Tag Archives: education

We Carry Ourselves

At its most fundamental level the Internet is nothing more than a way to spread and share information. Sometimes this information is produced by the person sharing it, but more often than not the Internet is simply the passing of acquired information. We share information in hopes that it will help us better connect with each other. We cut and paste information, passing it from one node of our network to the next hoping that it will stick where it needs to stick. I have cut and pasted the following post into all the blogs I operate on the web, in hopes that all the people who follow me will get a chance to experience the following words. I found his address by Marget Edson on Doug Noon’s great blog Borderland, and he found it from Susan Ohanian’s blog, and now I send it to you all:

Salutations, memorials, bromides: let us commence.

I want to talk about love — not romance, not love l-u-v.
I want to talk about a particular kind of love, this love: classroom teaching.

I have my posse of gaily clad classroom teachers behind me.

They like to be called college professors.
And we can’t all work for the government.

We gather together because of classroom teaching.
We have shown you our love in our work in the classroom.

Classroom teaching is a physical, breath-based, eye-to-eye event.
It is not built on equipment or the past.
It is not concerned about the future.
It is in existence to go out of existence.
It happens and then it vanishes.
Classroom teaching is our gift.
It’s us; it’s this.

We bring nothing into the classroom — perhaps a text or a specimen. We carry ourselves, and whatever we have to offer you is stored within our bodies. You bring nothing into the classroom — some gum, maybe a piece of paper and a pencil: nothing but yourselves, your breath, your bodies.

Classroom teaching produces nothing. At the end of a class, we all get up and walk out. It’s as if we were never there. There’s nothing to point to, no monument, no document of our existence together.

Classroom teaching expects nothing. There is no pecuniary relationship between teachers and students. Money changes hands, and people work very hard to keep it in circulation, but we have all agreed that it should not happen in the classroom. And there is no financial incentive structure built into classroom teaching because we get paid the same whether you learn anything or not.

Classroom teaching withholds nothing. I say to my young students every year, “I know how to add two numbers, but I’m not going to tell you.” And they laugh and shout, “No!” That’s so absurd, so unthinkable. What do I have that I would not give to you?

Bringing nothing, producing nothing, expecting nothing, withholding nothing –
what does that remind you of?
Is this a bizarre occurrence that will go into The Journal of Irreproducible Results?
Or is it something that happens every day, all the time, all over the world,
and is based not on gain and fame, but on love.

There are those who say that classroom teaching is doomed and that by the time one of you addresses the class of 2033, there will be a museum of classroom teaching.

Ever since the invention of wedge-shaped writing on a clay tablet, classroom teaching has been obsolete. It’s been comical. Why don’t we just write the assignments and algorithms on a clay tablet, hang it up on the wall, and let the students come who will to teach themselves from our documents?

Why, since the creation of writing with a pen on a piece of paper, do we still bother to have schools?

Why, since the invention of movable metal type, don’t we all just go to the library?

Why do we have to have class? Why do we need teachers?

Why, since the advent of the microchip, don’t we all stay home in our pajamas and hit send?

Technology is nipping at the heels of classroom teaching, but I perceive no threat.
How could something false replace something true?
How could a substitute, a proxy, step in for something real and alive?
How could the virtual nudge out the actual?

The other great threat to classroom teaching is the rush to data — data-driven education.
We must measure everything — percentages, charts, tables.

I’m not entirely opposed to this.
If data-driven education were a pie graph, I would have a piece.

But I was not educated and did not become a teacher to produce data.

I love the classroom.
I loved it as a student, and I love it as a teacher.
I can name every teacher I ever had:
Mrs. Mulshanok, Miss Williams, Mrs. Clark, Miss Bogan, Mrs. Johnson, Mrs. Muys, Mrs. Parker, Mr. Eldridge, Miss Bush — and that’s just through sixth grade.
I could go on, I promise.

I loved coming to class: the chairs, the windows, unzipping my book bag.
And I loved my teachers.
There was content, I suppose, but that’s not what I remember.
I remember my teachers.
I remember being in the room,
and no data and no bar graph will be assembled to replace that, or even to capture it.

