Like so many of the commentators on the Games I'm a reformed sceptic/cynic. What I wrote before -revealed a tinge of respect creeping into my jaundiced outlook: the torchbearer I eventually glimpsed after the long procession of sponsors’ buses and corporate cheerleaders looked like an ordinary decent salt-of-the-earth kid like so many I’d taught in schools in London, Devon and Yorkshire.
I've in the event been impressed and moved by all the things the commentators have: a superbly managed and creatively conceived spectacle, lovely people on all sides -- athletes, helpers, soldiers, audiences, boring sport becoming interesting for the first time. Even the national anthems, podiums, flag-raisings. (What a pity Wales wasn’t a country for Olympics purposes: then, if their athletes had then done their stuff, we could have had the best anthem of all. As it was we had to make do with the runner-up, Russia’s. Shame about the British one, of course.)
What I liked is that despite the oppressive business presence (Coca Cola, Samsung), the dominant feeling was inescapably non-corporate, non-accountancy-driven, non-managerial, non-PR/HR/government-speak and instead human, decent, warm. Plenty of ‘excellence’ (hated term) was in evidence, but also respect for and recognition of ordinary people and ordinary virtues, like solidarity, love of city and country and respect for honest effort as much as for ‘achievement’.
I liked it that so many of the athletes were people from ordinary or even disadvantaged backgrounds, and so many from unregarded parts of Britain like the North and Northern Ireland. Few seemed to from public schools or even from well-known schools -- even the gold medal canoeist, which you’d think an expensive sport, got there by drifting along to a local club after his day at an undistinguished provincial school. If the list of schools topping the examinations and Oxbridge entry league tables include almost none that aren’t in the south of England, those contributing Olympic athletes is another story.
British sport had been helped by two obvious things: immigration, obviously, and lottery money that had been spent wisely and to the benefit of the provinces, e.g. the way funding had been used to promote cycling and the athletics training centre in Sheffield.
I was impressed by the bold creativity of the organisers (Seb Coe?) -- picking the risky Danny Boyle to do the opening ceremony -- and terrific graphics, design and architecture. It was the sort of genius that used at one time to inform the BBC’s comedy programming and their drama production (one-off plays, I'm thinking of). Lesson: let creative people get on with it without having to negotiate with ‘management’.
Cameron’s educational response has been to say there’ll be more money (which will mean the money they took away in the first place) for competitive sport in schools. Their other educational push is for ‘excellence’. But my understanding is that the money that was put into sporting activities by the last government (including lottery money), and that has paid off in the Olympics, was for fitness, health and active pursuits generally, not just competition, and that what these Olympics at their best have showcased isn’t just ‘excellence’ but sportsmanship and decent behaviour -- everything that bankers and corporate management aren’t about; and that the money went not just to the selected best (though that was important) but also to facilities for everyone. It’s the latter we want more of in schools and local areas -- swimming pools, for instance. We can have any number of Tescos, it seems, but no political party has the guts to say we’ll take half Tesco’s profits off them and put the money into an equal distribution of swimming pools -- or concern halls or train and bus services.
I think the lesson for education, since that’s what I set out to write about, is that the aim should be a general flowering and flourishing: make provision -- facilities and staffing -- for all sorts of potentially rewarding academic and cultural pursuits, from Greek and engineering to learning the bassoon and the high jump, make kids want to pursue them and show them how. Done right, this will lead to no end of ‘excellence’ (and university applications) but also to a population that knows what to do with itself and doesn’t easily get bored and reduced to daytime TV.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Sunday, 12 August 2012
Friday, 10 August 2012
Teaching student teachers to teach literature
I taught PGCE (graduate teacher education) for only four years and keep thinking still, six years later, of how I might have done it better. I wish I’d had it clearer then how one might approach ‘teaching' a text like a poem, novel, part of a novel, story or non-fiction text treated as literature. Yesterday for some reason I started thinking how I might have laid it out in a session. Here’s a rough sketch.
Ask the group (the student teachers) the following questions about a text it’s proposed to teach in school:
(a) Distinguish between the noticings etc that a school student or reasonably responsive English speaker might be expected to come to on his or her untutored own, through such resources as a lay person brings to bear, and those that might result from concepts (‘scientific’ lit crit concepts) and knowledge that an English teacher might impart. Consider, as a possible general rule: should we be starting with the first sort? (A whole discussion is needed on this.)
(b) ‘in your view’, I said above but you have to take into account that that might not be their view. See below.
2. What would need to go on between you, the class and the text for those noticings to occur, those aspects or features to be felt? What processes and activities might you instigate?
I suggested in point 1 that teachers begin by identifying the things they think students should ‘get’ in the text but observed in 1(b) that students might well have a different take. Now you don’t want to preempt or cut off reactions that are different from the ones you think they should have that are the same as yours, or give the sense that yours are right and theirs somehow not legitimate. Devising forms of productive activity that will allow responses to appear that you’d no way of anticipating is a difficult matter and one of the hardest and most important thing English teachers have to learn to do.
4. There’s an extra complication: it may take some form of expression for the student to become aware of the nature of his or her response. For it to become known to the experiencer, the experience may need to be manifested out there, in the public (accessible to others) ‘space of appearance’, in, for instance, spoken or written words. Indeed, it may only be when ‘semiotically anchored’ or attached to signs that some sorts of experience may be said to come into existence at all, or at any rate definite existence as realities to be mentally entertained and contemplated. It may be in giving expression to the response to a text that the response happens ‘in the first place’.
And here we have to note that the notion of ‘expression’ is profoundly misleading, as if something that’s inside (mental, psychic) gets outside, by a process of ex-pression, pressing out. In fact there’s no way that what’s inside, a thought or feeling, can itself be made visible or apprehensible since what is perceptible is material and those inner occurrences aren’t. (Except that some thoughts are already ‘encoded’ internally in language to varying degrees….)
What actually happens in so-called ‘expression’ is that to whatever is ‘inside’ is added something else, something of quite a different, namely material, order.
As a responsible PGCE tutor I would want to supply references to articles and books in which the authors give serious thought to, and report their classroom experiments relating to, (a) forms of production to give ‘expression’ to responses, ones that could be set up without preempting those responses; and (b) the theoretically difficult issue of the disjunction between experience and the expression of it and the way in which it may only be in expression that experience may be said to come fully into existence at all.
But I'm now so out of touch with the whole business that no such references come to mind. But I'm also willing to bet that none of the main ‘method books’ on English teaching of the last, what, twenty years, at any rate in Britain, have anything substantial to say on these issues.
Ask the group (the student teachers) the following questions about a text it’s proposed to teach in school:
- What do you think it’s important to notice, feel, mark, note or register about this poem etc? what noticings (etc) would in your view constitute an adequate reading or mean the kid has ‘got’ the poem?
(a) Distinguish between the noticings etc that a school student or reasonably responsive English speaker might be expected to come to on his or her untutored own, through such resources as a lay person brings to bear, and those that might result from concepts (‘scientific’ lit crit concepts) and knowledge that an English teacher might impart. Consider, as a possible general rule: should we be starting with the first sort? (A whole discussion is needed on this.)
(b) ‘in your view’, I said above but you have to take into account that that might not be their view. See below.
2. What would need to go on between you, the class and the text for those noticings to occur, those aspects or features to be felt? What processes and activities might you instigate?
- How then will you know what has been registered, noticed, marked or felt? How will you get those results, that learning, to show? This is a question about evaluation, in the sense not of grading but on ‘formative’ evaluation or getting the information by which to proceed effectively.
I suggested in point 1 that teachers begin by identifying the things they think students should ‘get’ in the text but observed in 1(b) that students might well have a different take. Now you don’t want to preempt or cut off reactions that are different from the ones you think they should have that are the same as yours, or give the sense that yours are right and theirs somehow not legitimate. Devising forms of productive activity that will allow responses to appear that you’d no way of anticipating is a difficult matter and one of the hardest and most important thing English teachers have to learn to do.
4. There’s an extra complication: it may take some form of expression for the student to become aware of the nature of his or her response. For it to become known to the experiencer, the experience may need to be manifested out there, in the public (accessible to others) ‘space of appearance’, in, for instance, spoken or written words. Indeed, it may only be when ‘semiotically anchored’ or attached to signs that some sorts of experience may be said to come into existence at all, or at any rate definite existence as realities to be mentally entertained and contemplated. It may be in giving expression to the response to a text that the response happens ‘in the first place’.
And here we have to note that the notion of ‘expression’ is profoundly misleading, as if something that’s inside (mental, psychic) gets outside, by a process of ex-pression, pressing out. In fact there’s no way that what’s inside, a thought or feeling, can itself be made visible or apprehensible since what is perceptible is material and those inner occurrences aren’t. (Except that some thoughts are already ‘encoded’ internally in language to varying degrees….)
