MATTHEW  ISOM

ED 632

Matthew Isom

 

Reflections While Sitting on the Roadside

 

At certain times during a lifetime, it is very helpful to spend time reflecting on the things that matter most in life.  I am at a crossroads of sorts in my life in so many ways and it seems to me that it would be beneficial to reflect on my values concerning knowledge, my career, purpose in life, the means of attaining happiness, and even love.  I’ve been teaching now for 20 years and I’m at that point where I must decide if I’m going to coast for the next ten years, doing things as I’ve always done them, or if I’m going to revamp my approach to teaching to keep myself fresh.  Perhaps taking a few weeks to sit here quietly at the side of the road will give me and chance to see things in a new light and I’ll be able to continue into the uncharted paths of the next decade with a new sense of purpose.

 

It seems to me that I have a moral responsibility to change the way I teach to accommodate the learning styles of my students, students who learn so much differently now.  Or is it that we’ve always learned differently but not too many people realized it before?  Even thirty years ago when I left the turn of the century-old building of Kingwood Elementary because it wasn’t meeting my learning needs and headed off to The Salem Open School, I recognized that I learned so much better in that free environment where we were an extended family of sorts and the subjects that were taught were based on the real world and the things that came our way season by season.  I remember once, when the salmon were running and heading up Mill Creek to spawn, we went to see them and learn of that part of life.  Somehow or other my teacher got permission to take one of those dying fish and we returned school and dissected it.  What a sense of amazement filled the air as we explored life that day.  So, students have always learned best through hands-on, real-world projects, I believe, especially projects that fill them with a sense of wonder.  Today, in the technological age, the need for this approach to learning seems greater than ever.  Students no longer need the old approach to learning that  focused on facts and the dissemination of these facts from the “sage on the stage” as he poured knowledge into the heads of his pupils.  Knowledge is immediately accessible now.  Nearly every period I tell my students to get out their phones to google something--”find out if John Steinbeck ever went to church, I might say.”  So today what students long for is something to do, as Frank Smith says in his Book of Learning and Forgetting.  Students have the power, through amazing technological tools, to create their own projects, and often those tools are in the  hands of these very students.   But to teach in new ways involves a different outlook on what it is to educate people.  This portion of my journal will be dedicated to my philosophy of education and what it will take for me to effectively teach my students.

 

Ever since I was in the secondary education program in college, I have had quite a different view of just what it is to learn.  Most likely this has something to do with my father, who was known as a very eccentric law professor at Willamette University.  But as a teacher, I am not just a clone of Dad, although I do remember him every single day when I adopt one of his mannerisms or his penchant for the Socratic method.   I is also nice to recognize that the majority of who I am comes from within.  I think that some people downplay the role of the individual soul in determining what a person will become in life.  By this, I mean that it is all too common for people to say that humans are the “grand sum of all the people they have know”--I think the saying goes somewhat like this.  As I see it now, people choose their own philosophy more than I used to think.  So, I am an individual.  “Cogito, ergo sum.”  And what I am has to do with the way that I think and the way that I feel.   And these two concepts--how we think and how we feel--are things that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit as I read through Educational Fads , the Book of Learning and Forgetting, as well as watching Youtube videos of John Taylor Gatto and other revolutionary thinkers.  

 

Dana Ulveland’s first lecture in the 632 class introduces the concept of wonder.  I can think of nothing that better illustrates my view of wonder than Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.”

 

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

 

Who made the world?

Who made the swan,  and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention,  how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me,  what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

 

How often do people in public education--principals, for example--talk about instilling in students a sense of wonder?  It seems that what we’re typically told we must do are the very things that our readings these last few weeks refer to as ineffective teaching.  We hold to educational fads (about 7 years each, it seems to me) and view what might have been a good thing (small schools, for example) as an end in itself and neglect to find ways to teach our students to think. (“substantive education.”)  In particular, we seem to miss the opportunity to share with our According to Louis Raths, before something can be a full value it must meet sevstudents this sense of wonder. For years I have felt at odds with all but one of my school principals (at Realms of Inquiry--yeah, Dana, no joke.  That’s really the name.  Sounds like I’m making it up, doesn’t it.)  It seems that just about all that most administrators are concerned with is raising test scores.  They give lip service to doing things for the rioght reasons (and they truly believer they are, for the most part), but deep down in their subconscious minds it seems that they’ve got to know that raising test scores (not developing thinking, contributing members of society) will pad the old resume and increase their chances for advancement.  Many of us at South Salem High School felt that one of our vice-principals applied for a small schools grant prematurely (the faculty was not on board and it never panned out) simply so that she could become a principal the next year, which she did.  

