15 posts tagged “education”

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.

-----

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?

Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk

The Documentary of the night was Declining By Degrees: Higher Education At Risk. I would write more about it but after a 12 hour day today in my higher education job, I don't have a lot of energy. A.  portion of the documentary is about the lives of the adjunct faculty who often teach 8-9 classes a semester to make a living. Wasn't hard to relate to that. A portion was about universities full of students who can't be bothered to read their assigned texts. Wasn't hard to relate to that. A portion was about University basketball teams and how coaches are paid many times more than the University Professors and even Presidents; athletes that spend 80% of their time practicing; professors who say that for $65,000 it is insulting to tell them they need to teach kids how to write; college students who don't study more than an hour a night; professors who have to decide between promotion and educational quality.

All of this makes "sense" to me as colleges become more market driven and students are making choices about where they are going to go to college, often doing so on the basis of non-educational factors like work-out facilities, sports teams, landscaping, and dorm luxuries. As one President described it, "It's an arms race and we are going to win". Meanwhile cuts in state funding and increases in tuition are beginning to drive a selection process that places students, by means of an economic "sorting hat" regardless of merit (unless they are at the very top), in a caste system of schools based on their financial situation.

It is hard to know how to go about complaining. The documentary makes it clear that so many students are not applying themselves, are using college as a patio on which to drink and party. There is NO WAY that I want to fund their irresponsibility. No way. And yet on the other hand, you have exceptionally bright kids who are working their buts off to make it through who are being forced out or into Community Colleges.

I need to get some sleep. I have a long day of teaching ahead of me tomorrow. Its almost 2:00 in the morning. 

Question for Comment: How would you best prepare a smart kid to get a free college education?   

Nonverbal Learning Disabilities: A Guide to School Success (Middle/High School)

“Given a history of an inaccurate tactile perception, it is understandable that the student with an LND does not pay attention to that which cannot be trusted.”

I had a chance to read Dean Mooney's book on Nonverbal Learning Disabilities tonight and was reminded again how important it is to understand how my students percieve things and not just how I think they must be perceiving them from my understanding of the context of their learning. I asked Dr. Mooney what inaccurate tactile perception is and he said that young children with NLD can't really tell the difference between an X and an O when you draw it with a stylus on their finger tips. In other words, things that they may feel or see may be much different when they arrive as something to be thought about.

[Caveat! NOTHING I say in this post should be taken with authority and certainly not as though Dr. Mooney was the source of it. these are all my thoughts and attempts to understand and may be totally erroneous.]

Sights and tactile impressions have a tendency to be "diluted" by words before they are consciously grasped and thus it is that someone with NLD may need to take more time to "decipher" what should have just been an automatic impression. Something felt or seen may wind up getting lost in a tangle of words that has to be untangled to be "known". I said "So its like a tactile version of being color blind, then?" One could not necessarily assume that what was sent along those neural pathways was understood as such when it "arrived" to be thought about.

Perhaps I am searching for an understanding of something that I can have little experience with but what if ... what if you saw something green. In a normal brain, the color green would immediately be perceived as green. But what if in your brain, a conversion of that color took place that turned it into the WORD "green" ... and then your brain had to take the word to library of words relating to color to find a card in a card catalog with that word on it ... and on that card was a dab of green paint. "Ahhhhh ..." you might say. "Thats what I just saw!"

Its a longer process. And may help to explain why S. has that "gravity well syndrome" - - that tendency to think about something that should be -- or would be more automatic in someone who was not going through this process. It is not a "gum ball response" - coin in - gumball out. It is more like a gravity well in which you slide a penny and it circles around and around and around narrowing in on the center. The advantage is that you get an answer that has been around the universe. The frustration is that it arrives three hours after class is over.

Dr. Mooney writes:

“As these students discover that visual input (i.e. what they are looking at) conflicts with what they see, they learn to rely less on what they see and more on what they hear.”

“As a result of their need /reliance on auditory input, students with NLD do not need to make eye contact or appear to pay attention.”

