Pandora’s Box of protectionism was in the air, many other Republican business interests saw a means by which they could protect their own industries from competition. By the time the bill was passed, rates on imports for thousands of items were raised like drawbridges to protect industries from low-paid foreign labor. The notion was somewhat simplistic in many ways. It pretended that the countries that were affected by such high tariffs would not retaliate by putting high tariffs on American exports. This was delusional thinking as was soon to be discovered. Dozens of countries simply responded by saying “If you are not going to let our companies sell in America in a fair fight for market share, we are not going to let your companies sell in our countries in a fair fight for market share.” A recent TIMES magazine article puts it this way:

Though some legislators today might be reluctant to make such a promise, no one in Congress is seriously proposing anything as drastic as Smoot-Hawley. Still, the pro-tariff mania that swept Washington 55 years ago remains a danger. "What we are afraid of," says S. Bruce Smart, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, "is that people are so emotional that they will do something that they know is foolish, just to do something."

http://205.188.238.109/time/magazine/article/0,9171,960038,00.html

The Smoot Hawley Tariff then can be used as a great example of how democracies can often make knee-jerk short term emotional decisions without thinking through their long term consequences. In 1929 and 1930, business interests had almost completely taken over the American democratic system, using power and money to buy candidates and influence. The Smoot-Hawley tariff was packaged as a measure to protect American jobs but in all honesty, given the way that companies were failing to distribute profits to the workers, it was a measure that would line the pockets of business owners in the short term but cost jobs in the long term. It was also a measure that frankly inhibited the ability of the American economy to move its human resources into more lucrative areas of money making. Loosing one’s job to foreign competition is painful but at some point in time, it is this pain that causes workers to get higher order skills and the children of those workers to prepare for jobs of the future and not the past. Smoot Hawley protected American schools from having to make a transition to a system of education that would have prepared students for better jobs than their parents had.

Had I been teaching Ferris Beuller’s class on the Hawley-Smoot Teriff Bill, I would have brought in the movie Life and Debt about how the Jamaican economy is being affected by IMF anti-protectionist tariff policies and we would have had a good debate about whether or not globalization – the distribution of different economic niches to different parts of an increasingly interdependent world is a good idea or a bad idea. Should Jamaican farmers give up growing their own onions and producing their own milk so that their farms can be better converted into resort hotels for wealthy Americans?

I might have brought in the documentary American Jobs and looked at how people who are not thinking ahead about global market issues get themselves dependent on jobs that are bound to be moved elsewhere in a global economy that allows business to travel to regions of desperation in search of lower labor costs. In 1930, business interests were pro-protectionism because the factories were located here. In today’s economy, this is often opposite because the factories have been located elsewhere.

We might have watched a documentary on how the government’s intervention in the affairs of the agricultural economy or the economics of the transportation industry or its willingness to subsidize the energy industry’s need for global protection are affecting food prices, food quality, local farming communities, access to prescription drugs, airfares, technological innovation in auto fuel efficiency, and other similar issues of significant concern. We might have watched some excerpts from the debate about NAFTA that politicians fifteen years ago were engaged in and then examined the results of its passing.

Ultimately, students would leave the class with a better understanding of the dangers of taking a Ferris Beuller’s Day Off on election day. We would look at how business interests had managed to take over the Coolidge and Hoover Administrations and how lack of voter turnout in the 18-24 year old age demographic today is amounting to a type of economic serfdom by negligence. Clearly, when the government decides to borrow money instead of raise taxes, it is voting to tax a future generation that either cannot or simply does not care to vote. In some ways, Hamilton and Jefferson’s conflict has become generational in American society as the government leans in favor of those who are voting now and takes that pound of flesh from those who are either not old enough to vote or not interested enough in politics to vote. There is a reason why prescription drugs of the elderly will be getting huge infusions of Federal dollars while Federal funding for college tuition decreases. And it has to do with the tens of thousands and millions of 18-24 year olds that think Ferris Beuller is cool for skipping classes about meaningless topics like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.