What actually happens in so-called ‘expression’ is that to whatever is ‘inside’ is added something else, something of quite a different, namely material, order.
As a responsible PGCE tutor I would want to supply references to articles and books in which the authors give serious thought to, and report their classroom experiments relating to, (a) forms of production to give ‘expression’ to responses, ones that could be set up without preempting those responses; and (b) the theoretically difficult issue of the disjunction between experience and the expression of it and the way in which it may only be in expression that experience may be said to come fully into existence at all.
But I'm now so out of touch with the whole business that no such references come to mind. But I'm also willing to bet that none of the main ‘method books’ on English teaching of the last, what, twenty years, at any rate in Britain, have anything substantial to say on these issues.
Tuesday, 28 February 2012
Teaching for a better society
We had an end-of-project conference the other day to report our findings to other researchers, people involved in training English teachers and a fair representation of former teachers from the period we've been studying, 1945-65. There were also a handful of young teachers from London schools.
The striking contrast with today is that there existed then a significant number of London teachers who were so concerned with how well they were able to do their job that they were willing to give up endless evenings and weekends to meet together in study groups, for discussion and to hear speakers. Teachers today work just as hard, I believe, but don't organise themselves to meet for self-driven professional purposes. As for how much professional discussion goes on in department meetings I don't know enough to say.
Why the difference? In 1949, 1956, 1965 there was little extrinsic motivation to do the job well: pay was poor and few teachers were on anything above the basic pay scale.
One thing the two groups, then and now, have in common is that both would probably agree that the society they live in leaves much to be desired. The difference is that in those post-war decades there was a belief that education could make a serious contribution to making it better; for the teachers at our meeting, teaching English was a social project. I doubt if anyone today believes that an important key to building a better society lies in what teachers do with kids in their classrooms. If teachers today are wanting to do good, and many are, it's by helping individuals to liberate themselves by education from whatever's holding them back from a full and flourishing life.
A second difference might be that in 1956 those teachers believed there was a social group in which hope could be placed, namely that huge number of working-class children -- i.e. the majority of children -- who the system had neglected, except by picking a minority out for sponsorship in the grammar schools. I never hear it said these days that the hope for the future lies in the working class.
Is there a group in which hope might be placed? One that immediately suggests itself is the immigrant population that quite clearly contains large numbers of intelligent and admirable young people. But I don't hear it said that they're the hope either, even though many teachers appreciate their contribution to the schools.
The reason surely is that what's wrong with society today won't be solved by education; the problems are structural, to do with globalisation, corporations and finance. Of course, the problems were structural then, too, in the sense of social class, though people perhaps didn't see that so clearly; they thought education could make a difference, both through new structures (comprehensive schools) and through teaching that induced habits of mutual respect and cooperation, as well as assertiveness and criticality; if the citizenry were imbued with democratic values, things would clearly be better.
The striking contrast with today is that there existed then a significant number of London teachers who were so concerned with how well they were able to do their job that they were willing to give up endless evenings and weekends to meet together in study groups, for discussion and to hear speakers. Teachers today work just as hard, I believe, but don't organise themselves to meet for self-driven professional purposes. As for how much professional discussion goes on in department meetings I don't know enough to say.
Why the difference? In 1949, 1956, 1965 there was little extrinsic motivation to do the job well: pay was poor and few teachers were on anything above the basic pay scale.
One thing the two groups, then and now, have in common is that both would probably agree that the society they live in leaves much to be desired. The difference is that in those post-war decades there was a belief that education could make a serious contribution to making it better; for the teachers at our meeting, teaching English was a social project. I doubt if anyone today believes that an important key to building a better society lies in what teachers do with kids in their classrooms. If teachers today are wanting to do good, and many are, it's by helping individuals to liberate themselves by education from whatever's holding them back from a full and flourishing life.
A second difference might be that in 1956 those teachers believed there was a social group in which hope could be placed, namely that huge number of working-class children -- i.e. the majority of children -- who the system had neglected, except by picking a minority out for sponsorship in the grammar schools. I never hear it said these days that the hope for the future lies in the working class.
Is there a group in which hope might be placed? One that immediately suggests itself is the immigrant population that quite clearly contains large numbers of intelligent and admirable young people. But I don't hear it said that they're the hope either, even though many teachers appreciate their contribution to the schools.
The reason surely is that what's wrong with society today won't be solved by education; the problems are structural, to do with globalisation, corporations and finance. Of course, the problems were structural then, too, in the sense of social class, though people perhaps didn't see that so clearly; they thought education could make a difference, both through new structures (comprehensive schools) and through teaching that induced habits of mutual respect and cooperation, as well as assertiveness and criticality; if the citizenry were imbued with democratic values, things would clearly be better.
Wednesday, 20 July 2011
Hyderabad/UK: call centres/models of education
On two occasions a year apart I've had to call Technical Support about interruptions to my broadband. The first led to a protracted nightmare of communications in which the main problem was the inability of the person at the other end of the line in India to understand what I was talking about. This wasn’t a matter of language in the narrow sense of linguistic forms or accent but of a lack of the experience that would enable them -- there were a number of them on different days -- to envisage my situation, resulting in the successive dispatch by email of the same irrelevant questions after each call. Finally I got, also in India (I think) a more senior person with experience of what was involved in grappling with computers in real situations.
I had to call again a few days ago and this time I got an Irish chap who couldn’t have been better -- I’d use him any time as a model for customer relations. It’s clear that the company -- let’s give them the credit: TalkTalk -- had moved their call centre (back?) to the UK or Ireland. This person knew what I was talking about, made an immediate guess at what the problem might be, gave me something to try, tried something himself while I discontinued the call and called me back when he’d said he would. Meanwhile something he’d said had reminded me that I had a spare microfilter (to go between the phone socket and modem/router cable) and I’d tried substituting it, which had appeared to solve the problem. He agreed this had improved things but because he’d nevertheless noted a problem with my line was going to put in for a full test by the engineers which would report to me within 10 days -- if not I was to call again and he’d nag them.
The following comparison occurs to me. The junior people in India have been trained by the book, learning by heart what to say when confronted with this or that specified problem. When the problem is reported in different terms or isn’t exactly the textbook case they’re lost. Compare learning in English schools to meet specified ‘targets’ or evaluations by precisely specified criteria; learners pass the tests but don’t know the subject.
My Irish expert knew his way around IT. He’d learned by immersion in the field as well as from formal instruction in the discipline. He’d experienced the muddiness of real-world, ill-defined, multi-explanation problems and had the profession’s collectively built and informally disseminated know-how as an unspecifiably extensive web of resources to draw on.
I had to call again a few days ago and this time I got an Irish chap who couldn’t have been better -- I’d use him any time as a model for customer relations. It’s clear that the company -- let’s give them the credit: TalkTalk -- had moved their call centre (back?) to the UK or Ireland. This person knew what I was talking about, made an immediate guess at what the problem might be, gave me something to try, tried something himself while I discontinued the call and called me back when he’d said he would. Meanwhile something he’d said had reminded me that I had a spare microfilter (to go between the phone socket and modem/router cable) and I’d tried substituting it, which had appeared to solve the problem. He agreed this had improved things but because he’d nevertheless noted a problem with my line was going to put in for a full test by the engineers which would report to me within 10 days -- if not I was to call again and he’d nag them.
The following comparison occurs to me. The junior people in India have been trained by the book, learning by heart what to say when confronted with this or that specified problem. When the problem is reported in different terms or isn’t exactly the textbook case they’re lost. Compare learning in English schools to meet specified ‘targets’ or evaluations by precisely specified criteria; learners pass the tests but don’t know the subject.
My Irish expert knew his way around IT. He’d learned by immersion in the field as well as from formal instruction in the discipline. He’d experienced the muddiness of real-world, ill-defined, multi-explanation problems and had the profession’s collectively built and informally disseminated know-how as an unspecifiably extensive web of resources to draw on.
Tuesday, 5 July 2011
Education needs to be long
In order to flourish, some people need to continue in education beyond 18, but the education that group needs is often neither of the alternatives on offer in England: vocational, for trades or professions, and academic, for induction into university disciplines.
A case in point. In Canada I was able to take over and run for ten years an undergraduate course in which I had considerable freedom. It wasn’t a required element for qualifying in my department’s discipline of linguistics and it was taken by students from a variety of programmes, from second year to fourth. The course was called ‘Writing: Theory and Practice’. You could summarise it as Writing: What it is, how it’s done, what it does, how it’s learned.
Though elementary school teachers on day release from local schools had been the original intended clientele, they had (thankfully for me) stopped being released and no longer attended in any numbers; instead, regular undergraduates flocked in -- a far more appealing group to work with. Gearing the course primarily to the teaching of children in classrooms no longer seemed appropriate so while retaining the material on research into the writing process, together with theories of writing, I tried to make it relevant to students studying university disciplines and, above all, to enable students to understand and extend their own writing, and realise how writing can be a means of making ideas come and getting thoughts into order. That is, to experience the heuristic function of writing.
