On the Evils of "Schooliness"
Published January 25, 2009 @ 09:23AM PT
[Policy and politics aside, let me come out of the closet to my new readers here, as a teacher, about one of my pet peeves: Schooliness. From a March 2008 post as a guest-blogger on Wes Fryer's excellent Speed of Creativity. Apologies to readers from my other blog for the re-post.]
I Hate Schooliness. I Love Learning.
–this is my motto. It’s one of the reasons I wrote (in a post, “On Leaving Teaching to Become a Teacher,” on my other blog, with around 90 great comments now),
I’m not sure how much longer I want to work for schools. I’d so much rather teach.
So what is “schooliness”?
I have no idea. But that’s not a problem: I’m a teacher. I’m quite comfortable speaking with confidence on subjects I know dangerously little about. That's why I don't believe in computers in my classroom. My students have me. I'm the teacher. And they have the textbook. What more could they need? Pluto's a planet, the Soviet Union still exists. The textbooks say so in text and maps, and that settles it. Next question?
Fans of Stephen Colbert will note that “schooliness” riffs on Colbert’s “truthiness,” which won the Word of the Year awards from the American Dialect Society in 2005, and from Merriam-Webster in 2006.
Colbert, in a serious interview as himself, instead of as his Bill O’Reilly satire persona, had this to say about “truthiness”:
Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don’t mean the argument over who came up with the word…
I think "schooliness" is tearing something apart too: our students' - and some teachers' - attitudes toward school. Something about the hell of school at its worst does violence to the heaven of learning at its best.
I've never tried to define it before, but so many people are quoting it as “Clay’s idea,” I feel it’s time to try - and to ask for your help in a playful little Open Thread invitation at the end of this post.
The Birth of Schooliness
I first used the word “schooliness” in March 2007 - my third month of blogging - in one of a series of posts on “how to save blogging from teachers.” (I still worry about that danger, and still think-aloud about that challenge a year later.) I was envisioning a future in which all the edtech evangelists got what they wanted: schools full of teachers in every classroom using blogging with their students. But rather than seeing a utopia to celebrate, I saw a bleak dystopia: Blogging as “just another way to turn in homework.” Blogging, like thinking, creativity, and other joys, turned into an aversive horror by the forces of schooliness:
. . . . what reader will ever return to a blog that’s full of homework posts? If Stephen Colbert were here, he’d say such a blog smelled of this: “Schooliness.”
Like Colbert’s “truthiness,” “schooliness” stuck with me. It was a word without a dictionary definition that still seemed to identify something we all know, all too well.
Schooly Student Leadership
The next time I used the term was this past September. With a few other teachers around the world, I’ve started a Green Schools movement called Project Global Cooling. The project’s purpose is for student members to research waste-reduction measures, and their cost benefits for the school, and then present them for adoption in a formal proposal to the school administration - and to have, ideally, an Earth Day concert in cities around the world, student-promoted, on the same day, which will be filmed and uploaded to the Project Global Cooling website (it’s ugly right now, but it’s starting, finally, to grow legs - see my blog for future focus on this as it nears its April 19 climax).
One of the PGC students, a student council member, was ordered by the student council teacher-leaders to drop our club. It conflicted with the student council meeting times. That sent me into my second rage against the schooly in my post, “Student Council: Creating Tomorrow’s Followers (or, “Smells Like School Spirit”)“:
Me: “So what are you guys going to be planning in the Student Council that’s so important she’s forcing you to drop all other activities?”
Student: “The Haunted House for Halloween. And the next Student Assembly.”
Me: “The Haunted House….so, like, getting the pumpkins and doing some Halloween thing in the gym?”
Student: “Yeah.”
Me: “And the Student Assembly: what are you planning for that?”
Student: “Introducing the Sports teams. And raising school spirit.”
Me: “And how many people do you have meeting twice a week to plan a Haunted House and a 40-minute assembly to introduce the basketball players and give a few speeches and such?”
Student: “Seventeen.”