In the end, the joke’s on Ferris because while he is joy riding around in his friend’s father’s 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California, he is NOT learning that the Italian car manufacturer, Enzo Ferrari started his company in the same year that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was being debated (1929). Ferris is NOT learning that American car manufacturer, Henry Ford, personally went in and begged President Herbert Hoover to veto the Smoot-Hawley Tariff,  convinced that the secret to getting out of the economic crisis was not to be found in initiating trade wars but in paying workers higher wages. What Ferris does not know is that in a country dedicated to high trade barriers, it would have been impossible for his friend’s dad to own a Ferrari and that if Ferris expects to work for profit in a global economy, he will have to realize the importance of trust in developing markets and suppliers. He will soon discover that hacking into a school computer to change his grades is a good short term solution to a problem but it is not an offense that an international business partner will forgive soon if he begins to apply similar strategies to his business dealings.

Francis Fukuyama argues in his book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, published  a decade after Ferris Beuller’s Day Off came out, that unethical individualism of the sort that Ferris glorifies, is toxic to prosperous economies. As one commentator at Amazon puts it:

“Fukuyama examines the impact of culture on economic life, society, and success in the new global economy. He argues that the most pervasive cultural characteristic influencing a nation's prosperity and ability to compete is the level of trust or cooperative behavior based upon shared norms. In comparison with low-trust societies (China, France, Italy, Korea), which need to negotiate and often litigate rules and regulations, high-trust societies like those in Germany and Japan are able to develop innovative organizations and hold down the cost of doing business. Fukuyama argues that the United States, like Japan and Germany, has been a high-trust society historically but that this status has eroded in recent years. This well-researched book provides a fresh, new perspective on how economic prosperity is grounded in social life.”

In other words, it may well be Ferris’ approach to basic virtues like honesty, integrity, thrift, and work ethic that will make it impossible for someone in his generation to make the kind of money it takes to own a Ferrari. That said, it may ALSO be Ferris' disdain for tradition and his essential creative audacity that makes him millions. It would make for an interesting debate. 

I suspect that someday, a good sequel to Ferris Beuller’s Day Off might be a movie entitled The Day After Ferris Beuller’s Day Off. And in that movie, it would be interesting to see a good history teacher teaching a class on NAFTA. Grin.

There. I have laid down the gauntlet.

Question for Comment: I often say that a good history class is a critical thinking class that uses History as a Medium. Have you ever taken such a class?

“our failure in the educational world exists because we have failed to understand the importance of relationships. . . . The foundational design for the education of children is the parent-child relationship. ”

Safely Home

Tom Eldredge

MY good friend J., a woman who is or has or will be homeschooling a family of ten sent me a book recently about how essential relationship is to education. I will be honest, I do not agree with everything this author has to say. But on this subject of parental involvement in children's education, I am in hearty agreement. So often we send kids into a relational wasteland and expect them to learn while their basic human need to be loved, to belong, to bond, is simply ignored. They are like little monkeys, sent to wire mothers for milk. They have no relationships with their teachers, they are alienated from classmates (particularly if they are unique). They get "lost".

"When the public school students spend thirteen years of his life switching teachers, classes, friends, what is he being taught about relationships?” the author asks us.

Ironically, conversations with my son about his first week back in public school this past week have revealed this to be exactly true. It is just dawning on him what a good thing he had going in his private school ... a place where he had a father for a history teacher and a faculty that cared about him as a person, friends, and hope of lasing relationships. What happened to it? Well, in many ways that public school system sucked all the money up for its work and left no resources for those that were not served by it. This of course is not a universal condemnation of public school. Indeed, some of that money goes to make sure that the family atmosphere of my OTHER son's school is maintained for him. There are places that are providing community within the context of education but ... my mind is made up, the closer you can get your children's education to a family system, the better. If money for education is made to create family like experiences for kids, I can support it. If it is going to build better buildings and football teams and programs ... I would rather have it back so I can homeschool them myself, thanks.

Question for Comment: Is anything in an education worth what it costs if you have to give up good relationships to get it?

Teachings from the Worldly Philosophy

Robert Heilbroner

Over a year ago, a history instructor I know made a request that he be allowed to set up a bulletin board discussion group dedicated to the collaborative work of online General Education instructors. The main campus General Education faculty at his college are actually PAID to get together quite often and work collaboratively to improve their courses. It only made sense to do something similar for the online faculty who were all adjuncts. Ironically, despite all his efforts to do so, he could never get the clearance to do so. He was told that the initiative was supported but the money and technological support was never forthcoming. I suspect that the answer to the mystery lies in the following excerpt from Adam Smith.

"What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour.

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of.

Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of their labour. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work. But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands.

