Watching my tenth graders take the PSAT, I’m remembering the last standardized test I took — the English Praxis exam to earn a secondary English cert. I was prepared by disposition and academic training to blow the doors off that test.
I was pudding afterwards.
How do kids feel when they’re not prepared for tests and have the gaps in their own education so brutally thrust in their face?
Started Dave Eggers’s new book last night on a soccer sideline. One of the characters begins the book with a new career at Google The Circle.
Book may turn out alright, may not. But it got me thinking of how rare it is to begin a job so happy and with all the tools you need to do it; how rare it is to have a job where your “boss” talks about the importance of humanity; how rare to have any kind of moral clarity that isn’t immediately and obviously compromised by the working conditions.
1. Dave Eggers, The Circle,(New York: Knopf, 2013).
Liking this book a lot.
Quotes I’d talk over with students…
“I still have photographs, but I no longer know what my father looked like.”
(p.49)
“Writing is difficult, reading impossible. People are so exhausted after the hassle of a normal Lagos day that, for the vast majority, mindless entertainment is preferable to any other kind. This is the secret price paid for all those cumulative stresses of Lagos life: the ten-minute journeys that take forty-five minutes, the rarity of places of refuge, the constant confrontation with needs more abject than your own. By day’s end, the mind is worn, the body ragged.” (p. 68)
“Why is history uncontested here? There is no sign of that dispute over words, that battle over versions of stories that marks the creative inner life of a society. Where are the contradictory voices? I step out of the shop into the midday glare. All around me the unaware forest of flickering faces is visible. The area boys are still hard at work, but I imagine they will soon break for lunch. The past is not even past.” (p.117)
This quote I’d like to leave the opening identifier blank and ask students to fill it in or what it would mean to fill it in:
“______s do not always have the philosophical equipment to deal with the material goods they are so eager to consume. We fly planes but we do not manufacture aircraft, much less engage in aeronautical research. We use cell phones but do not make them. But, more important, we do not foster the ways of thinking that lead to the development of telephones or jet engines. Pat of that philosophical equipment is an attention to details: a rejection of only the broad outlines of a system, a commitment to precision, an engagement with the creative and scientific spirit behind what one uses.”
Is this true of Nigerians? Of Americans? Of Africans? Of urban or rural residents? Of Whites? Blacks? Can such a statement be true? Could you love your country and your people and make such a claim? How would you feel if such a statement were made about you?
Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief (New York: Random House, 2014).
Such “accountability” schemes reinforce ineffective practice because they fundamentally misunderstand the experiential nature of teaching. Children need to study ideas in ways that connect to their motivations and prior knowledge, and teachers need to respond to the challenges and questions children raise (Brown, 1994). Like success in musical composition, chess playing, architectural design, and other creative fields, success in teaching involves an iterative process: teachers evaluate information about students and subjects, anticipate solutions, and then revise plans based on what actually happens in the classroom (Yinger, 1978).
Cool choice of a book for a class on curricular leadership, particularly as her understanding of teaching is so spot-on. As a book published in 1997, the sad part is that it predicts all that has gone wrong in the intervening years as teaching is given less and less respect.
Linda Darling-Hammond, The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools That Work,(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), 75.