This week my students worked on dividing a pizza between two people, and they realized that if you make the line down the center of the pizza the two sides will be equal. After much trial and error, they came to this conclusion on their own, and I welcome you to try it. I think it’s really going to take off, and let this be where it begins.

When they take a standardized test, they will be able to fill in the bubble next to the pizza that is cut exactly in half. Do they know that will be the correct answer? Yes. But I don’t care that much. What I care about is how they got there, how they figured it out for themselves.

This skinny little high school senior got herself into Smith College by writing an essay about Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s theme, “The journey, not the arrival, matters.” It worked for me.

Standardized tests measure the arrival, but they have nothing to say about the journey, about having wonderful ideas. Do you know it/do you not know it is second, and how do you know it, and who are you, is first.

The only way this knowledge grows inside a student is with a teacher, a classroom teacher. Of course, my students will insist they did it themselves, and I don’t try to disabuse them of that.

But the work you graduates have done was in the classroom with your teachers.
That’s the miracle of today.
Why don’t we talk about it?
Because it doesn’t show up.
There’s not a bar graph for classroom teaching. There’s no data for classroom teaching, and yet it persists this year and the next year and the year after that.

Telling tens of thousands of people what to do is not teaching, it’s shouting, and there’s a lot of that going around.

Showing somebody how to do something exactly the way you’ve always done it is not teaching, it’s training. And there’s plenty of that, too.

But the reality that is neither shouting nor training is classroom teaching.
Nobody can touch it because nobody can point to it.
You have it forever.
When it grows inside you, it’s doing its work.

We can disappear.
We’ll never see you again, probably.
The chairs will be folded.
It will be as if we were never here.
There will be nothing we can count after today.
But not everything that counts can be counted.
Not everything that matters can be put into a pie chart.

The Board of Trustees has set a very great challenge for itself:
to educate us all for lives of distinction.
You are never going to be able to make a bar graph out of that.
That is immeasurable, and that’s what makes it so real.
I admonish you — because that’s my job — to think about the things that float away:
your love for your friends,
the smell of the lilacs,
the feeling your families have on this day.
You will have nothing to take with you.
The diploma you receive will be someone else’s.

Everything meaningful about this moment, and these four years,
will be meaningful inside you, not outside you.

I’ve been a classroom teacher for sixteen years–as long as you have been in the classroom. We started the same year. And I hope to go on for fourteen more years.
That will make thirty, and I’ll be done.

At the end of that time, someone will bring me a box, and I will put in it a ceramic apple somebody gave me thinking it would be symbolic somehow. I will have nothing, and that will be proof of the meaning of my work.

If you can point to something, you might lose it, or you might break it, or someone might take it from you. As long as you store it inside yourself, it’s not going anywhere — or it’s going everywhere with you.

This day is a day of love.
It’s a day of your family’s love for you,
your love for each other and your teachers,
and your teachers’ love for you.

In time, the bar graphs may tumble,
the clay tablets may crumble.
They’re only made of clay.
But our love
is here to stay.

Thank you.

Please pass it on to wherever it needs to go.

Teachers Are Fighting

2 Replies

I recently read an article about a teacher’s union in New Zealand fighting new rules that could have teachers fired for online behavior.

Teachers are fighting to exclude their private lives – such as personal postings on Internet sites Bebo and Facebook – from falling foul of new serious misconduct rules. The Teachers Council wants to change criteria by which officials decide whether to refer complaints against the country’s 90,000 teachers to its disciplinary tribunal. The tribunal can censure or deregister teachers for serious misbehaviour. The council says the new clause – covering “any conduct
that brings, or is likely to bring, discredit to the profession” – would plug gaps in current rules. But teacher unions fear the “all encompassing” clause would put teachers’ personal lives under unfair scrutiny, even when it had no bearing on their ability to be good teachers.