The masters upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the necessity superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders."

http://www.bibliomania.com/2/1/65/112/frameset.html

So what is Adam Smith saying? In a contemporary context, he is saying that those who hire adjunct faculty do not WANT them to gain access to the tools they need to organize and to communicate their story to one another and to the clients (students).  What has been the result of the lack of communication between the adjunct faculty at his college? Well, the following list is a start:

• Main campus full time faculty have full time contracts. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have health benefits. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have financial support for Professional Development. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have  sick days and personal days. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have pension benefits. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have life insurance. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have job security. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have voting rights in college decisions. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have paid collaborative training days. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have promotion, raises, and merit pay. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty receive travel grants. Online program adjuncts do not.
  

The great irony of course is that this portion of Adam Smith quoted above is being assigned in the General Education curriculum of the main campus education program. 

Question for Comment: What would you do if you were my friend?

What the Best College Teachers Do

Ken Bain

Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do, came and spoke to our faculty today.

 "We don’t learn from experience but from reflecting on experience" John Dewey once said and so I thought I would take a moment to reflect on what he had to say. "When we learn, we construct our sense of reality" Ken pointed out, "and then we begin to "use our models of reality to understand new sensory inputs."

We construct mental models or maps that enable us to know what to do in life. This practice serves us well but can be a problem if they are not accurate models or maps. As teachers, we want students to build new models of reality that we believe are more accurate than the ones they carry with them to the first class ... or to at least question existing constructs of reality. When we ask them to disbelieve their own maps and models, we are asking students to engage in an "unnatural act".

"Whether he is comparing how students and historians interpret documentary evidence or analyzing children's drawings, Wineburg's essays offer "rough maps of how ordinary people think about the past and use it to understand the present." Arguing that we all absorb lessons about history in many settings—in kitchen table conversations, at the movies, or on the world-wide web, for instance—these essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking.

Pasted from <http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Thinking-Pb-Critical-Perspectives/dp/1566398568>

Two physicists asked "Do my Physics classes change the way my students conceive of motion?" (Does your course change the way your students think about History?) They devised a "force concept inventory" and gave it to 600 students. Virtually none changed their minds between the test they took before the class and the test they took a few months after. Neither was the degree of change predictable by grade. "A" students were better at looking like they had changed their minds. That was all. The human tendency is to wrap new learning around old learning, Ken noted.

So, how do you create an environment where people will change their thinking? Bains asked, The Answer: A Natural Critical Learning Environment. Bain says, that you have to put the learner in a situation where their existing mental model does not work. There has to be an “expectation failure.” Students have to expect one thing and not get it. Secondly, the learner has to CARE that their mental model does not work anymore.
  

Question for Comment: So, “What is a learning experience that you could design to provide almost guaranteed "expectation failure"? What are the fundamental paradigms that you believe that your students come with? Which ones do you want your class to challenge?

Bains also suggests that good teachers appealed not to grades but to outcomes they could promise when motivating students. "You take my class and here is what you will be able to do." Not, "Here's what grade you will get."

"This course will help you to learn to use your head. If you don't want to learn to use your head , go enroll  in a Barber College."

Martian Child

David: What are you doing?
Dennis: Learning.
David: What are you learning?
Denis: "how to be a human in part of a family"
David:  I think thats what we're all doing.

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David: Why did they send you here? You know, the Martians?
Dennis: To join a family and to learn human beingness.

-----

David: Sometimes we forget that children have just arrived on the earth. They are a little like aliens, coming into beings as bundles of energy and pure potential, here on some exploratory mission and they are just trying to learn what it means to be human. For some reason Dennis and I reached out into the universe and found each other, Never really know how or why. And discovered that I can love an alien and he can love a creature. And thats weird enough for both of us.

Definitely one of my new favorite John Cusak movies. Any of you with children that may not exactly fit into a "one-size-fits-nobody" system will enjoy it I suspect. Cusak does a good job of portraying what it is like to look for that balance between letting your kid be a bit weird and working to "de-weirdify" the world they live in. "Dennis needs special attention that we are not equipped to offer here" the school principle says. I suppose it doesn't help that Dennis wears a battery and duct tape anti-gravity belt to keep from floating away.

The question is how do our children interact with us. how do we need them? How do they need us?

Question for Comment: Carl Jung once said that "nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent." I wonder what he meant by that? Do we teach our children how to be human or do they teach us?