I devised occasions and tasks that would get the students writing in a variety of genres. Some students claimed at the end that this had resulted in their papers/essays in their other courses improving, while some discovered a talent for short stories. Most significant, I think, was my encouragement of the regular production of unspecialised informal writing on the content of the readings and lectures. Such productions are often called logs or journals but what I was after was something more intellectual and more intelligent than the familiar work that comes under those labels, having had a bellyful of the usual wordy and self-indulgently expressive gush in too many summer courses. I was after ideas and thought.
Some found this sort of writing liberating and claimed it was their first experience of doing writing into which their thoughts could flow. It seemed to accompany an intellectual awakening, a broadening of vision beyond disciplinary boundaries and a taking hold of education as something one was doing for oneself -- though I realise it’s easy to claim too much and there was no proper evaluation.
This relatively unregulated writing, while it had its moments of sparky perceptiveness and rhetorical brio, was not what anyone would call ‘good writing’. It was, however, good mental activity and educationally valid in that students began to learn to connect their writing to their minds. The experience started to make writing an intellectual resource -- with effects, too, I thought, on how the students read the prescribed texts.
As tends to happen with me, I found that I continued to have contact with students who’d proved particularly interesting or on a roll, the ones (by no means all) for which this sort of course was just right at this point in their education. It was right because of those features that made it not a conventional university course, though I’d claim it was just as intellectually demanding. What it didn’t do is teach people how to write the approved political science or English Literature or psychology essay.
One student for whom the course apparently worked went on to take one or two graduate courses, having time on his hands over the summer. One was taken by a professor (North American usage: = any sort of university teacher) for whom I had great liking and respect, as did his students who had a good time with him and learned a lot. Having flourished throughout the course with my colleague, this student did his final assignment which was predictably lively and personal -- along the lines I’d been hospitable to -- but got back, along with an appreciation of the thinking, an adverse comment on the writing: observance of conventions, referencing, marshalling of evidence and arguments. All absolutely valid points to pick up in a graduate course -- but baffling to the student who legitimately asked, though not to the teacher and perhaps not explicitly to himself: ‘Who but a specialist in a discipline, which I'm not trying to be, would care about such stuff? what matters is the ideas and the thinking I do around them. I'm not submitting an article to an academic journal.’
The prof did his job superbly, to teach a Masters level course in Applied Language Studies. The young man, though, was into getting a broad education, and developing as someone who could use writing to further his thinking and learning. As someone for whom the world of ideas with its vistas and excitements was just opening up, he was back with the sort of mismatch that had characterised his experience in all his academic courses: they simply weren’t what was needed by a mind developing as his was after emerging from a narrow high school curriculum and needed, above all, free play in the domain of ideas and knowledge. The suggestion that he conform to academic writing standards was simply irrelevant to someone who was a way off from even contemplating a higher degree of the sort the course was located in -- though he found the ideas and texts in the course stimulating and mind-enhancing.
There thus needs to be a way for young men and women who leave high school -- and indeed, in England, who leave year 9 or 10 (at 13 or 14) -- to do something that is not a disciplinary induction and socialisation but yet is rich in ideas and knowledge. Does such an education anywhere exist?
A case in point. In Canada I was able to take over and run for ten years an undergraduate course in which I had considerable freedom. It wasn’t a required element for qualifying in my department’s discipline of linguistics and it was taken by students from a variety of programmes, from second year to fourth. The course was called ‘Writing: Theory and Practice’. You could summarise it as Writing: What it is, how it’s done, what it does, how it’s learned.
Though elementary school teachers on day release from local schools had been the original intended clientele, they had (thankfully for me) stopped being released and no longer attended in any numbers; instead, regular undergraduates flocked in -- a far more appealing group to work with. Gearing the course primarily to the teaching of children in classrooms no longer seemed appropriate so while retaining the material on research into the writing process, together with theories of writing, I tried to make it relevant to students studying university disciplines and, above all, to enable students to understand and extend their own writing, and realise how writing can be a means of making ideas come and getting thoughts into order. That is, to experience the heuristic function of writing.
I devised occasions and tasks that would get the students writing in a variety of genres. Some students claimed at the end that this had resulted in their papers/essays in their other courses improving, while some discovered a talent for short stories. Most significant, I think, was my encouragement of the regular production of unspecialised informal writing on the content of the readings and lectures. Such productions are often called logs or journals but what I was after was something more intellectual and more intelligent than the familiar work that comes under those labels, having had a bellyful of the usual wordy and self-indulgently expressive gush in too many summer courses. I was after ideas and thought.
Some found this sort of writing liberating and claimed it was their first experience of doing writing into which their thoughts could flow. It seemed to accompany an intellectual awakening, a broadening of vision beyond disciplinary boundaries and a taking hold of education as something one was doing for oneself -- though I realise it’s easy to claim too much and there was no proper evaluation.
This relatively unregulated writing, while it had its moments of sparky perceptiveness and rhetorical brio, was not what anyone would call ‘good writing’. It was, however, good mental activity and educationally valid in that students began to learn to connect their writing to their minds. The experience started to make writing an intellectual resource -- with effects, too, I thought, on how the students read the prescribed texts.
As tends to happen with me, I found that I continued to have contact with students who’d proved particularly interesting or on a roll, the ones (by no means all) for which this sort of course was just right at this point in their education. It was right because of those features that made it not a conventional university course, though I’d claim it was just as intellectually demanding. What it didn’t do is teach people how to write the approved political science or English Literature or psychology essay.
One student for whom the course apparently worked went on to take one or two graduate courses, having time on his hands over the summer. One was taken by a professor (North American usage: = any sort of university teacher) for whom I had great liking and respect, as did his students who had a good time with him and learned a lot. Having flourished throughout the course with my colleague, this student did his final assignment which was predictably lively and personal -- along the lines I’d been hospitable to -- but got back, along with an appreciation of the thinking, an adverse comment on the writing: observance of conventions, referencing, marshalling of evidence and arguments. All absolutely valid points to pick up in a graduate course -- but baffling to the student who legitimately asked, though not to the teacher and perhaps not explicitly to himself: ‘Who but a specialist in a discipline, which I'm not trying to be, would care about such stuff? what matters is the ideas and the thinking I do around them. I'm not submitting an article to an academic journal.’
The prof did his job superbly, to teach a Masters level course in Applied Language Studies. The young man, though, was into getting a broad education, and developing as someone who could use writing to further his thinking and learning. As someone for whom the world of ideas with its vistas and excitements was just opening up, he was back with the sort of mismatch that had characterised his experience in all his academic courses: they simply weren’t what was needed by a mind developing as his was after emerging from a narrow high school curriculum and needed, above all, free play in the domain of ideas and knowledge. The suggestion that he conform to academic writing standards was simply irrelevant to someone who was a way off from even contemplating a higher degree of the sort the course was located in -- though he found the ideas and texts in the course stimulating and mind-enhancing.
There thus needs to be a way for young men and women who leave high school -- and indeed, in England, who leave year 9 or 10 (at 13 or 14) -- to do something that is not a disciplinary induction and socialisation but yet is rich in ideas and knowledge. Does such an education anywhere exist?
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
Jacob Behrens and my education
Behrens, Jacob: 19th century Bradford wool man. I'm finding myself, after my recent couple of days in Bradford, interested in the city’s 19th century history, to which Behrens was important. (He was apparently involved in reforming Bradford Grammar School and putting it on a modern footing.) An intelligent, vigorous, warm and humane man, it appears. I vaguely knew that the Behrenses were one of the German families who moved to Bradford and contributing to building up the wool trade and city.
I’ve just bought his biography second-hand and have read the first part, about his early life (born 1806), up until I think his late 20s, in Hamburg, and emerge from this with a few miscellaneous observations.
Germany at the time was a mess of small states run for the most part by an outrageously rich, privileged and reactionary class of nobles. I hadn’t realised, a point the book makes clear, what a huge improvement Napoleon’s administration had made in that, what -- decade? --of occupation: abolishing arbitrary customs levies, banning discrimination against Jews (the Behrens family were Jewish, hence in trade, practically the only occupation that had been permitted for Jews), providing schools, building bridges. (I knew something of this in relation to the French occupation of Yugoslavia, from Rebecca West’s Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, and have since looked for a book on Napoleon’s administrative innovations in France and beyond, but haven’t found one.) And then the callousness and stupidity of the restored princely and aristocratic regimes after Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna (did I ever do that in history?) -- under the ‘Austrian Peace’, so-called because it was mainly Metternich’s doing, and he was an Austrian -- I didn’t know that either. Not only the rulers but the old ways and privileges and bans were restored -- to the extent of pulling down the French-built bridge in Hamburg so the ferrymen could resume their customary trade and the people could resume their hazardous and expensive half-hour crossings in open boats in wind, rain and snow. (Big society?)