 

Typically, when I mention that I want to teach my students a sense of wonder at the beauty of the world, or to instill in them intellectual curiosity, I get a slightly concerned look from my superior and the following comment: “That sounds great, but how can you measure it?”  Oh, “reason not the need!” (King Lear) I want to cry out.  I’m left with the conclusion that the thing that differentiates the great teachers from the satisfactorily skilled instructors is that the life-changing teachers are driven by a sense of wonder and are willing to focus on true education even though “they’re not really supposed to.”  

 

How can a sense of wonder be sparked in students.  As Frank Smith says, it has to do with the company you keep (in particular the teacher, for  he or she is the one who begins the journey of wonder that the class will embark upon).  And to make this journey something that students will want to by into it has to be, in Roth’s words, “chosen freely. . . not something . . . forced on you.”

As I see it, the best way to give students choice is to allow them to create projects “after due reflection,” things they will prize and cherish.

 

I find Dana’s example of the lack of creative thinking in piano students quite thought-provoking.  He mentions that ofter people become “very technically proficient and very capable of manipulating the technology at hand, but [very] hard pressed to think up something original and then represent that musically.” He continues with thoughts dealing with the sense of wonder that true learning is all about.  Doesn’t inspiration come from becoming one with the natural world and life in general and standing in awe of the significance of it all? Dana quotes Irving Layton and his poem “Soleil De Noces” and Dana mentions that the poet lies in wait for the obscure to show itself, just as all who are filled with wonder view the world.

 

Soleil De Noces

I wait for the good lines to come.

At the right moment the sun will explode them in my backyard.

Then I shall pick them off the lion-colored road and this unfractured greenery, thistle and speargrass, like bits of clothing.”

 

Yes, education is a matter of “waiting for the obscure to show itself.”  As learners, we must have the mind of the poet, waiting for illumination within the world of darkness, a moment of epiphany, of greatness to flow into the soul and for an ounce of true knowledge to live with us for a moment.  Pablo Neruda said it best in his poem entitled, interestingly enough, “poesia”:

 

Poetry [Poesia]   by Pablo Neruda

 

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don't know how or when,

no they were not voices, they were not

words, nor silence,

but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among violent fires

or returning alone,

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

 

I did not know what to say, my mouth

had no way

with names,

my eyes were blind,

and something started in my soul,

fever or forgotten wings,

and I made my own way,

deciphering

that fire,

and I wrote the first faint line,

faint, without substance, pure

nonsense,

pure wisdom

of someone who knows nothing,

and suddenly I saw

the heavens

unfastened

and open,

planets,

palpitating plantations,

shadow perforated,

riddled

with arrows, fire and flowers,

the winding night, the universe.

 

And I, infinitesimal being,

drunk with the great starry

void,

likeness, image of

mystery,

felt myself a pure part

of the abyss,

I wheeled with the stars,

my heart broke loose on the wind.

 

Ah, so beautiful.  And such an apt metaphor for the attitude requite for the kind of learning that we’re talking about this semester. “From a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night . . .”  And then the learner poet (or is it poet learner) can write

“the first faint line,/faint, without substance, pure/nonsense,/pure wisdom/of someone who knows nothing,/and suddenly” he will see “the heavens/unfastened” and knowledge will infuse the body, soul, and mind.  This way of viewing things is much more in keeping with Plato and Socrates (and the Greek concept of the Muses) than it is in keeping with the analytical perspective.  It’s learning with the heart just as much as it is learning with the mind.  One of my college professors once  told us that he thought the greatest tragedy in intellectual history was that point when Greek culture decided to abandon Plato’s more metaphysical view of enlightenment (think “Allegory of the Cave”) and go with Aristotle’s analytical perspective that tends to “murder to dissect” (Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”.)  Maybe, just maybe, this is where the course of education first turned from a creative approach to learning that focuses on heart to a cold institution of schools where students learned facts (think of Aristotle’s systematic categorization of all plants and anima--taxonomy).  Did things start to lose their significance and meaning at this point in the history of ideas?  Perhaps.