To begin this discussion of Gen. Ed. Curriculum, it might be worth highlighting some of my assumptions:

1.       “No clever arrangement of bad eggs ever made a good omelet” which is to say, no matter what we do with the curriculum, finding good teachers will be essential. For that reason, it is worth asking, “What sort of curriculum is likely to attract and keep good teachers?” It’s as important a question to be asking as “what sort of curriculum will attract students?”

2.       “A good curriculum will be like a good computer system. It won’t need to be junked every two years because it wasn’t designed to be modified easily.

3.       Adult students have had time to get unbalanced and so they will need curricular time to get re-balanced. Some will have a decade of experience and reading in at least one of our core areas and no experience in others. I think they have to be allowed to make use of a certain amount of flexibility. I don’t think that this has to create administrative nightmares for course scheduling if it is set up right.

4.       “A curriculum should be a piece of art not a menu.” As Robert Henri says in the book Art Spirit, “We are not here to do what has already been done.”  If we ask someone to summarize the CPS Gen Ed curriculum and they start listing courses that are on it, as though it were a recipe for a graduation cake and not an inspiring idea, we have missed something important. If a curriculum is an idea, well expressed, about what is important, it will convey to students that the courses that they take are a PART of the education they need. Not the entire thing. The education is more than the sum of the classes.

By listing specific courses, the curriculum starts to drive the faculty recruitment. Let’s say next Fall, we have three faculty members who WANT to teach for us and have excellent qualifications for doing so. Lets say they are all Nobel Prize winners and they want to teach a course in 20^th Century World History, Climate Change, and Irish poetry … but we only have slots for someone to teach World Civilizations II, Environmental Science, and “The Novel” (I am making up an illustration here). Having specific courses chiseled out requires that we be constantly stuffing faculty into holes that they may not fit in. And the courses can suffer as a result (I think).

The other problem with having those courses listed is that we are in the market for students who come to us with academic transcripts that may not fit. Lets say that a student has had a course in Constitutional Law. Can he get credit for the required course on American government? What if he has had a course on the Civil Rights movement? Do we really think that a student HAS to have a course in American Government to graduate? Or is what we are really trying to say something more like “a student should be exposed to a course in political thought to graduate”? If the later is what we really think, lets say so in the Gen. Ed requirements.

It is my contention that with the prevalence of the internet, courses should focus less on pure subject information and more on thinking skills and communication skills. I am not saying that the subject content does not matter but the fact is that students have plenty of access to information without college. What they really need to learn is how to better evaluate information, solve problems with it, and make their case about it in memorable creative ways. I would propose moving from a subject-based curriculum to a skill based curriculum. Not entirely mind you but I think the presentation of our curriculum should reflect that Taoist shift in emphasis. I often like to think of my history classes as “critical thinking classes that use history as a medium.” They are not subject based classes about which some critical thinking is done. And I think that is why they are working.

This is what I mean when I say that a curriculum should be a piece of art. Sometimes, a great piece of art is a simple retelling of a common theme but the replacement of a few lines and the use of a few colors and the introduction of a new brush stroke makes all the difference. Somehow, with line, color, and composition, a new balance is created.

So, this is where I start to ask myself some questions that I don’t know the answers to. If every one of our Gen Ed. classes was teaching a set of three vital skills (with other skills spinning out of them like fractal paisleys), what would those skills be? For me, among the many possibilities, the following three keep coming back to me as vital: critical thinking, problem solving, and creative expression. For me, the curriculum of the future will target these skills in the context of different disciplines. If someone takes a history course from me, they should know that they are taking a critical thinking, problem solving, and creative expression course that happens to be using history as a means of teaching those things. They should also know that these skills are essential to their personal relationships as well as their careers. I think we all understand at some level that a good career is only part of the recipe for life happiness and these courses should stress that the skills they aim to sharpen are as essential to personal life as they are to occupational life.

It is my belief that if the curriculum reflects this focus on skills, it will make the recruitment, inspiration, training, and assessment of faculty all that much easier. It means that when we go looking for faculty, we know what exactly we are looking for (my idea would be to ask applicants to show us two weeks of their blog writing just so we can get a feel for their thinking and creative writing ability). It also means that we could target specific strengths and weaknesses to focus training on. As we all know, if you try to target everything, you hit nothing. I also think that focusing on a few vital skills makes it easier for the marketing people to sell the education to prospective students. Instead of outlining a grocery list of courses to take, they can sell the grand idea. “Come to Champlain and you will get to evaluate how you are out of balance and educate your way back to balance. You will know that we are teaching you skills in every class that will have direct bearing on your ability to think, solve problems, and get your message across. Other colleges will teach you subject matter that you can either get on your own with a $20 internet connection or that will be obsolete by the time you graduate. Champlain is about skills that do not rust, rot, or get moth eaten and our faculty is trained to teach them and don’t get asked back if they don’t teach them in relevant applicable ways.”