Me: “Seventeen?”
Student: “Yeah.”
Me: “Seventeen people meeting twice a week for the next 20 weeks to plan a haunted house in the gym, and an assembly to introduce sports teams? How long can it take to come up with a plan to introduce sports teams?”
Student: “I know.”
Me: “I hate school. Look at how trivial it makes you, even when you want to make a difference in the real world.”
Student: “I don’t have any choice. The Student Council teachers won’t let me out.”
Me: “And look how powerless you suddenly are. You’re 17. You’re a young adult. You know physics, calculus, and history far more than most of your teachers, but have zero power in school despite that. ‘They won’t let me.’ I hate school.”
* * *
So, your advice: I want to suggest he quit Student Council, since it’s clearly one very school-blindered, trivial waste of time for all these poor students seeking election in order to show they can handle power effectively - like adults do.
Another idea is to instead advise him to wage a bit of a rebellion inside the Student Council, by asking the very sensible question - “Is this the best we can do? Jack-o-lanterns and basketballs? Can we give the StuCo some teeth? Extend it into the real world? Isn’t it pathetically fay right now? Trivial? Irrelevant? Infantile?”
The sad thing is, it’s institutionalized. The Rat-Race for college admissions puts a high premium on silly bullets like holding a class office. College counselors, administrators, parents, students, teachers - the whole school culture - treat the Student Council like it’s an honorable thing. In reality, it limits the horizons of the 17 most motivated leaders from each grade level to the paltry world of the schoolhouse. It’s outrageously trivial and infantile.
I don’t know if it’s “consensus trance,” blind traditionalism, or winking condescension (”Let the kids play like they have power”), but it smells really bad to me.
Schooly Morality
Schooliness raised its ugly head again when I considered the moral “offenses” schools choose to punish at school. Drive a gas-guzzler? Promote the bloody diamond trade with your flashy jewelry? Enjoy murder in video games or on your favorite movies? No worries. No punishment.
But use certain taboo vowel-consonant combinations, or look at the human form with certain taboo portions visible? We’ll throw the book at you, in our duty to teach you the difference between right and wrong. Schooly morality seems to have been held back since the mid-Victorian era. That was a fun post: “To Curse or Not to Curse: On Teaching the F-Bomb and Other Colorful Words.” Read it before you judge it. It’s about Shakespeare’s mastery of cursing, as an art form. Here’s a snippet:
Lear curses with style and grace, as befits a king. But Kent, his chief knight - Lear’s “Army Chief of Staff,” as it were - curses, as befits a career soldier, with much more salt and directness. Check out his classic “cussing out” of the slimy Oswald, servant of Goneril –
OSWALD:
What dost thou know me for?KENT:
A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of they addition. (Act II, Sc. 2, ll. 14-24)
If your Elizabethan English is rusty, and you don’t hear the vulgarity and sexual insult sloshing in practically every line, download the free “Answers” Firefox addon, and click the unknown words while holding down “alt” on your Mac for an instant popup definition and more (PC users, you’re on your own - maybe “ctrl”?). Kent calls Oswald a pimp, son of a bitch, bastard, son of a whore, “wussy,” a suck-up, and more, and then says, in today’s language, “Deny one word, and I’ll kick your disgusting little donkey” (substitute the King James Bible word for donkey here).
It’s depressing, isn’t it, how the art of cursing has degenerated in our own modern age? Our four-letter words are so unimaginative and artless by comparison.
So if you were me, how would you guide students to translate these curses? Having Kent abuse Oswald by hissing,
You bad person, I’m going to kick your bottom.
You son of a bad woman, you sissy, you person born out of wedlock,
You big meanie, etc
just doesn’t strike me as a faithful literary adaptation. (It does strike me as schooliness, though. Some teachers, like Wilde’s classic Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, would give such a bowdlerizing an “A,” I’ve no doubt.)