I also realise I know nothing about Germany. All those names: Pomerania, Saxony, Hanover, Silesia, Prussia... I've very little idea where they are. Nor could I draw a map of Germany which always seems to me to be a featureless mass without anything to get your bearings with. Well, just some rivers, I suppose, and the Black Mountains. So I need a geography book and atlas as well as a history. Come to think of it, we only did one year of geography in grammar school, and I think that was the British Isles -- which I'm glad to have done but it wasn’t enough.
Now a pedagogic observation. I sort of knew before opening the book that the Behrenses had been in textiles in Germany, and, having in mind I suppose that Jacob Behrens had a mill in Bradford - still there in my youth, perhaps it still is -- or I thought it was a mill (it may have been a warehouse) I simply assumed that the family manufactured yarn or cloth in Hamburg. Then I read without paying particular attention something about the firm importing its cloth from England, and only afterwards registered the significance of that statement: so they weren’t manufacturers, they were merchants, buying and selling.
Now: imagine -- I'm a teacher and my class has been ordered to read the chapter. When they’ve finished I might normally be inclined to ask them, ‘Where did they get their cloth from?’ ‘England, sir’ -- no problem. After the reading I’d actually had, in which on reflection I’d noted a particular significance in what I was being told, I might ask them rather, ‘What business were the Behrens in in Hamburg?’ -- in order for them to realise that, whatever they might have unquestioningly assumed, like me, it wasn’t manufacture. But what I should be trying to do is bring about in my students the sort of learning that I experienced -- and the difference is that no one asked me the question that made that happen. My learning, in fact, was precisely realising that there was a question to be asked.
A huge part of my effort in teaching humanities in school , including English, was to get the kids to have questions.
I was reminded of this the other day when Simon Clements, recalling his time as an HMI (inspecting schools, not just English), said that if he had one fundamental question for teachers in relation to their teaching, it was ‘Whose questions?’ Exactly right.
I’ve just bought his biography second-hand and have read the first part, about his early life (born 1806), up until I think his late 20s, in Hamburg, and emerge from this with a few miscellaneous observations.
Germany at the time was a mess of small states run for the most part by an outrageously rich, privileged and reactionary class of nobles. I hadn’t realised, a point the book makes clear, what a huge improvement Napoleon’s administration had made in that, what -- decade? --of occupation: abolishing arbitrary customs levies, banning discrimination against Jews (the Behrens family were Jewish, hence in trade, practically the only occupation that had been permitted for Jews), providing schools, building bridges. (I knew something of this in relation to the French occupation of Yugoslavia, from Rebecca West’s Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, and have since looked for a book on Napoleon’s administrative innovations in France and beyond, but haven’t found one.) And then the callousness and stupidity of the restored princely and aristocratic regimes after Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna (did I ever do that in history?) -- under the ‘Austrian Peace’, so-called because it was mainly Metternich’s doing, and he was an Austrian -- I didn’t know that either. Not only the rulers but the old ways and privileges and bans were restored -- to the extent of pulling down the French-built bridge in Hamburg so the ferrymen could resume their customary trade and the people could resume their hazardous and expensive half-hour crossings in open boats in wind, rain and snow. (Big society?)
I also realise I know nothing about Germany. All those names: Pomerania, Saxony, Hanover, Silesia, Prussia... I've very little idea where they are. Nor could I draw a map of Germany which always seems to me to be a featureless mass without anything to get your bearings with. Well, just some rivers, I suppose, and the Black Mountains. So I need a geography book and atlas as well as a history. Come to think of it, we only did one year of geography in grammar school, and I think that was the British Isles -- which I'm glad to have done but it wasn’t enough.
Now a pedagogic observation. I sort of knew before opening the book that the Behrenses had been in textiles in Germany, and, having in mind I suppose that Jacob Behrens had a mill in Bradford - still there in my youth, perhaps it still is -- or I thought it was a mill (it may have been a warehouse) I simply assumed that the family manufactured yarn or cloth in Hamburg. Then I read without paying particular attention something about the firm importing its cloth from England, and only afterwards registered the significance of that statement: so they weren’t manufacturers, they were merchants, buying and selling.
Now: imagine -- I'm a teacher and my class has been ordered to read the chapter. When they’ve finished I might normally be inclined to ask them, ‘Where did they get their cloth from?’ ‘England, sir’ -- no problem. After the reading I’d actually had, in which on reflection I’d noted a particular significance in what I was being told, I might ask them rather, ‘What business were the Behrens in in Hamburg?’ -- in order for them to realise that, whatever they might have unquestioningly assumed, like me, it wasn’t manufacture. But what I should be trying to do is bring about in my students the sort of learning that I experienced -- and the difference is that no one asked me the question that made that happen. My learning, in fact, was precisely realising that there was a question to be asked.
A huge part of my effort in teaching humanities in school , including English, was to get the kids to have questions.
I was reminded of this the other day when Simon Clements, recalling his time as an HMI (inspecting schools, not just English), said that if he had one fundamental question for teachers in relation to their teaching, it was ‘Whose questions?’ Exactly right.
Wednesday, 2 March 2011
Jamie's Dream School
Jamie Oliver -- good guy -- has set up a small school that’s to run for two weeks and attempt to rescue 20 teenage ‘academic failures’, and to ‘light their fire’, as he puts it, he’s engaged distinguished experts as teachers. Just seen the first programme and they didn’t do well, except the yachtsperson who only had four kids to deal with -- and no school subject to teach.
Might that be something to do with the fact that the experts aren’t teachers? might they not have been more successful if they’d been shown how to do it on a PGCE?
To which, sadly, Jamie’s answer might justifiably be that the people the kids have just come are all trained teachers, and what good did that do.
His scheme isn’t silly because we know that there are loads of ‘born teachers’ who aren’t teaching as a job, and some of his experts might have turned out to be among them as well as being expert in science, art, history and sailing.
Still, it’s also rather typical of the standing of the profession that the idea can even get a hearing that non-teachers could be given a bunch of kids to teach, whereas we wouldn’t (or would we, these days?) set non-medics to do surgery or non-musicians to conduct... Etc.
Shows we lack a clear concept of what the expertise in teaching actually is. But a prerequisite must surely be that someone understands teenagers and is used to being with them. I got the impression that none of these four did, except perhaps the yacht person whose name I should know but have forgotten.
Come to think of them, Jamie himself seemed by far the best with the kids, but then he’s taught similar kids for years in his restaurant.
Might that be something to do with the fact that the experts aren’t teachers? might they not have been more successful if they’d been shown how to do it on a PGCE?
To which, sadly, Jamie’s answer might justifiably be that the people the kids have just come are all trained teachers, and what good did that do.
His scheme isn’t silly because we know that there are loads of ‘born teachers’ who aren’t teaching as a job, and some of his experts might have turned out to be among them as well as being expert in science, art, history and sailing.
Still, it’s also rather typical of the standing of the profession that the idea can even get a hearing that non-teachers could be given a bunch of kids to teach, whereas we wouldn’t (or would we, these days?) set non-medics to do surgery or non-musicians to conduct... Etc.
Shows we lack a clear concept of what the expertise in teaching actually is. But a prerequisite must surely be that someone understands teenagers and is used to being with them. I got the impression that none of these four did, except perhaps the yacht person whose name I should know but have forgotten.
Come to think of them, Jamie himself seemed by far the best with the kids, but then he’s taught similar kids for years in his restaurant.
Saturday, 8 January 2011
Ivory tower classrooms
Train of thought this morning, walking down the Thames to Kingston:
The cruise boats were all moored for their winter painting etc. One was the ‘Richmond Royale’ and I thought how, probably, few people who used ‘royale’ in titles -- mainly of consumer items like notepaper and American cars, in copperplate typefaces -- realised it was the feminine of French ‘royal’. It’s used instead of ‘royal’, and placed after rather than before the noun, because the style connotes expensive sophistication.
Then I thought, what a donnish line of thought. Haven’t I anything better to do than go round like some leisured 18th century dilettante collecting interesting and amusing linguistic usages? I imagined the sort of unworldly teacher who would discourse about such oddities to bored classes who would mutter that he should, as they say today, get out more.
But then I thought, hang on: don’t some kids actually like that sort of unworldliness? Isn’t one point of school that it’s completely separate from life and that all children are thereby guaranteed many years of weekday security, peace and freedom from the constraints, pressures and preoccupations of their lives outside? Aren’t too many schools and teachers today jumping too fast to the belief that children need school to be obviously relevant to not only their lives but their modes of interacting and communicating outside?
Isn’t it precisely, for some, the abstraction and detachment of science, maths, history and poetry that make them so rewarding?
Memo to self: look again through Jonathan Rose’s great book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, for the quotes I remember of 19th century weavers living an alternative life in the volumes of literature, economics and geometry they propped up on their looms. For them, self-education wasn’t primarily a matter of seeking political liberation, still less the present-day obsession with vocational advancement; it was for entering the world of the mind.
