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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128083100
Laurie Anderson was featured on NPR with an interview about her new album and her work in general. She is a tongue in cheek world observer and still an entertaining musician. She shows courage to try ideas for the "fun of it." One example was her concert for dogs at Coney Island. Go to the link and have a renewal with an old friend or a wonderful new experience. Buddha believed Nirvana was within each of us. Laurie Anderson lets me approach my Nirvana without separating from the world just the way the Buddha wanted us to do it. Enjoy!
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
A Good Friend Has Passed Away
Perhaps there is an age that sees the passing from life more often than other parts of life, but such losses should never seem unimportant. I do not know how the death of a good person impacts the cosmos, but it must. My friend Bob passed today. Like another friend just two months ago, he had been fighting for his life for a while. He was a person who deserved more life. He was a person who could have filled more life. He was not given more life and his family and friends will have no more of him physically in their lives. This must be felt somewhere besides in our personal feelings and emotions. If it is not, is a life nothing?
Life Does Not Stop
Life Does Not Stop
Life does not stop when a friend gets ill. It does not stop because friends are not seen. The lives of others go on with or without us. Good intentions to call, to write to visit does not stop time for them. Death does not stop for them just because we have not called. Who a friend is becomes was in ways that the mind does not want to grasp. Instead the death is put on the shelf with the other memories - to be managed when life stops?
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
It would seem a truism to say that education and educational systems should make sense. Yet, do they? Does anybody really want them to make sense? Finally, to whom should education and education systems make sense? I like to share with my students in an early field experience student teaching course the idea that for our planning for classes and likewise, I believe for education systems to work, we need to look and think from the students' perspectives. It does not matter if the students are first grade students in an inner city setting that is surrounded by high crime and great poverty or if the students are freshman at a prestigious university. The system and its plans should make sense based upon the students' place in and understanding of the world and education.
Of course, this can sound simplistic, but it remains that very rarely in my 35 plus years at all levels of education plus nearly as many years as an educational consumer has the system even taken the time to try to explain how it works so an individual will reach specific goals not just universal ones such as "get a degree." If systems did make sense from the student/consumer's perspective, our success rates for achieving schools and successful students would be far better than they are. Why don't systems make sense from the students' views?
Quite quickly, the answer is that most who are involved in education are so concerned with what they are supposed to be doing or achieving that a very basic question is forgotten. That question is, "What will the student be doing, thinking feeling, and experiencing as I do whatever it is I do." (The question can be rephrased to reflect an institutional approach as opposed to that of one practitioner.) Let's look at an example we should all be able to understand - the classroom teacher.
If a teacher thinks, plans and teaches from a point of view of "What do I have to do," everything that happens is seen in reaction to what the teacher does. So with the best of intentions and the firm direction of a school district, the teacher decides that he must teach some skill or concept from a sequenced curriculum. The teacher then proceeds, again, with the best of intentions to make plans using his or her knowledge of instructional practices or whatever else you want to call all that we teach teachers about what they should do to be effective teachers. The lesson is constructed. It is presented and the teacher finds himself telling and retelling, teaching and reteaching what the students should do and learn. The teacher is then urged to reflect upon what he or she would do differently to improve the lesson.
The student is not asked to reflect in a similar manner. Has the teacher been provided with a lens to ask, "What does the student need and want to learn?" "What does the student need to do and think in order to learn that skill or concept?" What will it look like when the student masters the skill or concept?' We have tried to approximate this type of thought with all sorts of statements of behavioral objectives. This practice of objectives stated in terms of student behavior is even fading as misunderstood or inadequately understood statements of standards are becoming the planning loci of teachers, schools and systems. What might be different if the planning started from the learners perspective?