Schooly Imagination and Curiosity
I’m battling with schooliness now, most distressingly, in the very people I thought would battle it with me: my high school seniors. It seems they are so unfamiliar with having their own ideas, and writing about them, that they simply cannot do it with any engagement. Their free-choice blogs are, overall, schooly imitations of authenticity. Pretending to have ideas they pretend to care about. Thank Goodness, there are exceptions. But the rule is so distressing, it’s led me to believe that, by high school, it’s too late to unlock the creativity and engagement Wes so often champions. Twelve years of schooliness seems to have beaten the desire to learn - the pleasure of learning - completely out of most seniors. It seems to me now that, if we’re going to feed fires for learning, we have to do it before they’re snuffed out. And that means, to be clear, focus on school reform in primary and middle years. (How to reform secondary school, so in the grips of the SAT and AP and College Admissions - not to mention high school teachers living out college professor fantasies - is beyond me.)
Here’s a snippet from, “From the Classroom Blogging Doldrums: What Would Teacher 2.0 Do?“:
The problem? Little vision, little connective writing.
It’s partly senioritis, I think. College applications, SAT’s, too many commitments to too many extra-curricular activities (got to have those bullets for the college application, even if they come at the cost of destroying both my learning and my GPA), too many week-long sports trips, too many AP classes that were chosen not for interest but again for careerist reasons.
It’s partly Korean culture: parents sending students to night and weekend schools for SAT prep, AP prep, tutors. Students confusing memorization skills with academic excellence, trained to “be instructed” rather than to “construct” meaning themselves. Having no time to be, reflect, explore, wonder (or having no energy, rather).
And it’s partly my own fault: all the macho posturing of Advanced Placement courses as “college-level, rigorous,” etc - and Wes Fryer’s etymolological connection, in Shanghai back in September, of “rigor” with “rigid” and “rigor mortis” echoes here - led me to buy in to what now seems a sadistic and pedagogically pathetic imperative to overload AP students with A Mountain Of Homework.
Schooly Critical Thinking: An Oxymoron
This is from, “Teaching Grammar on the Titanic: On Fear and Irrelevance in Education“:
So: the problem with me, as a teacher, is that I design units that don’t address anything important. I’ve been trained to think that my job is to stuff the headpieces of the next generation with such irrelevant things as the definition of litotes and onomatopoeia, to write cute little stories about nothing, to know Stratford-upon-Avon. To be able, paradoxically, to think critically about safe subjects. And above all, not to think about anything that might, god forbid, rankle the status quo. And let’s not even start to think about taking any sort of action.
Again, so: As soon as I stop thinking like a teacher, designing units derived from an institutional culture that defines me as a teacher, and subconsciously makes me far more traditional in my teaching than my progressively-posing ego likes to acknowledge….as soon as I re-define myself as a community leader - as that once-upon-a-time American thing called a citizen - instead, maybe the young adults of my community might have an opportunity to learn how to function in the world they’ll inherit from and manage for us all-too-soon.
Schooly (Anti-)Science
When Bulgaria is, per capita, more scientifically literate than America about biology, geology, and genetics - and when even science teachers are afraid of the “e-word” - little more needs to be said. I say it anyway, in this post that got 1,000 hits in 8 hours (a record for me, at the time): Truly Critical: On Science, Religion, and Goodness.
Schooly Writing Lessons
Under the influence of Oscar Wilde’s aphorisms and Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, and in order to battle evil with wit and thus smile a bit more in hell, I’ve decided to slowly compile twitter-like definitions of all things schooly. Here’s my first effort, from a post last week:
Schooly writing (noun): Assignments by teachers who don’t want to read them, to students who don’t want to write them; a perpetual and unnecessary misery upon which hinges the student’s future, and the teacher’s present, livelihood; an oxymoron.
Open Thread Invitation to Play: Your Definitions of Schooliness?
What's an Open Thread? It’s simple: A topic or question is proposed in an Open Thread post, and all readers are encouraged to write comments as long as they would like, to copy them to their own blogs if desired, and to converse with each other in the thread. It’s fun.