I was, I should note here, once a non-traditional student. I went to college for a few years but did not graduate. I went back after a few years to finish and I had to go through this whole process of covering missing gaps in a curriculum that made sense to someone. I had been coaching Jr. High and Highschool hockey and soccer for years. The year I went back to college, I was coaching a college soccer team. I had played college soccer and hockey for years but I still had to cover those P.E. credits. Sigh.

Anyway, those are my general thoughts. Part of me thinks that I should end this ramble here and take a breather. But I am “in the zone” so I figure I might as well get more specific.

When I was shopping for this computer, I was thinking to myself “What am I going to want this new computer to look like five years from now?” I think something similar needs to be done with this curriculum. I really think we need to have a picture of what we want the whole CPS division to look like five years or ten years from now before we start pouring cement and watching it dry. How big do we want it? How easily do we want it to be managed? What is the process we want to see faculty going through to be allowed to teach (We do want a line of faculty asking to teach, don’t we?)

Let’s just assume that we have 1000 students now and we want 5000 within ten years. What sort of Gen Ed. Curriculum can provide a structure that is consistent throughout so that it can be marketed in the same way every year and become a signature curriculum even while modifications are being made to it? What sort of curriculum can allow us the maximum amount of discretion in offering teaching opportunities without becoming a scheduling nightmare? How do we design a curriculum so that every course is a microcosm of the whole curriculum in the same way that every cell of an organism contains the blueprint of the whole? Those seem to be central questions to me. I know I don’t have the perfect answer but I can’t help but try.

The following was adapted from the a recent attempt I made to do this:

To reiterate, I am suggesting that students would need to take two courses that related to each of these ten broad categories. One course would have to be broad in scope (Macroeconomics, World Civ I, World Religions, Western Philosophy, etc.) and the other course would have to be narrow in scope (Irish Literature, Russian Literature, Economics of China, Abnormal Psychology, etc.). If you had ten broad subject areas and two courses were required for each, that would be 20 Gen Ed. courses or 60 credits.  The beauty of this is that you aren’t left having to find someone to teach an American Government class even though you have five people who you would LOVE to see teaching a class in Eastern Religion, a class in Science Fiction and Culture, a class in Art History, Mythology, or The Modern Middle East. The “sockets” would stay the same from semester to semester and year to year but the courses would follow the talents of the faculty you found.

Naturally, you could find dependable faculty to teach a great course over and over. It doesn’t have to be an earthquake of change every semester but it has flexibility, balance, and choice built into it. You could start out with fewer options but add the diversity in as the program grows, selecting those classes that students love and that best achieve the goals for permanence in the curriculum. You are never in the unenviable position of having to retain instructors that can’t deliver the goods because you have a slot to fill that they have taught before.

I am not totally committed to this set of ten subject areas or even to the three skills that I have listed as primary. But I still like the idea of not making specific courses mandatory. To me, that just locks administrators in and defeats their purpose when it comes to recruitment of faculty. It seems to me that the administrative ace in the hole when recruiting is the ability to give instructors the opportunity to teach something that they are really exceptionally qualified to teach in an environment that knows what it is doing and trains them to play a part in it.

Think of the possibilities. An Administrator or faculty member happens to see a lecture being given by someone in the newspaper, they attend and find it fascinating, and so ask the lecturer after if she might be interested in teaching an online course in the subject. An administrator or faculty member happens upon a blog by someone with a graduate degree in Physics and they make everything scientific understandable and relevant. They ask great questions and talk in normal speak but with obvious intelligence and competence. We contact them and ask if they want to take a course for a semester.

So much more enjoyable than sorting through a stack of resume’s looking for the elusive candidate who can teach two sections of American Government!

So … that’s my “Virginia Plan”

Looking forward to hearing what you think and completely aware that my lack of administrative experience may be leaving me with significant blind spots.  I confess, this idea is so significantly different from the one being proposed that I fear it must be way off.

Respectfully,

James Madison

 Question for Comment: What do you think of the idea? Would you be better at the job you do ... or in the relationships you are in if you could think more critically, express yourself more creatively, or solve problems more effectively?