 

Speaking of the beginning of the downward slide in schooling (Gatto), I’m intrigued with Frank Smith’s idea that schools and the very approach to learning became institutionalized as they began to follow the model of the Prussian army and it’s uber-organized and “uniform” (interestiing word, there) approach to learning.  I agree with him that this is, perhaps, the beginning of schools as factory-like “institutions” of instruction.  Many people blame all of this on the Industrial Revolution and the advent of factories.  Maybe it did start earlier.  Education become obsessed with control (“everything in modern education is about control,” John Goodlad says in A Place Called School (rough paraphrase there)).  But if it’s all about control, maybe we could look to America’s Puritan origins for an explanation of our “official model” (Smith) of schooling in America.  Is that where we learned our work ethic and the idea of “no pain, no gain” that is posted on many a locker room wall and ingrained in the minds of the powers that be in education?  Or, as I’ve suggested earlier, maybe it all started with Aristotle.   Whatever the case, breaking free from the fetters (hmmm, Allegory of the Cave, again!) of our educational model won’t be easy.  I agree with Frank Smith.  It might require some radical teachers, the Mr. Keatings and John Gattos out there, to teach the right way even though they’re not supposed to.

 

END OF PART I

 

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The Radicals Who Will Change the World

 

“I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem” --Malcolm X

 

Naturally, I don’t feel that teachers need to revert to the violence of the early sixties and Malcoolm X’s ideas or even the Berkeley protests (a couple of mild teacher strikes and the like ever hurts, though!)  But I do agree with Frank Smith that good teachers need to stand up and teach the right way.  This is why I allow cell phones in my classroom even though I’m technically breaking the school policy. This is why I speak up in faculty meeting and become one of those teachers in the “pesky” English department, the malcontents.  

 

John Taylor Gatto is, no doubt, one of those “pesky” teachers.  In his “The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher” speech Gatto says, tongue in cheek, “ I don't teach

English, I teach school.”    Ever since my first day teaching at Realms of Inquiry, I have felt that I don’t teach English or humanities or French or Theory of Knowledge, but that what I do in the classroom is teach critical thinking.  Next to reading, I’d say that critical thinking is the most important skill that anyone ever learns and that it, along with reading, are pretty much the only skills required to become a mature human being and a contributor to society.  I guess you need to throw in some heart there as well, and isn’t it sad that so few teachers teach that, compassion, along with critical thinking.  With critical thinking comes the ability to grow as an intellectual, to become a new person from day to day, not to sink into what Emerson called a “foolish consistency.” “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines.” I thought of Emerson’s statement when George W. Bush and his cronies were criticizing John Kerry for being a flip flopper on the issue of the war in Afghanistan.   Although Gatto bashes the typical school system, because his approach to education is based on human interaction and problem solving, he most definitely believes in school.  School for Gatto appears to be a place where students and teacher become fellow learners in the journey of critical thinking and problem solving.  No doubt Gatto would like reading about the weaknesses of all the educational fads that have plagued us for the last thirty years.   

 

As an example of the type of learning that John Gatto would most likely approve of, let me read the following exerpt from The Princeton Review’s 357 Top Colleges.  The PR suggests that Deep Springs, although absolutely unknown, is the best undergraduate school in the country.  It state that Deep Springs students frequently consider “but rarely prefer Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Brown.”  The book adds that Deep Springs is founded upon three guiding principles, “the three pillars of a  Deep Springs education--labor, academics, and self-governance,” combine to produce unparalleled challenges that run the gamut from fixing a hay baler in the middle of the night to puzzling of ta particularly difficult passage of Hegel.”  Talk about making learning real, something very much of this world, an opportunity for minds to come together in the business of walking down Neruda’s street and beginning to experience in body, heart, and mind, the world in new, enlightened ways.  

 

I found a YouTube video on a somewhat similar secondary school in England,  the Sudbury Valley School.  It seems to me that it shows a couple of dangers that lurk in the radical departure from structure, however.  At this school students are free to show up whenever they like so long as they put in 5 hours. Do teenagers really have this kind of self-discipline?  Maybe they do if they work on truly fascinating projects.  Another problem I have with the Sudbury approach is that there are no teachers at the school.  Instead, they have resident experts to coach students when they have questions.  But do students think of the right questions to ask?  Are engineers and artists effective teachers?  Both are often doubtful. In the video the interviewer asks, “So, students sort of stumble along learning things?”  The response to this question is interesting and hits at the core of the approach to teaching that fosters student passion based on their interests and their choices.