Let's start with that hypothetical first grade student in an inner city school in a high crime and poverty area. If we ask the child what she or he wants to or needs to learn, in some form they would say something about reading, writing, math, and making a living. The answer would not vary from one schoolhouse to another, no matter what baggage is brought from the environment. The question of "Why learn those abilities" is where the divergence would show. So, now we know that the child has some basic concepts of what might happen if school works for them. One could then continue the conversation to learn what reading means to the child instead of trying to tell the child what reading means. A response to this by a child might be. "Understanding the words." With that information, we could then prepare to explain to the child or children that there are a lot of words; but there are a certain few words that seem to show up everywhere. We can then share with the children that in order to reach their goal of reading, we will have to do things to learn those frequent words. We could then also explain that words can be unlocked using tools that help us figure out what the marks on the page mean. The marks on the page have shapes and each shape represents a sound or set of sounds.
Our second task then will be to learn those marks and the sounds. When those marks are put together, that is when all words are made. So we will have to learn what the marks look and sound like not just by themselves but also when they are with other letters and sounds. Clearly, we go on to develop with the students, tasks that we will have to be able to complete in order for them to do what they want which is to read. This would be one aspect of planning and working from the students perspective.
Be careful if as an educator, you are saying those wants are a given. My inner-city student teachers were surprised when I had them ask the students they encountered why they wanted to learn to read. They learned ideas such as being safe, getting my daddy out of jail, stop the shooting or shouting or fighting, or to have enough food. All students of any age seek power from learning. Power over or for what is still a critical question that should be examined in a further discussion of student wants.
Other aspects of planning would be what would the child be doing physically as he or she were practicing and mastering these parts. That planning would take into consideration that the learner is a child not a little adult who acts and performs like a little adult. The planning would be from the eyes of one who understood what holding a pencil and using paper were like for a child. The planning would understand how interesting everything going on in the world is to the child. That would help to shade planning that ensured the type of space both in physical space and in time that a child can comfortably control. How big might each chunk of the task be for an individual child to feel confident and strong enough to work upon and complete the task. Most lessons and plans in early literacy would then begin to be quite brief strings of activities that are molded, repeated and modified until the what the child is doing looks like what we had learned literacy would look like if the child had mastered the skill.
With such a perspective on the tasks of learning the students and teacher could learn to utilize effective and research based cooperative group learning environments as well as l whole group review, drill and practice. Combing the new perspective of planning from a students' expressed needs and desires the shared responsibilities to each other that are a part of correctly applied cooperative learning work groups, would change the flavor of a classroom from one of constant struggles for control that are the teacher's responsibility to places of effort or work that are the students' responsibility and owned by them because they own the goals of the inquiry as well.
Instead of what I have suggested above for a very basic area of learning - literacy, teachers/educators have been programmed to believe planning is to have students do activities that when done often enough in a certain pattern should lead most children to be able to read. Of course, if there is one correct way and pattern to learn and master any field beginning with literacy, everyone would be doing it and nearly all would be successful. However, just in the field of literacy, I have found no such agreement or holy grail. In fact there have been hundreds of reading programs and approaches developed and used over the decades. So, instead of teachers and students joining to set goals and plan steps to reach the goals in ways that are agreed to by all, the teacher/instructor/professor becomes the keeper of the magic formula as well as the determiner of success rather than the students.
The literacy example could be expanded to be applied in any school setting through post graduate work. Surprisingly, it is often at the post graduate level that the process begins to look like what I believe should be the nature education from the start. In post graduate work, a student is more of a colleague who is asked what problem or area of exploration is of interest. A plan of what might be needed to be done to solve the problem or better understand a field is then jointly planned. The post-graduate student in the best of situations owns her or his own goals and efforts.