As readers of this blog are aware, I have had my own troubles dealing with this issue of being asked to resign for my online behavior. For the last few weeks, I have often found myself saying, “This is a very grey area. Incidents like mine will occur more and more often as teachers and society at large start spending more time online.”

This problem is more than just a case of inappropriate applications on Facebook, the issue at hand is that as we enter a more open and global society with more and more people allowed to express themselves publicly on the internet, professionals especially those who work with children must decide how to best express themselves in a multi-cultural world.

Teachers already have to prove they are of fit character.

What does that mean? What is fit character is probably very different in New Zealand, or New York City, or the Middle East.

Post Primary Teachers Association president Robin Duff said current misconduct criteria were “perfectly adequate”. The new rule was too vague. “What’s creditable and discreditable these days? That sort of judgment is often based on your own social background.”

To what rubric are teachers being judged on appropriate online behavior. I think we can all agree that…

allegations of physical, sexual or psychological abuse of children; inappropriate pupil relationships; viewing pornography at school; using, making or supplying drugs; neglect or illtreatment of a child or animal in their care; or crimes punishable by at least three months’ jail.

…are unacceptable anywhere, but what about teachers who promote the theory of evolution over intelligent design, or teachers who have strong feelings about the war in Iraq? Suddenly, a teacher who is pro-active in politics can be deemed unfit by a school board, a principal, or a particular group of parents.Teachers are held to a higher standard for social behavior in nearly all cases. Which is fine to an extent. I understand the level of trust that is put in my hands on a daily basis. I will expect nothing less when my daughter goes to school, but as the 21st century really gets underway, we must move forward cautiously and not allow fear of unknown technologies dictate the level of freedoms we allow the men and women teaching our children.

The reality is that teachers are not robots. We function in the same social and intellectual spheres that govern the rest of the world. It is difficult enough to be everything to everyone else: the polite and professional coworker, the qualified and hardworking employee, the fair and kind role model for students, and the polished and respectful saint for parents.

I cannot think of another job, where a person is expected to always be on their “best” behavior. We are expected to remain blank slates that will somehow shape and build the future, without offering our own ideas so as not to improperly influence young minds, lest their parents’ opinions, or that of the school board or administration should differ from our own.

We live in an age where opinions and strong beliefs can be threatening to people in power. We are told from a young age not to discuss politics or religion in public. It is unprofessional we are led to believe. But as a language arts and social studies teacher how can I not? How are we meant to teach children that they can change the existing power structures and work towards a better world, if we are no allowed to discuss the flaws in the system?

Teachers are not meant to criticize a certain president or his policies, or question the global consumer culture, or suggest that perhaps capitalism is not the best system around. Some say this type of political criticism makes a teacher of unfit character. Don’t get me wrong. I whole-heartedly agree that this type of bias has no place in a classroom, especially at the middle school level. Teachers should not be sermonizing their religious or political beliefs in the classroom, but they shouldn’t be punished for expressing them on the Internet.

If we allow schools to start firing teachers for vague indications of inappropriateness, we are opening the door to weakened teacher’s unions and a generation of teachers afraid to take risks and be themselves.

There seems to be no place left for us teacher/activists to express our ideas. It doesn’t seem fair that we cannot feel comfortable expressing ourselves on the internet, the very space we are painstakingly teaching our students to use.

It feels very hypocritical to teach students to use the tools that we ourselves are afraid to use. I believe in education more than anything else in the world. I believe that objective presentation of facts, logical thought, honesty, love, and communication are the keys to a more peaceful world. A peaceful world is my only goal. If this attitude makes me of unfit character than I suppose I have to search the earth until I find a school that agrees with my ideals. Which is what I am doing now. I have no hidden agendas. No matter what political or religious obstacles we may face, I want nothing more than to find a path toward peace. This is why I teach. This is why I write. This is why I exist. My blogs are nothing more than maps of my journey. There may have been times I have taken wrong turns, said things I shouldn’t have said, but they are meant to be read as a whole. I do not believe in sermonizing or preaching in the classroom. While my opinions may appear to take a one-sided stand at times, I work very hard to create and maintain an objective environment to teach kids to ask questions and search out the truth. That is all.