So in reality ... they may actually LOOK inattentive to be attentive.  Every student in that situation needs a different social contract with his or her teacher . . . about time and about non-verbal cues. S. often perceives life with what I have often called "the miner's helmet" on. Its like a person in a dark room with a helmet on equipped with an intense headlight. What is IN the headlight is being seen with more clarity than would ever be seen in a well lit room where attention must be diffused. But what is OUTSIDE the beam may not be being noticed at all ... SO if a tactile or visual package has been "delivered" it has to be run through an airport scanner ... a Geiger counter  ... a thermal imager ...  etc. to be "known". That takes time and will lead to a student who "knows" the package better than you did when you posted it. But by definition, the student HAS to NOT pay attention to what you are going on to say next. In short, by NOT paying you any mind after you have shown them what you showed them, they ARE paying attention to what you showed them. Actually, probably better attention than anyone else in the room once all is said and done.

I remember taking S. on a field trip to Billings Farm once. He and his classmates were taking a tour of the different exhibits. Every three or four minutes the tour guide would move on to a new exhibit but S. was clearly not ready to leave any of them. Four minutes was not enough for someone looking at an exhibit with a miner's helmet on. Just as you might scan a room in 30 seconds in daylight but take 45 minutes if you had to do it with a flashlight in a power outage. He found his attention "yanked" out of about three of these exhibits and then you could almost physically say to himself "Well, dammit, if you aren't going to let me look at the thing, I am not going to even start. I will pay attention to something I can carry with me and to heck with these exhibits!" [These were of course my words and my interpretations.]

What NLD kids and adults get in exchange for the hassle of their "different drum" perceptual idiosyncrasies is an amazing (they say) ability to scan books and computer text FASTER than their classmates and colleagues. They might for instance be able to read Dr. Mooney's book in under a half an hour. Grin.

Question for Comment: Where is the best learning environment for a kid with this skill and challenge set? Would he thrive in an unrelenting two hour verbal debate in an online chatroom for example?

A Touch of Greatness

Tonight's movie was A Touch of Greatness, a documentary - no a eulogy - of one of America's great educators, Albert Cullum. It is hard to describe the impact of a movie like this really. It is a reminder to me of Ralph Waldo Emerson's insistence  that we all must find the genius, the spark of originality in ourselves. No teacher will be a great teacher by trying to emulate Albert Cullum. They will only become great by finding that spark in themselves (like Albert Cullum did) that allows others to find that spark within themselves.

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost — and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgement. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on the plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried"

http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm

Some days, I feel like it is time to go back to face to face teaching. Can a person really leave an impact with words alone?

Question for Comment: Can you think of a teacher in your life that clearly loved what they did?

Chalk

Tonight's movie was CHALK. I haven't a whole lot to say about it. I guess if you were going to be a teacher at a public school, it would be a movie that would allow you to discuss issues you were likely to face ahead of time. Classroom management, Administration, workplace romances, peer conflict, pedagogy, teen violence, the relationship between personal issues and professional life. Just  to name a few.

Maybe this would be as good a place as any to introduce a few of my guiding philosophies when it comes to teaching.

The first one is from Jan Jacques Rousseau:

“You wish to teach this child geography and you provide him with globes, spheres, and maps. What a lot of machines! Why all these symbols? Why not begin by showing him the object itself so that he may at least know what you are talking about? . . . I do not like verbal explanations. [Students] pay little attention to them and hardly retain them. Things! Things! I cannot repeat it enough that we give too much power to words. … In general never substitute the sign for the thing unless it is impossible to show the thing itself. For the [student’s] attention is so taken up with the sign that he will forget the thing that is represented.” J. J. Rousseau

The second is from John Dewey:

"A large part of the art of instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems large enough to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition to the confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring." - Democracy and Education

In other words … “aha!” has to follow “huh?” A third one is Kenneth Bruffee

“Collaborative learning is a reculturative process that helps students become members of knowledge communities whose common property is different from the common property of the knowledge communities they already belong to . . .  The main purpose of college or university education is to help older adolescents and adults renegotiate their membership in that encompassing common culture. The foundational knowledge that shapes us as children sooner or later circumscribes our lives. We never entirely outgrow the local, foundational knowledge communities into which we are born. But for most people, the need to cope to one degree or another with the diversity and complexity of human life beyond the local and familiar does outgrow knowledge that is familiar and (locally) foundational.”

In other words, education is a bridge to communities that one could not live in or in some cases even visit without a certain acculturation. This calls for one of my own cartoons.

Ridlin

Question for Comment: Who has been your best teacher?