So: Questions:
1. List the topics that come to your mind when you think of “Schooliness.”
2. Write your own “Devil’s Definition” and give us all a wicked laugh.
We know what schooliness is. We teachers and students, and parents and administrators, live it daily. Let’s have some fun with it.
(Other comments are fine too, of course.)
Photo Credits:
Colbert Motivational Poster by Louisville Joe
Oscar Wilde Action Figure by -sel
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Comments (34)
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Author
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Clay is an American high school Humanities teacher, technology coach, and Apple Distinguished Educator who has taught for the last eight years in Asian international schools. According to law, he's married to his wife. According to his wife, he's married to his Mac.
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Schooliness: Using testing to guage the ability of our students to craft a quality piece of writing, and not allowing them to use dictionaries, thesauri, others as souding boards, etc.
In other words, requiring them to write in a way that never happens in outside-of-school life.
Posted by Mindy J on 01/25/2009 @ 10:37AM PT
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Schooliness: (v.) Having the structure of school, but not the substance. Teaching details, but not the underlying meanings of items and issues. Focusing on standardization, but omitting the value of being well rounded as in the difference between primary and secondary schools.
(n) activities where enthusiasm is drained from the creativity of participants. This seminar has a schooliness feel to it. Characterized by rote responses and conformity.
Posted by William Pointer on 01/25/2009 @ 07:01PM PT
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Schooliness:
(1) Characteristic of a system or environment that diminishes intrinsic motivation and/or authentic meaning in favor of extrinsic motivators and/or tradition.
(2) The experienced result of favoring traditional ideas and methods at all cost when technological changes, social changes, political changes, and contradictory research render tradition obsolete and ineffective.
Posted by Carl Anderson on 01/25/2009 @ 10:32PM PT
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Schooliness: Can't see the student for the systems...sung to the tune of "Can't see the forest for the trees..."
Schooliness: Less teachers, more testing.
Schooliness: "A laptop for every child"
Posted by Evie Romero Montoya on 01/26/2009 @ 06:21AM PT
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Dear Clay:
Thank you for bringing out of the closet the computer in the classroom bugaboo. For a graduate ed tech class I was in recently, I chose to do a research project on how computers in the classroom detract from student learning (not surprisingly, there is a lot of empirical evidence out there to support my premise)...
am still feeling the burn from the reaction...one fellow grad student retorted: "Why should we have to know anything when we can find any information we may need at the click of a button?" And to this day, the professor remains chilly.
Give me kids, a blackboard nailed to a tree, some chalk, and some books, and together we will learn in our classroom community!
Posted by Evie Romero Montoya on 01/26/2009 @ 06:27AM PT
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Ooh. Evie, I'm afraid my attempt at irony must have failed. I hate to say it, but I side more with the grad student arguing that information is now accessible at a click.
That does NOT mean, though, that I advocate computers in any and every classroom. Their introduction require a huge shift in teaching practice, and in administration and school policies, to work.
See my Why Schoolwork Doesn't Have to Suck: Learning 2.0 for more. (And if that html doesn't work, here's the link: http://education.change.org/blog/view/why_schoolwork_doesnt_have_to_suck_learning_20 )
Posted by Clay Burell on 01/26/2009 @ 06:53AM PT
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@Mindy, As an ESOL specialist, that "no dictionaries" fetish has always driven me mad. Good on you for adding it. Only in school *head-desk*
Posted by Clay Burell on 01/26/2009 @ 06:55AM PT
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Yes, Clay, but there is a huge difference between Knowledge and Information. They are not at all the same. Her argument is that none need KNOW anything because information is so very accessible...yeah...in her White middle class world, information is accessible, and who's to say that the information out there is so important...in the grand scheme of things, anyway? One of the things I learned in my rebellious research is that "information" on the super highway could certainly be considered an extension of imperialism and colonialism. How is all that information displacing the traditions and life of peoples who aren't "Western"? ...but I digress...