“Well, we’ve always stumbled along learning,” the director of Sudbury says.  Frank Smith would agree.  

 

As I contemplate teaching my survey-level English classes next year, I do worry that students just wouldn’t have the maturity to take responsibility for their learning.  As one of the students at Sudbury remarks,“This is the hardest school to be at because we are responsible for our own learning.” At this risk of coming across as affectedly philosophical, this sounds a bit like the anguish Jean-Paul Sartre talks about, the terrible responsibility that humans can’t handle.  He says,  “We are alone, with no excuses. That is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”  But I’ll never find out just how much responsibility my typically unmotivated students will take when they’re given the opportunity to do things they’re passionate about.  I’ll find out in September.

 

END OF PART II

 

I think that Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince marvelously illustrates mindset that has come to plague the United States at the beginning of the new millennium.

 

“Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing.

In the book it said: "Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion."

I pondered deeply, then, over the adventures of the jungle. And after some work with a colored pencil I succeeded in making my first drawing. My Drawing Number One. It looked something like this:

I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them. But they answered: "Frighten? Why should any one be frightened by a hat?"

My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of a boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained. My Drawing Number Two looked like this:

The grown-ups' response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter. I had been disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and my Drawing Number Two. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

 

In his lecture notes, Dana Ulveland refers to a Chinese student he had who said that Chinese students aren’t good at math but that they are simply gifted at making calculations. Supposedly it is Americans who teach more mathematical thinking.  Hopefully this is true.  If it isn’t, we must definitely move in this direction.  It doesn’t seem to me that all that many teachers teach critical thinking and even fewer teacher creative thinking.  Instead, we slip into thinking that school and learning are to be “hard work” (brings to min the Zen tale) and that it takes real effort to make progress--”no pain, no gain.”  Maybe this explains our obsession with homework.  I have always hated homework, myself.  I don’t hate take home projects for students, but I hate mindless drills, that’s for sure.  I agree with Alfie Kohn when he says that homework destroys families.  Can you see an Italian family gathered around the dinner table and sitting there for an hour discussing homework?  No.  They talk and share stories of life.  Kohn is right.  It’s not at all logical to give students 12 hours of homework a day (“a second shift”), the equivalent of the hours  a Wall Street attorney puts in.  Shouldn’t learning be a natural thing?  Should the first words out of parents’ mouths upon reuniting with their children in the evening be, “Do you have any homework?”  I say, continue to live life instead, taking with you the new ways of thinking that the day of school brought.

 

But instead so many people in society have foregone “la dolce vita” of the family gathered around the hearth and have turned their backs on true learning.  And for what?  As one high school valedictorian put it, “the majority of students are put through a brainwashing process” preparing them to become consumers.”  Sad.  It seems as if the American Dream has become perverted and what people now seek is to work hard to make money to buy more toys.

 

I’ll refrain from preaching any more about what I think the American dream is all about and finish this part of my journalizing with Dana’s interesting idea that maybe our current approach to education could actually be working against what is required for sound and vibrant economic health”[because our schools are] caught in old linear industrial models.”

 

One of my favorite concepts from the last decade comes from Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat.  He says that now that the world has been flattened we must not try to compete with a world that is now better at cranking out products.  Our schools should not be caught in old linear industrial models.  And they shouldn’t be caught in the models of last year, either.  Now that we’re in the computer age, over 500 million keen minds in other countries can use the ideas we currently have to build their economies.  If the United States wants to continue to compete, we have to become creative thinkers.  Friedman says that what our schools need to do is to teach us to be creative problem solvers and inventors.  If we’re not the ones inventing the iPhones and other cutting edge technology, we will languish.  But if we can be the ones “running the show,” who cares if workers in China make parts for iPhones or if cardiologists in India read MRI scans (which is what happened with my last one).  Maybe we can give up one part of the American dream, which said that if we work hard we’ll get ahead, and instead focus on the other part of our dream, which is to live happy, meaningful lives.

 

END OF PART III