So I have rambled. Why shouldn't education at every level make sense to the students, the consumers? Why shouldn't the goals and plans at every level of education be owned by the students? Helping students to grow and learn to reach for life goals is not the heroes journey where one is trying to turn students to our greater goods - as if education were a battle. It should be built on the students' sense of what will be good for them and then explained and developed from that perspective. "If you want to be able to read that book, we can do these things - learn all of the parts that are used to build the book; learn the ways that those parts work alone and together; and learn how to make sense of all of the parts together. Are there other things we may need to do? Where can we start?" I just want to start a conversation about seeing and thinking from the learners perspective as opposed to the more current and frequent, "What do I have to do to get them to read?" Does any of this make sense? Can you help flesh this out further.J. Pierrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298205278413870026jpm19064@gmail.com0
Of course, this can sound simplistic, but it remains that very rarely in my 35 plus years at all levels of education plus nearly as many years as an educational consumer has the system even taken the time to try to explain how it works so an individual will reach specific goals not just universal ones such as "get a degree." If systems did make sense from the student/consumer's perspective, our success rates for achieving schools and successful students would be far better than they are. Why don't systems make sense from the students' views?
Quite quickly, the answer is that most who are involved in education are so concerned with what they are supposed to be doing or achieving that a very basic question is forgotten. That question is, "What will the student be doing, thinking feeling, and experiencing as I do whatever it is I do." (The question can be rephrased to reflect an institutional approach as opposed to that of one practitioner.) Let's look at an example we should all be able to understand - the classroom teacher.
If a teacher thinks, plans and teaches from a point of view of "What do I have to do," everything that happens is seen in reaction to what the teacher does. So with the best of intentions and the firm direction of a school district, the teacher decides that he must teach some skill or concept from a sequenced curriculum. The teacher then proceeds, again, with the best of intentions to make plans using his or her knowledge of instructional practices or whatever else you want to call all that we teach teachers about what they should do to be effective teachers. The lesson is constructed. It is presented and the teacher finds himself telling and retelling, teaching and reteaching what the students should do and learn. The teacher is then urged to reflect upon what he or she would do differently to improve the lesson.
The student is not asked to reflect in a similar manner. Has the teacher been provided with a lens to ask, "What does the student need and want to learn?" "What does the student need to do and think in order to learn that skill or concept?" What will it look like when the student masters the skill or concept?' We have tried to approximate this type of thought with all sorts of statements of behavioral objectives. This practice of objectives stated in terms of student behavior is even fading as misunderstood or inadequately understood statements of standards are becoming the planning loci of teachers, schools and systems. What might be different if the planning started from the learners perspective?
Let's start with that hypothetical first grade student in an inner city school in a high crime and poverty area. If we ask the child what she or he wants to or needs to learn, in some form they would say something about reading, writing, math, and making a living. The answer would not vary from one schoolhouse to another, no matter what baggage is brought from the environment. The question of "Why learn those abilities" is where the divergence would show. So, now we know that the child has some basic concepts of what might happen if school works for them. One could then continue the conversation to learn what reading means to the child instead of trying to tell the child what reading means. A response to this by a child might be. "Understanding the words." With that information, we could then prepare to explain to the child or children that there are a lot of words; but there are a certain few words that seem to show up everywhere. We can then share with the children that in order to reach their goal of reading, we will have to do things to learn those frequent words. We could then also explain that words can be unlocked using tools that help us figure out what the marks on the page mean. The marks on the page have shapes and each shape represents a sound or set of sounds.
Our second task then will be to learn those marks and the sounds. When those marks are put together, that is when all words are made. So we will have to learn what the marks look and sound like not just by themselves but also when they are with other letters and sounds. Clearly, we go on to develop with the students, tasks that we will have to be able to complete in order for them to do what they want which is to read. This would be one aspect of planning and working from the students perspective.
Be careful if as an educator, you are saying those wants are a given. My inner-city student teachers were surprised when I had them ask the students they encountered why they wanted to learn to read. They learned ideas such as being safe, getting my daddy out of jail, stop the shooting or shouting or fighting, or to have enough food. All students of any age seek power from learning. Power over or for what is still a critical question that should be examined in a further discussion of student wants.