So remember that not only are…

there’s lots of other things that happen in people’s lives that have no direct bearing on people’s ability to be good teachers. Certainly not the private life of a teacher unless it impacted on the profession itself.

Personal factors in a teacher’s life often enhance their ability to better relate to and teach students. We cannot allow these freedoms to be taken away.

Activist Classroom

6 Replies

Since March 10th, I have been out of a job and it has been difficult for me to post anything worthwhile, because after all, it is tough reflecting on teaching when you haven’t been teaching. There have been many times I have had a post brewing, but I let it slip away due to either, laziness or self-pity. Whatever the case may have been, I have a new project and I am excited to be back in the game.

Although I am not getting paid and my future is still unclear, I feel the need to be involved with my teaching network and trying to rustle up people who are interested in exchanging ideas and learning. Those are the reasons I teach anyway, not for a paycheck.

As I sat day after day, thinking about how the educational institutions of the world are mistreating me, I started to re-think what it means to teach in an institutional environment run at best by bureaucrats and at worst by corporate interests. I also began to brainstorm “perfect” classroom ideas. I have been forced to really sell myself to potential employers, and these negotiations have got me thinking about courses I would like to teach that don’t exist in most schools.

It appears that more and more people are starting to realize the fundamental flaw of teaching in a system that is based on profit. Teachers like Clay Burel and Bill Farren are asking us to rethink the very nature of how a school should function in society. As the global consumer cultures attains more and more influnce over all of our lives, should it not be the role of schools to offer young people alternatives to current systems.

Our schools should play a role in encouraging and teaching students the basic principles of activist culture. As the authority, teachers are nervous to tell an already rebellious group of adolescents to question authority, but we owe it to them to demand more of their educators.

I hope to play with some of these ideas further at the Intrepid Classroom, but I want to use this space to reflect on the reasons behind why these themes should be taught in traditional schools. I hope to create a sort of activist training school. A place where students can question the very systems they are told to worship. I would like to create a source of resources from art, to music, to web culture that helps students understand that although the mass media may try to make them believe they are powerless, there have always been people fighting for a better world, and most importantly they too can participate. Although perhaps not for much longer!
I have written in the past about my Utopian classroom, but now I want to focus on my perfect curriculum. The reoccurring themes for most of my ideas are the incorporation of Social Justice and Peace Activism into traditional curriculums. I see a series of specialized courses that deal with political, class-based issues, and artistic and philosophical themes. One such course would be an elective, probably a semester long on music as an agent of change. I hope to outline each course in depth, but for now I want to start drawing the rough sketches:

The music curriculum would study everything from sixties protest music, to the blues, to modern day singer/activists working for change. Students would not only listen to the music and examine and reflect on the lyrics, but they would also be asked to research and learn about the social problems that were the impetus of the music. As you can see there is already a Social Studies and Language Arts element to the material. They would also be asked to collaborate and create socially conscious music themselves. Using networking tools like Youtube, they would than try to promote their music to as wide an audience as possible.

I have taught a mini-music unit every year of my career, but it always seems forced, and it takes time away from the curriculum I “should” be teaching. Now that I am out of a real classroom, I hope to teach students about the power of music in a less constricting and confined environment We owe it to our students to not only study history, but learn to be a part of it.

How do you incorporate socially conscious material into your curriculum? What obstacle to you face?

Three Cups of Tea

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I am reading a book called Three Cups of Tea, by David Oliver Relin about a man named Greg Mortenson, who after failing to summit K2 stumbles into a small village in Northern Pakistan called Korphe and promises to build the people of the village a school. Reading this book coupled with my friend Jason’s work with his school the Daraja Academy has got me thinking. What am I doing? What is my purpose?

The last few days have been a series of intensive soul searching journeys for me to find out the answers to these questions. While it may appear that I am being a bit melodramatic about the whole affair, I do take my life goals and plans very seriously. I have never wanted to simply live your average middle class life. Even as a kid, I imagined that I would do bigger things. I imagined that someday, someone would write books about things that I had done, or better yet I would write them myself.