Then: might it be a, perhaps the, problem for education that children divide: one group appreciate abstraction (let’s call it that) and the other are bored and switched off by it and need to be coaxed by ‘relevance’ (this novel is more about your own lives than you think) into such engagement. Where’s the research on this? is it a false or a true dichotomy? where’s the research on those teachers who have successfully taught both types together in ‘mixed-ability’ classes? (It’s not of course a matter of ability.)
I also thought -- the Thames was lovely, wild and windy with swans and geese rising and all the moored barges -- and I need a good camera. My present one isn’t broken but the quality now depresses me when I see the work of people (Neil!) with better lenses and electronics. I've more or less stopped using it. So my dilemma: do I get a something bulkier for the sake of the lens, at the price of having to deliberately carry it round my neck or in a sizeable bag, or get a good compact on the grounds that I'm more likely to use it if I routinely have it in my coat pocket?
I might then get back to putting more photos on the blog.
The cruise boats were all moored for their winter painting etc. One was the ‘Richmond Royale’ and I thought how, probably, few people who used ‘royale’ in titles -- mainly of consumer items like notepaper and American cars, in copperplate typefaces -- realised it was the feminine of French ‘royal’. It’s used instead of ‘royal’, and placed after rather than before the noun, because the style connotes expensive sophistication.
Then I thought, what a donnish line of thought. Haven’t I anything better to do than go round like some leisured 18th century dilettante collecting interesting and amusing linguistic usages? I imagined the sort of unworldly teacher who would discourse about such oddities to bored classes who would mutter that he should, as they say today, get out more.
But then I thought, hang on: don’t some kids actually like that sort of unworldliness? Isn’t one point of school that it’s completely separate from life and that all children are thereby guaranteed many years of weekday security, peace and freedom from the constraints, pressures and preoccupations of their lives outside? Aren’t too many schools and teachers today jumping too fast to the belief that children need school to be obviously relevant to not only their lives but their modes of interacting and communicating outside?
Isn’t it precisely, for some, the abstraction and detachment of science, maths, history and poetry that make them so rewarding?
Memo to self: look again through Jonathan Rose’s great book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, for the quotes I remember of 19th century weavers living an alternative life in the volumes of literature, economics and geometry they propped up on their looms. For them, self-education wasn’t primarily a matter of seeking political liberation, still less the present-day obsession with vocational advancement; it was for entering the world of the mind.
Then: might it be a, perhaps the, problem for education that children divide: one group appreciate abstraction (let’s call it that) and the other are bored and switched off by it and need to be coaxed by ‘relevance’ (this novel is more about your own lives than you think) into such engagement. Where’s the research on this? is it a false or a true dichotomy? where’s the research on those teachers who have successfully taught both types together in ‘mixed-ability’ classes? (It’s not of course a matter of ability.)
I also thought -- the Thames was lovely, wild and windy with swans and geese rising and all the moored barges -- and I need a good camera. My present one isn’t broken but the quality now depresses me when I see the work of people (Neil!) with better lenses and electronics. I've more or less stopped using it. So my dilemma: do I get a something bulkier for the sake of the lens, at the price of having to deliberately carry it round my neck or in a sizeable bag, or get a good compact on the grounds that I'm more likely to use it if I routinely have it in my coat pocket?
I might then get back to putting more photos on the blog.
Wednesday, 29 December 2010
What it means to be working-class
I thought Lynsey Hanley, as so often, hit the nail on the head:
The iron rule of being working class in today’s Guardian. She explains that for a kid to get on and get into the sort of education -- the sort of degree in the sort of university -- that will mean you’re on a steady £30,000 at 30 is these days a hopeless prospect. Hanley puts it in a way we seldom hear:
While in government, Labour consistently missed the point about the demoralising nature of low-paid insecure work, which, unless they are superhuman (as business and government demands of them) traps people in crisis-management mode: bills, debt, childcare, housing, on a rota of uncertainty. It may well be the case that flexible jobs are better than no jobs; the question is whether children whose parents are barely getting by can see a real and concrete route to a more comfortable life.
The iron rule of being working class in today’s Guardian. She explains that for a kid to get on and get into the sort of education -- the sort of degree in the sort of university -- that will mean you’re on a steady £30,000 at 30 is these days a hopeless prospect. Hanley puts it in a way we seldom hear:
While in government, Labour consistently missed the point about the demoralising nature of low-paid insecure work, which, unless they are superhuman (as business and government demands of them) traps people in crisis-management mode: bills, debt, childcare, housing, on a rota of uncertainty. It may well be the case that flexible jobs are better than no jobs; the question is whether children whose parents are barely getting by can see a real and concrete route to a more comfortable life.
Monday, 20 December 2010
Alec Clegg again
An article* by Sir Peter Newsam is one of several about Sir Alec Clegg (see posting Developing teachers: theory or example?) in an issue of Education 3-13 (2008, 36:2 pp.109-116). According to Clegg, there were two approaches to education: pot-filling and fire-lighting; a combination of both was needed but it’s clear Clegg thought that without the fire-lighting the pot-filling wouldn’t be very effective. Newsam writes:
“There was, in his [Clegg’s] view, no mystery about how ‘fire-lighting’ could improve the quality of work and behaviour in any school. And because his conclusions have so little to do with the preoccupations of today and so much to do with the distinctive quality of what was achieved in the West Riding, they need to be set out fully, so far as possible in words he used in speeches of the 1960s [thus I take it the following is a composite that Newsam has put together]:
What then are the conditions that bring about this change in the potential of the school community? First of course a teacher who has at least average concern to do his job well, is sympathetic, and loves children. This isn’t asking too much and most heads fit the description. Then, he must have an impulse to do something differently because he believes it will yield better results. This belief may be induced in a variety of ways: he may have read something, got an idea from his head or from a colleague, picked up an idea on a course, and so on. Then, what I think is perhaps one of the most important of all conditions is that what he wants to try out must give the child a deeply satisfying sense of success and achievement. After this comes the recognition of this success by other children and by teachers. This stage is the acceptance of the child as a significant person in the group in which he moves, it is something we all crave, a basic need of the human spirit. It is this which spurs the child on to greater endeavour, which with the wise guidance of a good teacher leads to further success, and this success in its turn is the impulse of the next forward step. Let us forget the child for a moment, and think now of the teacher. He has had an idea, he has tried it out, and it has seemingly worked on his pupils. His need then is often for confirmation of belief in his idea, he wants to talk it over with someone, and he too needs what the child needs, almost as much as the child needs it. He needs the recognition and approbation of those with whom he works and as it was with the child so it will be for the teacher a spur to renewed effort. In all the many examples I have seen of schools suddenly becoming alight, the original flame has been kindled by a creative subject – art or craft or expressive movement – and the conflagration has then spread. Now I know that this may have happened in this county because I have gifted colleagues in those fields who have sown the first seed, as it were, and this may be the explanation. It may be that if we had equally gifted folk dealing with mathematics the same vital seeds might have been sown. Certainly I believe this to be possible. But I, nevertheless, think that it is easier to start with the creative subjects as one’s achievement is more obvious – one looks upon what one has done and sees that it is good, and others whose approval matters see it rather more easily.”
There’s a terrific formulation by Sir Peter at the end of his article:
“There are some who strut and fret on the educational stage these days who appear to have little understanding of the range and depth of the tradition within which Alec Clegg worked and seem to envisage a curricular diet and procedures for motivating high performance more appropriate to a minor preparatory school than to the educational system of a great nation.”
*’What price hyacinths? An appreciation of the work of Sir Alec Clegg’
“There was, in his [Clegg’s] view, no mystery about how ‘fire-lighting’ could improve the quality of work and behaviour in any school. And because his conclusions have so little to do with the preoccupations of today and so much to do with the distinctive quality of what was achieved in the West Riding, they need to be set out fully, so far as possible in words he used in speeches of the 1960s [thus I take it the following is a composite that Newsam has put together]:
What then are the conditions that bring about this change in the potential of the school community? First of course a teacher who has at least average concern to do his job well, is sympathetic, and loves children. This isn’t asking too much and most heads fit the description. Then, he must have an impulse to do something differently because he believes it will yield better results. This belief may be induced in a variety of ways: he may have read something, got an idea from his head or from a colleague, picked up an idea on a course, and so on. Then, what I think is perhaps one of the most important of all conditions is that what he wants to try out must give the child a deeply satisfying sense of success and achievement. After this comes the recognition of this success by other children and by teachers. This stage is the acceptance of the child as a significant person in the group in which he moves, it is something we all crave, a basic need of the human spirit. It is this which spurs the child on to greater endeavour, which with the wise guidance of a good teacher leads to further success, and this success in its turn is the impulse of the next forward step. Let us forget the child for a moment, and think now of the teacher. He has had an idea, he has tried it out, and it has seemingly worked on his pupils. His need then is often for confirmation of belief in his idea, he wants to talk it over with someone, and he too needs what the child needs, almost as much as the child needs it. He needs the recognition and approbation of those with whom he works and as it was with the child so it will be for the teacher a spur to renewed effort. In all the many examples I have seen of schools suddenly becoming alight, the original flame has been kindled by a creative subject – art or craft or expressive movement – and the conflagration has then spread. Now I know that this may have happened in this county because I have gifted colleagues in those fields who have sown the first seed, as it were, and this may be the explanation. It may be that if we had equally gifted folk dealing with mathematics the same vital seeds might have been sown. Certainly I believe this to be possible. But I, nevertheless, think that it is easier to start with the creative subjects as one’s achievement is more obvious – one looks upon what one has done and sees that it is good, and others whose approval matters see it rather more easily.”