Other aspects of planning would be what would the child be doing physically as he or she were practicing and mastering these parts. That planning would take into consideration that the learner is a child not a little adult who acts and performs like a little adult. The planning would be from the eyes of one who understood what holding a pencil and using paper were like for a child. The planning would understand how interesting everything going on in the world is to the child. That would help to shade planning that ensured the type of space both in physical space and in time that a child can comfortably control. How big might each chunk of the task be for an individual child to feel confident and strong enough to work upon and complete the task. Most lessons and plans in early literacy would then begin to be quite brief strings of activities that are molded, repeated and modified until the what the child is doing looks like what we had learned literacy would look like if the child had mastered the skill.
With such a perspective on the tasks of learning the students and teacher could learn to utilize effective and research based cooperative group learning environments as well as l whole group review, drill and practice. Combing the new perspective of planning from a students' expressed needs and desires the shared responsibilities to each other that are a part of correctly applied cooperative learning work groups, would change the flavor of a classroom from one of constant struggles for control that are the teacher's responsibility to places of effort or work that are the students' responsibility and owned by them because they own the goals of the inquiry as well.
Instead of what I have suggested above for a very basic area of learning - literacy, teachers/educators have been programmed to believe planning is to have students do activities that when done often enough in a certain pattern should lead most children to be able to read. Of course, if there is one correct way and pattern to learn and master any field beginning with literacy, everyone would be doing it and nearly all would be successful. However, just in the field of literacy, I have found no such agreement or holy grail. In fact there have been hundreds of reading programs and approaches developed and used over the decades. So, instead of teachers and students joining to set goals and plan steps to reach the goals in ways that are agreed to by all, the teacher/instructor/professor becomes the keeper of the magic formula as well as the determiner of success rather than the students.
The literacy example could be expanded to be applied in any school setting through post graduate work. Surprisingly, it is often at the post graduate level that the process begins to look like what I believe should be the nature education from the start. In post graduate work, a student is more of a colleague who is asked what problem or area of exploration is of interest. A plan of what might be needed to be done to solve the problem or better understand a field is then jointly planned. The post-graduate student in the best of situations owns her or his own goals and efforts.
So I have rambled. Why shouldn't education at every level make sense to the students, the consumers? Why shouldn't the goals and plans at every level of education be owned by the students? Helping students to grow and learn to reach for life goals is not the heroes journey where one is trying to turn students to our greater goods - as if education were a battle. It should be built on the students' sense of what will be good for them and then explained and developed from that perspective. "If you want to be able to read that book, we can do these things - learn all of the parts that are used to build the book; learn the ways that those parts work alone and together; and learn how to make sense of all of the parts together. Are there other things we may need to do? Where can we start?" I just want to start a conversation about seeing and thinking from the learners perspective as opposed to the more current and frequent, "What do I have to do to get them to read?" Does any of this make sense? Can you help flesh this out further.J. Pierrehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298205278413870026jpm19064@gmail.com0
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Certainty is a Trick
After watching the movie "Doubt," I thought about some of the ingredients that make that film so intriguing and interesting. The manner in which it was redesigned from the play version is wonderful and new emphasis can be found due to that effort. Yet, it was not the existence and power of doubt that finally held my after viewing thoughts. It was not the issue of priestly abuse of minors which is a personal topic of pain. It was not the re-seeing of the world in which I grew or failed to grow. It was not even seeing the world of my parents and grandparents. The issue that I cannot shake today is certainty.
The search for certainty has focused the attention of philosophers, religiositors, mathematicians and even medicine throughout the recorded histories that I have learned. Yet,
is there ever certainty? Is certainty about anything possible? Descartes tried to find certainties. Most know the statement attributed to him, "Cogito, ergo, sum." However not as many are familiar with his revision which he actually called his first certainty, "I think, I exist." Playing with that rephrase in the mind can lead one to understand how so many great thinkers in all disciplines and religions have gone nearly mad trying to discover or decide if there is certainty. Yet is that the important question?