As I said, big difference between knowledge and information. Last semester, I asked a profound question of my students: "What do you know?" and then again in response to the blank looks on their faces: "Yes, I mean, what do you REALLY know? What is your personal definition of Knowledge? What do you have in your heads and your beings that is knowledge? What do you know?"
Sadly, even after we had talked about it, none of them could say they knew anything. Even if they did know some things, which I have faith that they do, they were not able to express that knowledge.
Posted by Evie Romero Montoya on 01/26/2009 @ 07:19AM PT
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Schooliness: The act of doing things in school with the sole goal of producing good enough grades to trade for access to the right high schools or universities. There is learning involved, you learn how to produce good grades.
Posted by Inger Grøndal on 01/27/2009 @ 04:28AM PT
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Schooliness: 45 minutes a day, timed bells, and the assumption that learning happens in just a few minutes when you are also required to share annoucements, hand out school fliers, and a zillion other things before you get to the ideas you had to leave behind the other day because the bell rang.
Posted by Liv Halvorsen on 01/27/2009 @ 12:32PM PT
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Liv, that one's a keeper :)
Posted by Clay Burell on 01/27/2009 @ 12:54PM PT
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Schooliness:
The creation of standard test that will show the quality of schools and intelligence of students and then spending the entire school year teaching the students how to take the test.
Posted by Stacy B on 01/28/2009 @ 03:26PM PT
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Wicked, Stacy :)
Posted by Clay Burell on 01/28/2009 @ 03:57PM PT
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I understand the difference between information and knowledge...but whatever will the next generation talk about at cocktail parties if they haven't any educational foundation? hee hee Think about it: shouldn't we have a basic educational foundation in case the Internet shuts down?? I'll never forget my horror when I was quizzing my daughter on math facts and she hesitated at 3+2. When I asked why she kept hesitating ("surely you know that!"), she replied that she was supposed to estimate first.
Schooliness: spending your planning time filling out paperwork for special needs students, thus leaving you less time to plan for their special needs!
Posted by Julia Riggleman on 01/30/2009 @ 03:36PM PT
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Julia, your question is well-taken, but it involves an "either/or" I hear a lot, and never understand. I don't believe anybody argues that basic knowledge and skills aren't necessary, or that the internet is supposed to replace them. Ideally, it should inform and develop them - far more effectively and authentically than textbooks. Check out the teaching tag for examples of how web-embedded teaching _builds_ the knowledge-base we're talking about.
And enjoy the paperwork ;-)
Posted by Clay Burell on 01/30/2009 @ 03:43PM PT
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Perhaps she wasn't sure if you were talking about 3+2 with a base 10 number system or some other base.
Posted by Carl Anderson on 01/30/2009 @ 07:20PM PT
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Carl, you get my non-existent "Wag of the Week Award" for that comment ;-)
Posted by Clay Burell on 01/30/2009 @ 07:47PM PT
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My "higher education" definition of schooliness: (noun) anything done in service of the reproduction of academic professionals rather than the production of anything genuine, interesting, or useful.
The ethics of intellectual property play an important role in maintaining the fundamentals of "schooliness," as we teach students that it most valuable to assert something (no matter how trivial) that hasn't already been published by academic professionals and to quote profusely what has been published in order to maintain the scholastic hierarchy of thought ownership and to avoid the plebian process of simply learning about or understanding a topic. This practice is especially vital in fields such as the fine arts which, without hyper-professionalization, would be dangerously enjoyable.
Posted by Kimberly Koch on 01/30/2009 @ 07:21PM PT
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Kimberly, not only do I thank you for the wicked final flick of phrase - "dangerously enjoyable" - I also congratulate you for pretty much nailing why I chose not to go the professor route in the Humanities. Something about gradual school just smelled bad. I followed my nose out into the fresh air of unprofessional enjoyment of culture. I don't regret it.
Posted by Clay Burell on 01/30/2009 @ 07:46PM PT
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Carl, if only! Unfortunately she was only little at the time!