There’s a terrific formulation by Sir Peter at the end of his article:
“There are some who strut and fret on the educational stage these days who appear to have little understanding of the range and depth of the tradition within which Alec Clegg worked and seem to envisage a curricular diet and procedures for motivating high performance more appropriate to a minor preparatory school than to the educational system of a great nation.”
*’What price hyacinths? An appreciation of the work of Sir Alec Clegg’
Saturday, 11 December 2010
Knowledge in Chinese classrooms
Jan Derry draws my attention to an excellent letter by David Lambert, Professor of Geography Education at the Institute of Education, in the Independent on Thursday, about the Chinese apparently getting it right in at least some classrooms:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letters/letters-perspectives-on-schools-2155816.html
I've referred more than once (e.g. at the end of this http://petemedway.blogspot.com/2010/12/developing-teachers-theory-or-example.html") to Jan Derry’s work on the nature of knowledge in the school curriculum, drawing on inferentialist theory. Here’s a link Jan has kindly surprised to an article that gives an idea of her thinking (it’s a prepublication version so there are no copyright problems):
Derry, Jan (2008) Abstract rationality in education: from Vygotsky to Brandom. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27 (1). pp. 49-62.
http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/1138/1/Derry2008Abstract49.pdf
For those who’d like to read more, here are some more of her papers:
Derry, Jan (2008) Technology-enhanced learning: a question of knowledge. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 42 (3-4). pp. 505-519.
http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/1034/1/Derry2008Technology505.pdf
Derry, Jan (2004) The unity of intellect and will: Vygotsky and Spinoza. Educational Review, 56 (2). pp. 113-120.
http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/1035/1/Derry2004Unity113.pdf
Derry, Jan (2007) Epistemology and conceptual resources for the development of learning technologies. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning , 23 (6). pp. 503-510.
http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/1132/1/Derry2007Epistemology503.pdf
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letters/letters-perspectives-on-schools-2155816.html
I've referred more than once (e.g. at the end of this http://petemedway.blogspot.com/2010/12/developing-teachers-theory-or-example.html") to Jan Derry’s work on the nature of knowledge in the school curriculum, drawing on inferentialist theory. Here’s a link Jan has kindly surprised to an article that gives an idea of her thinking (it’s a prepublication version so there are no copyright problems):
Derry, Jan (2008) Abstract rationality in education: from Vygotsky to Brandom. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27 (1). pp. 49-62.
http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/1138/1/Derry2008Abstract49.pdf
For those who’d like to read more, here are some more of her papers:
Derry, Jan (2008) Technology-enhanced learning: a question of knowledge. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 42 (3-4). pp. 505-519.
http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/1034/1/Derry2008Technology505.pdf
Derry, Jan (2004) The unity of intellect and will: Vygotsky and Spinoza. Educational Review, 56 (2). pp. 113-120.
http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/1035/1/Derry2004Unity113.pdf
Derry, Jan (2007) Epistemology and conceptual resources for the development of learning technologies. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning , 23 (6). pp. 503-510.
http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/1132/1/Derry2007Epistemology503.pdf
Saturday, 6 November 2010
Another Brussels encounter
I’ve held off telling you about my second encounter in Brussels while waiting for the person concerned’s ok.
I’d arranged to meet Martin King, who I taught for a year or two in a secondary modern in Wakefield till he left at 16 with one CSE in 1976, after doing a project for me to interview three old men on the village bench about their memories of the First World War (Passchendaele, in fact).
No contact since then until recently I noticed something on Friends Reunited, and as a result we’ve met. Martin drove in from Antwerp one morning to show me Brussels -- expertly (see below) -- and induct me in some unusual beers. (Unfortunately our meeting had to be curtailed so he could get out again: the EU summit was about to open so a ring of steel would come down on the city at 3.)
After leaving school, which he didn’t get on with (for good reasons), Martin went to tech for a couple of years to get more qualifications, joined a band and took off with them to tour Europe. The tour lasted some years, they made records and he was a star in Belgium where he met a Flemish nurse and married. Got into university, ended up lecturing in history and then left when they wouldn’t pass his PhD thesis -- too sensitive, it seems (quite a story there). Off to Hollywood to make a documentary, then Discovery Channel in Canada for another, drawing largely on his specialism: military history -- and especially the First World War. I'm eagerly awaiting his films that are to be on tv, though maybe not here. And he’ll have two books.
In schools nowadays you’re required to write lessons plans that include a statement of ‘learning outcomes’. How about, ‘In 35 years time will pick up this topic again and be inspired to make two documentary series’?'
Here are two clips to give an idea of the them:
<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F3DtITOOoM” target=“_blank”>Greatest Tank Battles</a>
<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL5_RZffQ9g” target=“_blank”>Voices of the Bulge</a>
and a notice for the book:
<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Voices-Bulge-Untold-Stories-Veterans/dp/0760340331/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1289310014&sr=1-1” target=“_blank”>Voice of the Bulge</a>.
The trailer from ‘Greatest Tank Battles’ is currently on the ‘Discovery Channel’ in Europe and from January can be seen in the US.
I’d arranged to meet Martin King, who I taught for a year or two in a secondary modern in Wakefield till he left at 16 with one CSE in 1976, after doing a project for me to interview three old men on the village bench about their memories of the First World War (Passchendaele, in fact).
No contact since then until recently I noticed something on Friends Reunited, and as a result we’ve met. Martin drove in from Antwerp one morning to show me Brussels -- expertly (see below) -- and induct me in some unusual beers. (Unfortunately our meeting had to be curtailed so he could get out again: the EU summit was about to open so a ring of steel would come down on the city at 3.)
After leaving school, which he didn’t get on with (for good reasons), Martin went to tech for a couple of years to get more qualifications, joined a band and took off with them to tour Europe. The tour lasted some years, they made records and he was a star in Belgium where he met a Flemish nurse and married. Got into university, ended up lecturing in history and then left when they wouldn’t pass his PhD thesis -- too sensitive, it seems (quite a story there). Off to Hollywood to make a documentary, then Discovery Channel in Canada for another, drawing largely on his specialism: military history -- and especially the First World War. I'm eagerly awaiting his films that are to be on tv, though maybe not here. And he’ll have two books.
In schools nowadays you’re required to write lessons plans that include a statement of ‘learning outcomes’. How about, ‘In 35 years time will pick up this topic again and be inspired to make two documentary series’?'
Here are two clips to give an idea of the them:
<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F3DtITOOoM” target=“_blank”>Greatest Tank Battles</a>
<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL5_RZffQ9g” target=“_blank”>Voices of the Bulge</a>
and a notice for the book:
<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Voices-Bulge-Untold-Stories-Veterans/dp/0760340331/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1289310014&sr=1-1” target=“_blank”>Voice of the Bulge</a>.
The trailer from ‘Greatest Tank Battles’ is currently on the ‘Discovery Channel’ in Europe and from January can be seen in the US.
Monday, 27 September 2010
'Get on!'
Had the odd word in Waitrose, as I occasionally do, with a young chap who is often working there and who I’d originally taken for a teenage school leaver but who, when I first asked him about where they’d hidden the jars of plums after their refurbishment, was clearly older and turned out to be a recent graduate in sports science and business studies who was working part-time and in the vacations -- and now, temporarily he says, in what is, in terms of his ambitions, unemployment.
He reckons now to be filling in time and making some money while looking for a job, but I don’t know how serious that is. Last week he’d expected his Waitrose work to be finishing at the weekend but today he’s back and apparently learning the bakery/patisserie section -- couldn’t say no, he said, to the money, I suppose. Fair enough. He doesn’t seem unhappy with the situation.
Neville Newhouse, however, English master at Bradford Grammar School in the 1950s, would have said that he should be. ‘Get on! don’t waste time! got to get on!’ he used say, and what he meant was not ‘get on with your work’ or ‘get on with covering the syllabus’ but, more generally, get on with the task of youth, or of grammar school youth, which is to develop your mind, acquire knowledge, grow intellectually, read, write, think, learn.
