Public education is not easy

This was a response to an article about the need for merit pay and Charter Schools.

Really !

Who will teach the unteachable? The criminals? I had them in my class. How do you measure success? Good grades? Good citizens? I would love to see what the religious (Charter Schools) would do with an atheist. Should they deny funding rather than accepting an atheist?
How about the unmotivated?

Can a great teacher motivate students in the gang infested urban schools? If you think so, you have watched too many movies.

It is easy to be a great teacher -- only teach those who need good grades to move on -- don't work in a school where students (or their parents) do not think that graduating is important. Don't teach in a school that requires more than 20 students in a class. Teach in a school where the parents are willing to pay for more attention to students.

Students and parents who have will always have greater education -- even from teachers who are not stellar.

Those who do not have will always need to share the attention of any teacher -- good or bad. However. the business model will measure success on a short term time-line.

Education for the masses is a very very long term venture. No bottom line measured each year is meaningful. Success comes one student at a time over a very long time.

A Charter school is a great way to separate those who will succeed anyway from those who need to be educated.

My $.02

Don

BANG!

This is an article recently published in the FACCC Journal.


Imagine the instability at the point of the big bang -- transition at the speed of light.

I have been at smaller big bang moments in which an idea gives birth to a new endeavor that requires a new process. Over time as the process grows and thrives I've watched the progenitors gradually pushed aside because of their creative sloppiness and replaced by those who feel they can leverage the success with better management. The managing process then begins to lose sight of the original idea replacing it with a concern for self sustainability through standardized, neat, and orderly processes. The last step is the calcification of the routinized process, calcified in its own procedural gridlock. I then find little interest in the current expression of our original big bang and slip away.

Can you imagine what it was like at that primordial meeting of service oriented individuals as they banged into the idea of having everyone in our society educated? Can you image their first attempts (one teacher on one end of a log and student on the other)? Pretty inefficient. It could be made so much better. We could teach students just like we make widgets. Mass production. Let's put them all in a room and push standardized content at them and then assess them all in the same way. We could then have cloned thinkers who will move society forward in lock step.

But those of us who still feel the power of the bang find that students are constantly and perhaps fortunately left behind to find their own personal bangs. In fact, those who are successfully extruded from our mass education machine might at best only be capable of service to the banging of others. I think of all the institutional meetings I took part in that had way more than six degrees of separation from the bang's prime directive, student learning--remember the student?

I have just recently retired and made the reverse move of full time to part time teaching. I now have the pleasure of shrugging off all those meetings and simply teaching. I leave just as we are assimilating the no-child-left-behind extension of SLOs. Why in the world have we not stood up to such naive impositions? We all know there are no two students alike. Why do we accommodate such directives that violate our understandings of the diversity of students and the way they learn? We know better yet we rationalize their worth.

The opposite of the dynamic transition of our big bangs is the stasis of procedural conformity. Cults conform, educated minds thrive in the transitional milieu of ambiguity. How do we encourage students to ask the questions important to their lives when we have standardized tests? Life is not standard! Life has no answer book. We are intellectually dishonest when we intimate through our overly specific syllabi that life, like our courses, has specific and known expectations. We should worry less that students know soon to be forgotten obscure details and more that we don't have the tools to rate their ambiguity factors. Instead we should want students, unlike our politicians, to understand why it is important to change your mind in the transitional throws of life.

Rapid transition is exciting and scary. Stasis sucks.

Musings on the Mat

We are a part of a great ensemble. Our instrument chimes at just the right time to add our voice in the texture of the symphony. One thread in the tapestry of life that clings artfully to those around it through a series of interweaving loops, wraps, and knots. A fiber of gold next to a fiber of green; blue and yellow blending with red and brown. The richness of the tapestry, the depth and vibrancy of the symphony depends on the harmony in the ensemble, the sangha.

Sangha is a yogic term for community. Often spiritual, sangha is really any group that works together toward a common goal. Sangha is the ensemble playing a symphony. Sangha is the dance of the loom as it weaves its tapestry.