JR
Posted by Julia Riggleman on 01/31/2009 @ 05:28AM PT
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schooliness gets people 'memorizing math' instead of enjoying playing with its ideas...
but clay, you said you wanted to get out of teaching so you could become a teacher. i think the notion of teaching is problematic, too. it implies putting information into our students, instead of drawing thinking out of them.
i'm 'teaching' adults, and they want me to do well what they think teaching is - explain the particular concepts of this course. they don't want to think. math is too scary for them...
i'm trying to learn how to facilitate some real math learning, in among what my college and my students want from me.
Posted by Sue VanHattum on 01/31/2009 @ 06:00AM PT
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On computers: Clay, you may be better than McFarlane at keeping the kids away from those laptops when you want them to really talk to one another, but her article in Rethinking Schools ("The laptops are coming! The laptops are coming!") made me realize it's a complex issue... I'm with Evie on questioning the fad, and I'm with you on realizing the kids will be ahead of us and trying to keep up with them. Love these discussions...
Posted by Sue VanHattum on 01/31/2009 @ 06:46AM PT
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I respectfully refer you young come-latelies to three classic books:
Summerhill, by A. S. Neill, 1960
Deschooling Society, by Ivan Illich, 1972
Must You Conform? by Robert Lindner, 1954
Neill was the administrator of what we would call a private school in England, advocating "Freedom, not License" when, in most English schools, beating students with a cane for vrious and sundry offenses (including questioning the pooh-bahs) was fairly common practice.
Illich argued that our schools were preparing people to be followers rather than innovators and leaders, and attributed most of the resulting problems of society to this failure.
Lindner, a psychiatrist, looked at the pressure to conform in 1950s schools, expected rebelliion rather than universal conformity, and claimed, "We are doing our best to produce a generation of psychopaths." A little background: he wrote another book about the unfortunate life story one of his teen-aged patients and the extent to which the kid's environment turned him into a delinquent. It eventually got made into a movie: "Rebel Without a Cause."
And how long do you think Tom Sawyer would have lasted in a current-era US suburban school before his parents got the ultimatum: "Shape him up, using medications if necessary, or he can't come back!" (But in the same school, your daughter could be expelled for giving another kid a Tylenol.) Mark Twain meant "Tom Sawyer" as a protest against regimentation -- in 1870! As for how that turned out, consider Twain's comment much later in life, "God made the idiot for practice, and then He made the school board."
In short, "schooliness," which I define as substituting slavish devotion to school procedure over any meaningful attempt to induce learning, has been with us, in one form or another, for quite a while.
Posted by Doug Samuelson on 02/01/2009 @ 10:40AM PT
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Doug,
Two weeks ago, we were told at my school that four teachers must be cut because of the economy...I walked away from the meeting shaking my head...this system doesn't care about our kids. It cares about money. One week ago, I was informed that I was to be one of the cuts because I was "too nice to the kids," and because one of my lessons from our food unit in my Spanish II class strayed too far into English Language Arts when I introduced my students to the odes of Pablo Neruda. Never mind that the whole class then wrote odes (in Spanish) to food items, designed restaurant advertisements (again in Spanish) and created menus (again in Spanish)...Well, so much for "teaching across the curriculum"...
Anyway, I wanted to thank you for your reading suggestions. In all the heartache I have felt about having to leave my students at the end of this year, I had forgotten that there really are some level-headed and logical thinkers "out there" when it comes to education. And Mark Twain is my hero! Next weekend, I shall be jaunting down to the library to look for Neill, Illich, and Lindner.
Posted by Evie Romero Montoya on 02/01/2009 @ 04:39PM PT
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Evie, I'm so sorry to hear the news. I hope the stimulus for schools goes through and leads to new hiring and a job for you, if you want it.
But I also love the Taoist wisdom tale about the old farmer who answers each of his neighbor's "Oh! I'm sorry about the bad news!" and "Hey, congratulations on the great news" with: "Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?" And the farmer is right - the good luck often led to bad consequences, and the bad to good.