Newhouse would have said that our lad in Waitrose, clearly bright and alert, should have developed in education a sense of the value of his own mind and be working to develop it, and not be wasting his life in a supermarket. If the school had done its job, an active mind (‘lively mind’ was one of his phrases) and an established habit of engaging with knowledge, ideas and one’s own thought would have led to a constant and insatiable desire to know more; each encounter with a book or thought would have stoked curiosity and extended the need to explore further, follow leads, see what else was there. As Jara Rakusan, a colleague in Carleton University, Ottawa, once remarked in the corridor when some of were sharing the fact that as adults we rarely found ourselves being bored: ‘No, because what goes on in us is unending semiosis’ -- one (mental) sign triggering another.
It seems a good criterion for an education that it should leave its students with minds in that state.
(And a critique of Waitrose, with, apparently, a high proportion of bright and educated young staff, might be that for all its benignity its provides an environment in which its people can live contented working lives without having an idea in their minds ever again. Or is that unfair?)
He reckons now to be filling in time and making some money while looking for a job, but I don’t know how serious that is. Last week he’d expected his Waitrose work to be finishing at the weekend but today he’s back and apparently learning the bakery/patisserie section -- couldn’t say no, he said, to the money, I suppose. Fair enough. He doesn’t seem unhappy with the situation.
Neville Newhouse, however, English master at Bradford Grammar School in the 1950s, would have said that he should be. ‘Get on! don’t waste time! got to get on!’ he used say, and what he meant was not ‘get on with your work’ or ‘get on with covering the syllabus’ but, more generally, get on with the task of youth, or of grammar school youth, which is to develop your mind, acquire knowledge, grow intellectually, read, write, think, learn.
Newhouse would have said that our lad in Waitrose, clearly bright and alert, should have developed in education a sense of the value of his own mind and be working to develop it, and not be wasting his life in a supermarket. If the school had done its job, an active mind (‘lively mind’ was one of his phrases) and an established habit of engaging with knowledge, ideas and one’s own thought would have led to a constant and insatiable desire to know more; each encounter with a book or thought would have stoked curiosity and extended the need to explore further, follow leads, see what else was there. As Jara Rakusan, a colleague in Carleton University, Ottawa, once remarked in the corridor when some of were sharing the fact that as adults we rarely found ourselves being bored: ‘No, because what goes on in us is unending semiosis’ -- one (mental) sign triggering another.
It seems a good criterion for an education that it should leave its students with minds in that state.
(And a critique of Waitrose, with, apparently, a high proportion of bright and educated young staff, might be that for all its benignity its provides an environment in which its people can live contented working lives without having an idea in their minds ever again. Or is that unfair?)
Wednesday, 4 August 2010
W.B. Gallie
Hands up who’s heard of him -- Scottish (in origin) philosopher, 1912-1998. A friend mentioned that he’s rereading an old 1952 Pelican by Gallie, Peirce and Pragmatism, about the 19th century American philosopher C.S. Peirce who devised a semiotics that I find, in so far as I understand it, much more useful that Saussure’s. So I got it too (as usual, second-hand, free via Amazon apart from exorbitant postage) and it’s terrific: the best-written, most intelligent and most helpful account of Peirce I've read (Peirce himself is way too hard for me).On the Pelican’s back cover it said he’d written a book about his own schooling at Sedburgh School, a public school in north Yorkshire. So I got that too and was immediately delighted with the dust jacket. It’s 1949.
As I’d expected it’s intelligent and well-written (in a literary and not just philosophical way -- good descriptions of scenes, people and situations), but also sensitive and sensible about education, teachers, games, Christian teachers and friendship. A great find.
Incidentally, for those who are into that sort of thing, Peirce according to Gallie was an inferentialist over a century ago, though I don’t recall Brandom mentioning him (see the label Inferentialism on the menu down the side).
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
Thoughts on assessment
Even in Vygotsky’s time (1925-35) people knew (or he did, in the Soviet Union) that to get a useful reading of where a child was at in intellectual development you needed information not just of what they could do now but of what they’d soon be able to -- the Zone of Proximal Development or ZPD, for which one of my Canadian students, invited to publicise it with a bumper sticker, wrote ‘Zee Pee Dee Doo Dah, Zee Pee Dee Day’ (though Canadians usually say ‘zed’).
And how did you know about a child’s ZPD since it would be entered only in the future? a good indication was what he/she could manage now with just a bit of help.
Something of the spirit of Vygotsky’s insight needs to get into assessment in schools. In my own marking, where the strictness of the mark scheme didn’t prevent it, I tried to consider the student’s trajectory as well as his position in a moment in time. Two students with B- might be very different in terms of their promise and I wanted my marking to reflect that -- ideally by indicating both.
Judging promise is an inescapably subjective business. But I was paid as a professional, and what it means to be that is that you’re trusted to exercise judgement. I imagined myself placing a bet: who would you bet on to be the best writer in, say, three years’ time? The assessor’s situation, given he/she is properly qualified (educated and experienced), should be more like that of a wise boss hiring someone: all you can go on is what you know and can find out at present -- but on that basis you make your best guess.
So, who would you bet on for success in future? The person’s life chances are in your hands, but better that, I would judge, than in the robotic grasp of some mechanical scheme. The privilege of exercising judgement, though, brings with it the responsibility of constant effort to get better -- first by seeing how your bets work out, and second by betting alongside colleagues and discussing your reasons in what, in the CSE examination teachers' meetings in West Yorkshire c.1975, we used to call agreement trials.
Thursday, 13 May 2010
They don't read the papers
It’s said ‘this generation’, ‘young people’ etc don’t read the papers but get all their information from the internet. Don’t we agree that if that’s true, it’s a pity?
I don’t think kids/young adults, many of them (let alone older adults), know what papers are, what they do, how they’re used.
So in my school every day will start in the tutor group/home room/whatever with reading and discussing the papers. They’ll all be available in each room in sufficient copies. (The publishers will supply them free in hope of future custom.) The teachers will get in an hour early to review them. (If necessary the kids will come in an hour later. Or be in some sort of study room when they arrive.)
The proceedings around the day’s papers will be a mixture of browsing and directed inquiry. The students will get to know what to expect from each paper. They’ll do a lot of comparison of treatments of the same story, but will also come to appreciate the best writers, best cartoonists, best sports pages, best tv coverage. And they’ll learn what goes on on the financial pages.
Seems rather obvious, doesn’t it. Why isn’t it done? probably because it isn’t a ‘subject’.
I don’t think kids/young adults, many of them (let alone older adults), know what papers are, what they do, how they’re used.
So in my school every day will start in the tutor group/home room/whatever with reading and discussing the papers. They’ll all be available in each room in sufficient copies. (The publishers will supply them free in hope of future custom.) The teachers will get in an hour early to review them. (If necessary the kids will come in an hour later. Or be in some sort of study room when they arrive.)
The proceedings around the day’s papers will be a mixture of browsing and directed inquiry. The students will get to know what to expect from each paper. They’ll do a lot of comparison of treatments of the same story, but will also come to appreciate the best writers, best cartoonists, best sports pages, best tv coverage. And they’ll learn what goes on on the financial pages.
Seems rather obvious, doesn’t it. Why isn’t it done? probably because it isn’t a ‘subject’.
Education and forming the brain?
A chap on the Today programme just now was claiming that no one becomes a top sportsman/woman without at least ten years of practice, which doesn’t just develop the body but changes the brain. Pretty well anyone’s brain and body, moreover, can get there with enough practice.
We know about the brain changing with learning from London taxi-drivers and the archaeologist I heard who’d taken singing lessons for a month (or perhaps it was a year) and had his brain scanned before and after -- sure enough one part had grown, and I imagine the change was in the structure too, what was connected to what, how many connections each bit had. Sorry to be so technical.
Dr Johnson said that education in childhood should be determined and relentless because that is when the brain is particularly retentive so that knowledge gained then lasts for life.
So I wonder: is there enough emphasis in contemporary ideas of education on the sheer volume of repetition and application needed? is education arduous enough? is there enough practice to decisively reconfigure the brain?
Ian Pringle and Aviva Freedman in the 1980s did a study of students' writing at different ages in a Canadian school board and concluded that by the age of ten children should be writing many pages of continuous text every week. It seems to me that most children are well capable of that if properly taught from the start, and that it should be happening.
Similarly, it’s necessary to read a certain quantity of poems in a school year. No one has attempted, as far as I know, to say how many but I'm sure it’s far more that most kids do have the chance of reading. Books likewise.
Classrooms cursed by too much variety of activity, not enough sheer application and persistence? too low a tolerance of the possibility of boredom?
Or am I just getting reactionary in my old age?
We know about the brain changing with learning from London taxi-drivers and the archaeologist I heard who’d taken singing lessons for a month (or perhaps it was a year) and had his brain scanned before and after -- sure enough one part had grown, and I imagine the change was in the structure too, what was connected to what, how many connections each bit had. Sorry to be so technical.