Since it is more likely that certainty is an emotion, like other emotions, it will have its ebbs and flows throughout life. I may have one certainty - People who say they are certain about something or some dogma or faith path either block emotional channels to hold that certainty or they transfer the pain of their doubt into outward behaviors that can often be harmful to self or others. Since we do not want to or cannot look at the world where some other idea/dogma but ours is true, we must destroy, denounce, or ignore that other view. Otherwise, as the Irish poet wrote the center will not hold.
It is interesting how powerful this need for certainty is for people. The generation which preceded mine and the one that preceded that one had great need for certainty because the threats and changes that took place in their lifetimes were perhaps the most extreme of all history. Of course, I am referring to the generations of my parents and grandparents. The grandparents were born into a world which mechanical engines were just being fully mastered. Communications would go from a letter delivered over a period of days or weeks to instantaneous communications over wires and airwaves. Travel would move from primarily animal and foot based to air, rail and tire. Economies would intertwine and crumble in larger and larger circles beyond the control of individuals or families.
The children, my parents, would live in a world where the world actually did go to war twice, and each time it did, the results were worse - less certainty. They were born during or affected by a worldwide plague of huge proportions which created fears regarding illness and death for their parents and themselves for a lifetime. A world wide economic depression would change beliefs and shake all certainties about work, careers, and the future for everyone. The parents fought and some died or were scarred for life in the war to end all wars, and the children fought, died and were maimed in the great crusade against evil totalitarianism. Yet, nothing gave certainty. So at the same time as all of the great upheavals, religious certainty began to fill the void and soothe the pain of a need for certainty. The various manifestations of religious certainty had been brewing for centuries, but they had become especially energized as reactions to the "modern world". The churches, temples, mosques "like the all-wise and all-caring states" were supposed to restore the certainty that had been ripped. Did they?
As in "Doubt," I am sure that some of the people who made their way to mass and the bakery each Sunday felt comfortable in the predictability of no change. Perhaps, that seemed like certainty. There is too much evidence in the people whom I remember, the literature of the time and the truths that were not to be shown the light of day to say that all or any did have certainty. An example from literature of the time is from a popular novel made into a movie called, "The Cardinal." That novel was as much about uncertainty/doubt as is the film that stimulated this writing. It was just relayed in the symbols and allowable language of the times.
One choice in the novel as an example shows the pain between the demands for religious certainty and our experiences as humans. The focal character is a priest. His sister gets pregnant outside of marriage. She has a difficult delivery with a complication that calls for a decision between the fetus or the mother - the priest's sister. Dogma tells the priest that he must choose the fetus. The choice is made; the sister dies. Years later when the priest is the cardinal in Rome, there is a beautiful young niece to help him feel that his choice was favorable to god. Do his doubts end? Did he ever have certainty? While the trappings of church and robes and position seem to say yes, it never feels quite true until he acts against the ruling/advice of his superiors and his church to rescue people from totalitarian harm.
So while the churches seemed to offer certainty the same way that dress codes in schools and the workplace did, the certainty of the times of my parents and grandparents was as superficial as the suits and hats at IBM. So much of it crumbled when the tools of the past were used but no longer supplied the certainty and feeling of unity that they once had. War did not unite us in the Vietnam era. Segregation and gradualism did not hold. A trustable government did not answer Watergate. And hoping it never happened did not stop the pain of clergy abuse, racism and homophobia. Hate could only give certainty when the people who were hated did not live among us. When some stood up and spoke out about the lies and facades that were supposed to protect certainty, the crumbling began. Doubt was on the loose again.
I hope to revisit this topic from time to time because it helps me to understand better who I am and why my search for certainty was never the needed search.
The search for certainty has focused the attention of philosophers, religiositors, mathematicians and even medicine throughout the recorded histories that I have learned. Yet,
is there ever certainty? Is certainty about anything possible? Descartes tried to find certainties. Most know the statement attributed to him, "Cogito, ergo, sum." However not as many are familiar with his revision which he actually called his first certainty, "I think, I exist." Playing with that rephrase in the mind can lead one to understand how so many great thinkers in all disciplines and religions have gone nearly mad trying to discover or decide if there is certainty. Yet is that the important question?