While I am not shy about admitting that I have had my share of self aggrandizing feats, I still feel like my life is building. I haven’t done enough.

That is when it hit me; tonight, here in bed, as my wife lay sleeping reading about how this guy Mortenson had a huge set back in his plan, and his girl friend dumped him, I realized just how alone and miserable he must have felt in the Richmond district of San Francisco. I felt sorry for him. He was not some hero out changing the world. He was a mortal who was broken. I felt connected to him.

I guess what I am trying to say is that we needn’t change the world all at once and all alone. We can allow it to change us, back and forth, until we become something we can recognize and live with. I have been racked with guilt that I came to Doha to make money, and that being fired was the price I paid for turning my back on my true nature, but my true nature is to simply be the peace that I want to spread. The kids I interacted with here needed education and guidance just as much as the kids in Kenya or Korphe, and I was, until the plug was pulled, getting through to them.

I am a teacher. That is what I was born to do. I was put on this earth to interact with people and try to better understand each other. I prefer working with young adults, because that is the age I felt I needed someone most, eighth grade to be specific. I am realizing that I do not need a classroom to teach. I simply need to be the peace I seek here and now. Where ever I am, interacting with whomever I meet. I am not angry at myself or others for how they perceive my actions. Perhaps there is a hint of hostility in the way I see the world, and that is where I need to start the change.

I may not be building schools in Pakistan or Kenya, but I am on a path that will lead me some place worth being. Actually this very path, my journey is in itself the most amazing thing I will ever experience. And if there is no one there to write the book about it when it is done, you could say you were reading it here all along.

End note: For all the edubloggers out there, here is my question. This was originally written for my personal blog, as a way for me to sort out my thoughts and share my thoughts with the small community of people that I have built there, but I also see the value of posting it here. This is where I am having a hard time separating private from professional. Wouldn’t other teachers or perhaps parents who would read a blog post like this not benefit, from seeing this side of a teacher? I guess I will just double post till I figure it out.

Exposure

3 Replies

Comment I just left on The Thinking Stick:

As you, and maybe some of your readers know, what you discussed in this post has been a very real experience for me. I have written on the subject a bit, but since I am exposed and looking for a new job, I am a bit reserved on how I approach the subject.

But let me try and sort some thoughts out here now:

We want, I think, as educators to teach our students to be resourceful, expressive, open, honest, members of a global community that is rapidly homogenizing and melding in terms of social norms, cultural taboos etc…This is true at least in the developed world, where access to Web 2.0 is at all time high. But then as educators, we ourselves are terrified of who and what we are.

In my case it was a picture that represented my thoughts on censorship that upset a parent, but it could have been my thoughts on social justice, politics, religion, or many other things that, apparently, I am expected to teach but not think or write about.

My point is that there will always be things that will upset a group of people when we are exposed on the web. So the questions is are we trying to use Web 2.0 and all these tools to connect people and tear down walls, or are we still trying to hide behind as many walls as we can?

I honestly feel that if an employer searches me out and sees my work on the web, from my youtube videos, to my flickr pages, to my personal and professional blogs, they should see a complete picture of the type of person I am. I am extremely proud of that person, I have been working on him for 33 years now. He is more than just a marketable teacher; he is a complete human being. Isn’t that ultimately what we are teaching our students? To be able to create themselves and be fully expressive using the Internet tools to not only better understand themselves, but also the people who cohabitate the planet on which they live.

Perhaps I am too naïve and idealistic, I have been told this before, but I am a firm believer that the point of all this technology is connection and exposure. I guess my idea of private and public is fading fast…is the world ready for that? Are our schools?

I have learned the hard way, that they are not, but with things changing as fast as they are, we have to be ready for it when it does. If we as educators are overly cautious to use the web, we cannot expect our students to use it to its full potential.

So if you have never read my work please google Jabiz Raisdana and if you are an administrator and need a teacher please get in touch.