Dr Johnson said that education in childhood should be determined and relentless because that is when the brain is particularly retentive so that knowledge gained then lasts for life.
So I wonder: is there enough emphasis in contemporary ideas of education on the sheer volume of repetition and application needed? is education arduous enough? is there enough practice to decisively reconfigure the brain?
Ian Pringle and Aviva Freedman in the 1980s did a study of students' writing at different ages in a Canadian school board and concluded that by the age of ten children should be writing many pages of continuous text every week. It seems to me that most children are well capable of that if properly taught from the start, and that it should be happening.
Similarly, it’s necessary to read a certain quantity of poems in a school year. No one has attempted, as far as I know, to say how many but I'm sure it’s far more that most kids do have the chance of reading. Books likewise.
Classrooms cursed by too much variety of activity, not enough sheer application and persistence? too low a tolerance of the possibility of boredom?
Or am I just getting reactionary in my old age?
Monday, 22 February 2010
Good sense on teaching
I like the tone of this, from the introduction to Inglis, Fred, and Lesley Aers. Key Concepts in Education. London: Sage, 2008, p.4:
Then, if you are lucky, you will see the art of teaching in action - the art because the practice in question is being displayed with force and complexity, the life of the classroom is being directed with an assurance and subtlety intrinsic to art, the shape of the interior life of the lesson is made beautiful by the quiet animation of its participants, the smooth motion of their study from point to point, and all this lovely life advances to its goal, which is to discover the truthfulness for which class and teacher have set themselves to look.
Nobody talks about teaching like that these days. They never did, very much, in the past. But the predominance of what is called in these pages 'technicism', which is to say the supposition that teaching may be made foolproof by devising impersonal techniques and so-called 'skills' to cover all classroom and curricular life, has led to the treatment of all teachers as fools: creatures to be told what to do and never to be left alone to do it.
It isn't working. It'll go away. The aim of this book is to help dispel the inanities of technicism, the terrible tripe talked in the diction of the management of performance. The faith in this book is placed in certain inherent and indestructible attributes of the human mind which, when awoken, repel cant, mock jargon, deride cliché. These cheerfully oppositional forms of action are what one looks to find (ha!) in university departments of education. The key concepts are those which may so be orchestrated that they work on behalf of some of their best qualities - truth and beauty say; knowledge and freedom; equality and mind.
Then, if you are lucky, you will see the art of teaching in action - the art because the practice in question is being displayed with force and complexity, the life of the classroom is being directed with an assurance and subtlety intrinsic to art, the shape of the interior life of the lesson is made beautiful by the quiet animation of its participants, the smooth motion of their study from point to point, and all this lovely life advances to its goal, which is to discover the truthfulness for which class and teacher have set themselves to look.
Nobody talks about teaching like that these days. They never did, very much, in the past. But the predominance of what is called in these pages 'technicism', which is to say the supposition that teaching may be made foolproof by devising impersonal techniques and so-called 'skills' to cover all classroom and curricular life, has led to the treatment of all teachers as fools: creatures to be told what to do and never to be left alone to do it.
It isn't working. It'll go away. The aim of this book is to help dispel the inanities of technicism, the terrible tripe talked in the diction of the management of performance. The faith in this book is placed in certain inherent and indestructible attributes of the human mind which, when awoken, repel cant, mock jargon, deride cliché. These cheerfully oppositional forms of action are what one looks to find (ha!) in university departments of education. The key concepts are those which may so be orchestrated that they work on behalf of some of their best qualities - truth and beauty say; knowledge and freedom; equality and mind.
Monday, 8 February 2010
Modern education 1947
From John Betjeman, ‘The Dear Old Village’, 1947
Behind rank elders, shadowing a pool,
And near the Church, behold the Village School,
Its gable rising out of ivy thick
Shows "Eighteen-Sixty" worked in coloured brick.
By nineteen-forty-seven, hurrah! hooray
This institution has outlived its day.
In the bad times of old feudality
The villagers were ruled by masters three-Squire,
parson, schoolmaster. Of these, the last
Knew best the village present and its past.
Now, I am glad to say, the man is dead,
The children have a motor-bus instead,
And in a town eleven miles away
We train them to be "Citizens of To-day."
And many a cultivated hour they pass
In a fine school with walls of vita-glass.
Civics, eurhythmics, economics, Marx,
How-to-respect-wild-life-in-National-Parks;
Plastics, gymnastics-thus they learn to scorn
The old thateh'd cottages where they were born.
So that would be one of they new secondary moderns.
Behind rank elders, shadowing a pool,
And near the Church, behold the Village School,
Its gable rising out of ivy thick
Shows "Eighteen-Sixty" worked in coloured brick.
By nineteen-forty-seven, hurrah! hooray
This institution has outlived its day.
In the bad times of old feudality
The villagers were ruled by masters three-Squire,
parson, schoolmaster. Of these, the last
Knew best the village present and its past.
Now, I am glad to say, the man is dead,
The children have a motor-bus instead,
And in a town eleven miles away
We train them to be "Citizens of To-day."
And many a cultivated hour they pass
In a fine school with walls of vita-glass.
Civics, eurhythmics, economics, Marx,
How-to-respect-wild-life-in-National-Parks;
Plastics, gymnastics-thus they learn to scorn
The old thateh'd cottages where they were born.
So that would be one of they new secondary moderns.
Sunday, 7 February 2010
Over-parenting in school
Report in today’s paper about an American books arguing that happy children are the result not of relentlesssly attentive parenting but of living with parents whose relationship is good. I don’t know about the relationship part but might there be an equivalent in schools?
I.e. perhaps schools can be too caring. I think one of the schools I worked in, or certain departments in it, may have been so and we may have worried more about the kids’ ‘adjustment’ and happiness than about their intellectual development. In my own schooling I think I benefitted from the impersonal relationship we had with most of our teachers. The school then was just an institution we could manage in pragmatic and instrumental ways, and certainly we never felt it was intrusive; it made huge demands on our time but otherwise didn’t interfere with our freedom and autonomy. Your personal life was right outside their concern. One could have a relationship with knowledge and the disciplines that was disinterested and compartmentalised: they gave you the tools and material and left you to it, partly because the teaching was often ineffective but also because that was the way: the stuff was presented, more or less conscientiously, and it was for you to get to work on it. There were tests and assignments, of course, loads of them, but except when one was terrified of a teacher they were just impersonally there: doing what you had to to pass them was often interesting and enjoyable, and despite the load there was usually time to develop one’s own interests.
I'm grateful, too, for a childhood that wasn’t over-protected or over-provided-for at home. It seems to me that, until I went to grammar schools (with homework and Saturday morning school) I played out most of the time, on the magical Moor Fields [see labels down side] or taking a meandering couple of hours exploring our world on the way home from school. My parents weren’t irresponsible but they didn’t worry.
I was lucky in growing up on the rurban fringe of a city, with the best of both worlds available, endlessly stimulating and affording unlimited possibilities for exploration and activity. Schools should provide the intellectual equivalent, through curriculum and resources, with the teachers taking a rather detached responsibility for avoiding harm and ensuring kids enjoy a large zone in which they’re not at the mercy of peer culture.
I.e. perhaps schools can be too caring. I think one of the schools I worked in, or certain departments in it, may have been so and we may have worried more about the kids’ ‘adjustment’ and happiness than about their intellectual development. In my own schooling I think I benefitted from the impersonal relationship we had with most of our teachers. The school then was just an institution we could manage in pragmatic and instrumental ways, and certainly we never felt it was intrusive; it made huge demands on our time but otherwise didn’t interfere with our freedom and autonomy. Your personal life was right outside their concern. One could have a relationship with knowledge and the disciplines that was disinterested and compartmentalised: they gave you the tools and material and left you to it, partly because the teaching was often ineffective but also because that was the way: the stuff was presented, more or less conscientiously, and it was for you to get to work on it. There were tests and assignments, of course, loads of them, but except when one was terrified of a teacher they were just impersonally there: doing what you had to to pass them was often interesting and enjoyable, and despite the load there was usually time to develop one’s own interests.
I'm grateful, too, for a childhood that wasn’t over-protected or over-provided-for at home. It seems to me that, until I went to grammar schools (with homework and Saturday morning school) I played out most of the time, on the magical Moor Fields [see labels down side] or taking a meandering couple of hours exploring our world on the way home from school. My parents weren’t irresponsible but they didn’t worry.
I was lucky in growing up on the rurban fringe of a city, with the best of both worlds available, endlessly stimulating and affording unlimited possibilities for exploration and activity. Schools should provide the intellectual equivalent, through curriculum and resources, with the teachers taking a rather detached responsibility for avoiding harm and ensuring kids enjoy a large zone in which they’re not at the mercy of peer culture.
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