Since it is more likely that certainty is an emotion, like other emotions, it will have its ebbs and flows throughout life. I may have one certainty - People who say they are certain about something or some dogma or faith path either block emotional channels to hold that certainty or they transfer the pain of their doubt into outward behaviors that can often be harmful to self or others. Since we do not want to or cannot look at the world where some other idea/dogma but ours is true, we must destroy, denounce, or ignore that other view. Otherwise, as the Irish poet wrote the center will not hold.
It is interesting how powerful this need for certainty is for people. The generation which preceded mine and the one that preceded that one had great need for certainty because the threats and changes that took place in their lifetimes were perhaps the most extreme of all history. Of course, I am referring to the generations of my parents and grandparents. The grandparents were born into a world which mechanical engines were just being fully mastered. Communications would go from a letter delivered over a period of days or weeks to instantaneous communications over wires and airwaves. Travel would move from primarily animal and foot based to air, rail and tire. Economies would intertwine and crumble in larger and larger circles beyond the control of individuals or families.
The children, my parents, would live in a world where the world actually did go to war twice, and each time it did, the results were worse - less certainty. They were born during or affected by a worldwide plague of huge proportions which created fears regarding illness and death for their parents and themselves for a lifetime. A world wide economic depression would change beliefs and shake all certainties about work, careers, and the future for everyone. The parents fought and some died or were scarred for life in the war to end all wars, and the children fought, died and were maimed in the great crusade against evil totalitarianism. Yet, nothing gave certainty. So at the same time as all of the great upheavals, religious certainty began to fill the void and soothe the pain of a need for certainty. The various manifestations of religious certainty had been brewing for centuries, but they had become especially energized as reactions to the "modern world". The churches, temples, mosques "like the all-wise and all-caring states" were supposed to restore the certainty that had been ripped. Did they?
As in "Doubt," I am sure that some of the people who made their way to mass and the bakery each Sunday felt comfortable in the predictability of no change. Perhaps, that seemed like certainty. There is too much evidence in the people whom I remember, the literature of the time and the truths that were not to be shown the light of day to say that all or any did have certainty. An example from literature of the time is from a popular novel made into a movie called, "The Cardinal." That novel was as much about uncertainty/doubt as is the film that stimulated this writing. It was just relayed in the symbols and allowable language of the times.
One choice in the novel as an example shows the pain between the demands for religious certainty and our experiences as humans. The focal character is a priest. His sister gets pregnant outside of marriage. She has a difficult delivery with a complication that calls for a decision between the fetus or the mother - the priest's sister. Dogma tells the priest that he must choose the fetus. The choice is made; the sister dies. Years later when the priest is the cardinal in Rome, there is a beautiful young niece to help him feel that his choice was favorable to god. Do his doubts end? Did he ever have certainty? While the trappings of church and robes and position seem to say yes, it never feels quite true until he acts against the ruling/advice of his superiors and his church to rescue people from totalitarian harm.
So while the churches seemed to offer certainty the same way that dress codes in schools and the workplace did, the certainty of the times of my parents and grandparents was as superficial as the suits and hats at IBM. So much of it crumbled when the tools of the past were used but no longer supplied the certainty and feeling of unity that they once had. War did not unite us in the Vietnam era. Segregation and gradualism did not hold. A trustable government did not answer Watergate. And hoping it never happened did not stop the pain of clergy abuse, racism and homophobia. Hate could only give certainty when the people who were hated did not live among us. When some stood up and spoke out about the lies and facades that were supposed to protect certainty, the crumbling began. Doubt was on the loose again.
I hope to revisit this topic from time to time because it helps me to understand better who I am and why my search for certainty was never the needed search.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
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