Question: Define the purpose of guttering on a house. Answer: Choose the response that represents your thinking. a. to catch rain water coming off the roof b. to catch and direct rain water deflected by a roof out away from a vulnerable foundation c. to correct an imposition d. to protect a preconception We have [...]
Tag Archives: school
Schools (Don’t?) Matter, (Nor) Does Creativity?
Okay, I’ll confess to being less than tactful most of the time. But I gotta tell you, I’m pretty tired of one particular complaint that I hear (rather, read) again and again on education sites and FB pages dedicated to combat testing regimes in public education: “Your stealing my child’s creativity!” Be sure, I too [...]
Discipline and Punish
Maybe you’re not 44 and so are not conversant with the movie Reality Bites (its genesis and presentation 20 years past), but I am. The down-and-out 20-something “losers” (heed my punctuation, please) in that film did not exemplify me. I had a job as an English teacher in a parochial high school in St. Louis, [...]
How We Learn: How We Don’t Learn
It’s possible that if I even hint at the name “Melville” to begin a piece anyone who sojourns here will click the “close” button and be well on their merry way. (Though surely there are intrepid adventurers among us willing always to hear more of the greatest American writer–yes, I said that.) But, all I’m [...]
Public Potluck Picnic Perfection
There is real humanity in the potluck picnic. Or rather, a humanity that is real: personal, physical, unmediated. Yesterday, after our annual, end-of-the-year elementary public school music program, the families of students in the the mixed-age (K-6) classroom (which our children have attended for the past three years) gathered for the annual picnic. The school [...]
The Logic of Technagogy
Our advances in technology offer what we might call short-cuts to thinking and doing. The logic of technagogy might be stated thus: the more technology we use in elementary and secondary schools the less the students need to think and do. In other words, introducing children at younger ages and in a sustained fashion to [...]
Learning Bathroom Discipline: Let Freedom Aggregate
One of the abiding memories of school for many of us is the fact that you have to ask permission to use the bathroom and that that request can be denied you.* We are taught in school, and perhaps this is the sole abiding goal of the institution, how to be bossed; to learn the [...]
While You Still Have a Body: Rethinking Everything
The world dominated by humans operates outside of our frame of reference. No matter how hard you try it’s hard to think about the muddle when you are surrounded by it. It thinks you. Forgive me if what follows is confused. Too much disgusts me lately and it is all related and my responses are [...]
An Errant Declaration of Educational Mission
Upon review, it seems as though “mission statements” are succinct (though that begs the question as to what use they are); I’m not sure who decided a mission statement needs to be brief. Brief statements made in service to institutional aims tend to be rather full of buzzwords of the moment. In essence they are [...]
Philosophus Agonistes: Thinking Against the State
I’ve been pondering what it is schools do and what it is I can imagine they might do instead. So you might gather from that statement that I do not agree with our current educational systems. But, I might as easily say that this position is easily transferred to ANY institution that has been used [...]