That probably doesn't help, but I hope it does.
Posted by Clay Burell on 02/01/2009 @ 05:29PM PT
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"Schooliness" smacks right upside the head one of the main reasons I do not want to teach. Well, aside from parents with lawyers and IEP meetings that rob time from me getting to know my students (I want to teach Special Education, IEPs are a huge black hole, sucking time and resources). Samuel Clemens (to those of you who have forgotten, Mark Twain) said "Don't let schooling get in the way of your education." How appropriate to this very day. If I could always and forever remain an Instructional Assistant, making a living I could survive on at the same time; and not constantly want to face down administrators for the injustices I see, which I have no place to rectify because I do not have a degree (I have been put in my "place" more than once), I would consider it. A great read, if you have the time (it is nearly 500 pages), is "Overachievers" by Alexandra Robbins. Definitely expands on Clay's re-post
Posted by Lisa Cristaldi on 02/02/2009 @ 04:16PM PT
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This, by no means will be a scholarly post; I am a product of the the U.S. school system. I do have a complaint, (yes, I realize everyone else does too,) regarding computers in the classroom.
I walked into my son's classroom, unannounced, about a month ago. (4th grade) His teacher didn't even notice me. Why would she? She was busy shopping on-line. I stood behind her for at least 3 minutes; picking out shoes, color, size, and width.
Maybe, if she gave my son less homework, she could find time to shop on her own dime.Maybe? I would have gladly paid for her shoes with cash, instead of my son's future.
Lucky, lucky, this, "10 year having" teacher. When I complained to the principle, he must have been on-line too. He barley acknowledged my presence, but assured me, " I'll have a talk with her!" ( I think this was code for, "I'll, tell her to keep her door locked, so parents will have to knock.")
I think he should send her an e-mail..........
Posted by L.S. hope on 02/02/2009 @ 07:05PM PT
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If the teacher was using a pen to fill out a J Crew Catalogue order form in the classroom, would it be the fault of the pen?
Posted by Clay Burell on 02/02/2009 @ 10:05PM PT
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Facetious, but I get it.
Posted by L.S. hope on 02/02/2009 @ 11:36PM PT
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L.S., no offense intended. Just trying to make a quick point.
Posted by Clay Burell on 02/03/2009 @ 12:54AM PT
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Another pt here is that the sheer speed of computing makes it easy for us all to end up places we maybe shouldn't be! But let's try to stay helpful to each other. Part of the problem with schools is that they're institutions, they try to do too much with too little, and teachers have too many demands placed on them. Technology is changing at such a pace that we old-timers are having a hard time keeping up. Clay, where do u teach? My children are from South Korea and I was curious!
Posted by Julia Riggleman on 02/03/2009 @ 05:48AM PT
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I was at Korea International School in Bundang for two years, but took this year off to work on a book, re-charge, and move into married life.
I'm going to be teaching again starting this August at an American-curriculum international schoo in Singapore.
Posted by Clay Burell on 02/03/2009 @ 06:10AM PT
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What would you consider to be the strengths of these internat'l schools? What is yr clientele like? Part of my problem is that I teach SE and I'll get these inspired, 21st century ideas and then I get torn with the fact that they can't write a complete sentence! They typically are dependent learners who freak out when asked to be creative. Any ideas? I spend days off investigating techie stuff... thanks for the last tip...and they do seem to enjoy it.
Posted by Julia Riggleman on 02/03/2009 @ 06:43AM PT
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International schools are, at best, selective and well-resourced private schools. Students normally from diplomatic and commercial expatriate communities.
For teaching ideas using tech, I've been writing and exploring that for a couple years on my other blog. Maybe the teaching tag there is the best way to do the brain-share thing.
You may be interested in Muhammad Ali: D- Student or F- School? for starters.
Hope that helps. And note there's an "Archives" page where you can skim titles from the full 2+ years for ideas that might interest you.
Posted by Clay Burell on 02/03/2009 @ 07:03AM PT
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