Yoga is an interesting practice, like music and dance it can be done as individual practice or group practice. I find, while I like practicing on my own, I much prefer to practice in a group, surrounded by my sangha. We are a group of people working individually, but nevertheless unified by our common struggles and challenges, whether it is coming into full lotus or truly allowing our core being to relax. The presence of the sangha assists me in my individual growth.

And, most importantly it reminds me as I roll up my mat and leave the studio, that sangha is out there in the real world and I am a part of it.

With each step, I weave my thread into the fabric and play my melody for the sweeping crescendo.

I am a golden thread.
I am an oboe.

You are my sangha.
Namaste.

A Child Left Behind

Dave and I just got back from Minneapolis at a MERLOT conference and Dave raised the idea that this national group of educators covering most disciplines in higher education should be a policy making group. Why not produce a Merlot report on the state of education in America. The discussion moved to possible topics. Dave hit it out of the park. He wants to investigate the child that is left behind -- like the entire NBA.

There are some very successful individuals that meet this definition. College and becoming a nuclear scientist was not in their DNA. So, why should every student be defined as successful by meeting a college bound agenda? and a failure if they don't. There are many very successful careers that do not need this as a measure of success.

Then we should not make being left behind as a failure, it just might be a success. Glass half full, Glass really full. Just because the student's educational glass is half empty does not mean that there is only failure in the future for them.

If a technical school does not need the "standardized tests" it does not mean that the school or the individual is a failure.

What is illiteracy? Not enough English? Math? Who sets these rules. I am a musician - these standardized tests don't test anything that is really important to me -- music theory, playing the clarinet, writing world class songs.

So this might be the problem. We need more music in the standardized tests. Just get rid of some of the English and Math. All students must be able to play the piano and the oboe.

Yes, this could save the world.

Don

Flash back

Listening to Obama's speech in Berlin today I remember the same kind of inviting global perspective years ago when I was in college. I was in the marching band at Berkeley and we were having a bonfire rally (yes for the football team). I was back stage in the outdoor theater waiting to go in. Just a few feet away was Bobbie Kennedy. I could feel the heat of this man.

He came out and spoke about the citizens of America and how they needed help. He did not speak of war or force of any kind except the force of the individual to work together with like minded individuals to help the least of us. It was the Kennedy theme but it resonated with me and the others their at this "pep" rally.

I just don't understand why such a large percentage of our population (usually the haves) don't feel any obligation to the have nots.

I guess protecting one's money is everything.
"The government should not take my money"
"Cut taxes -- I don't want my money going to those lazy poor people."
On and on . . . . . .

I know so many struggling poor people who keep saying these same tired lines.

Don't they know that they are not rich enough to be a Republican?

Don

Watching the pros

The World Music online course is developing well. The main authors are such pros. Their expertises do not parallel as much as overlap. One has taught the course for several years and one editor/author has a honest love for the musics and cultures and has lived in many of these countries. The third is a world authority in several cultures and is a complete academic.

Dave and I are essentially producers of the project pedagogically and technologically. The three content specialists together have a vast body of knowledge. Translating it to the goal of this course has been interesting and at times difficult.

The collection of listening examples for the course is being put together by Sony. They are also securing rights for the selections. There are selections that I have never heard of that surprisingly that Sony can not secure rights. I can understand the Beatles not giving rights for our Rock collection but these selections are far far far from the public eye and not valuable to the mass market. Weird. Somebody is not sharing and this is an educational product. AND they would make a little bit of money.

Regardless, it will be a wonderful addition to our suite of online music courses.

Don

Snow in June

Who would have thunk it. We (Dave and I and wives and friends) are in Steamboat Springs, CO just to experience the hot springs and the high country. At 5 am it started to snow. It is June and was 80 degrees yesterday. Love it -- snowed in June. So what do you do in June when it snows? You make little snowmen and put them on the railing of the balcony. That is what you do.

Don