Statement of Philosophy
beliefs about teaching
 
on teachers:
 
~ There are no less than three major occupational tasks lumped into our conception of "teacher":
 
(1) someone who presents material to a group of students, engages students in the process of understanding/analyzing the material, and oversees legitimate assessment of this process
(2) someone who plans material to be presented for student engagement and assessment
(3) someone who collects and organizes the data gathered by assessment
 
It is becoming increasingly clear - given that I have 130 students and 3 preps - that it is frankly impossible for one person to complete all of these tasks simultaneously. At least if you have an reasonable level of concern and accountability for all three tasks. At least if you want to work within 40-60 hours a week. At least if you want to engage in extracurricular tutoring, mentoring, and group organizing.
 
This assertion of impossibility is not hyperbole. Nor is it a cry for sympathy. It is merely an assertion of a certain kind of impossibility. I work 70-80 hr weeks. I'm in the school building for 10 hours a day on average - often without break. I choose to do this and I enjoy doing this (though I'm well aware that it would be psychologically and physically dangerous to do this for more than a few years). I barely reach a level of competence with tasks (1) and (2), and I'm merely treading water with (3). I'm almost never more than a week ahead of planning, and usually have no idea what I'm teaching the next day (though I have committed myself to never letting myself walk into a classroom without a plan). While I regret this lack of competent preparedness (deeply), and sincerely wish that I could please my administrators by turning in the next two-weeks of lesson plans by friday afternoon every other week, there's little to no chance that it will ever get done. Because - if I want to preserve what’s left of my physical and mental health in the short term - there just isn't any more time left.
 
I would not wish this situation upon any human being, and it is a major part of the crippling tragicomedy of education that teachers are subject to this sort of workload as a given if they have any pretention of being competent/meaningful. I imagine that as a teacher becomes more weathered, competency is preserved at the expense of vital meaningfulness - as survival techniques are frozen into a rinse-repeat cycle of the same lesson plans and activities year in an year out.
 
on schools:
 
~ It is upon the schools to be stewards of freedom; if they fail to cultivate an attitude of civil responsibility within the agency of their wards, then they mistake their role in a democratic society - and become a great burden to democracy when they should be its strongest foothold.
 
~ This is the bottom line - competency in the classroom and in the school building involves a fatal concession in some sphere - be it personal or professional. As an educational community, we’ve lumped more and more responsibility on the classroom, and (rightfully) reasserted our commitment to “opportunity for all,” but we’ve failed to make an honest effort at what that actually entails. A education model that was constructed for the needs of the middle class can not merely be cut and pasted into servicing lower income and minority populations, at least with the pretense that we’ll be doing any more for poor black kids than shuffling them from room to room, and feeding them a free or reduced lunch when it’s their turn to be escorted to the cafeteria. Inasmuch as learning requires a respect for the sanctity of choice and initiative, so does teaching; the idea that we must level the playing field means we need to go in the opposite direction in terms of considering standards, accountability, and alignment as minimal bounding elements in educational mandate - actively teaching the under-served requires a higher instance of high-quality teachers, more adults in the classroom, etc. than would be necessary for a student population that comes complete with family support, functional nutrition, and various other social bells and whistles.
 
beliefs about learning
 
~ Nothing is learned without choice; the sanctity of choice it paramount to academic success. This is not to say that it would be appropriate to approve of a student’s decision in any context (the decision to copy a response verbatim, for example), only that one must accept the fundamental role of a student’s decision-making in the learning process. With 30 students in a classroom and a curriculum to get through, this is of course a difficult thing to accept. However, the amount of effort it takes to coerce students into producing in a manner that at least mimics a thought process is actually much less efficient/genuine than the illusive gesture in which an instructor can tempt a student or groups of students into actually wanting to know. I would rather spend days on a build up and a moment on the follow through than hour after hour of plodding through something no one has chosen to pay mind to. In fact, I would rather risk a week of building a context that none of my students will buy into than barrel ahead into a shallow end of information that is important to learn just because it’s on a test someday.
 
~ Learning, to a large degree, is a process of interpersonal/intrapersonal discourse. Facts do not exist in a vacuum, and should not be presented as such. “Mile wide, inch deep” curriculums - as focused as they are on familiarizing a student with a broad reservoir of information - put entirely too much emphasis on the currency of information itself as a learning goal, rather than the currency inherent in the ability to adapt information to context, especially a novel context. I’m entirely convinced that content is arbitrary to the learning process - context and structure are key. Clearly, you need content to fill structure, but content alone has only a tangential relationship to the learning process. My most successful lessons have not engaged learners with the idea that there is anything inherently important about this or that piece of information; rather, they have allowed the learning process to strengthen within the notion that the opportunity a set of information provides for context-building, sense-making, and other structural, critical processes is more meaningful to a student’s development than any notion that the information alone will provide any inherent benefit. That is, it is nothing to learn what linear systems are, or even what mocked up real-world settings they can be used to analyze - rather that there is a certain character of analysis itself that can be strengthened by looking deep into the role linear systems play in the mere ability to analyze. At the end of the day, it’s more important to be able to see the connection between function shapes and marching bands than it is to believe that there is any benefit in knowing what a vertex is.
 
theoretical connections/bibliography In this section I’ll list some education theory, policy, and philosophy books that I’ve read these past two years, with brief comment on how they’ve helped influenced my thoughts on and in the classroom: Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich This text - long out of print - was a course selection in a “Democracy and Education” class at Amherst (which I never took). It is a cornerstone of my intense relationship between choice and learning. The basic premise seems to be that the concept of a right to education is nullified by the idea that school could be compulsory. Radical Equations, Bob Moses Written by a SNCC leader and architect of Freedom Summer, this book’s premise is that - inasmuch as the right to vote was key in the 1960s to participation in American society and economy - fluency in mathematics, particularly in the mode of thought exemplified in Algebra, is key to participation in contemporary American society and economy. That is, to secure a honest and humane living wage as an unskilled laborer in the still manufacturing-healthy economy 1960s meant you needed to be able to protect yourself by the umbrella of enfranchisement; to secure an honest and humane living wage as an unskilled laborer in the service-sector fanatic 21st century, you need to possess the faculties of analytical reasoning secured by fluency in Algebra. Horace’s Compromise, Theodore Sizer Unsurprising foundation for education reform (not revolution, unfortunately); takes a deep look at the underpinnings of educational impotency - built around the “compromise” that the average teacher makes to stay alive in an inhumane setting - and tries to improve upon them (much like my three full-time job responsibilities analysis of the concept of “teacher”). Contrary to the radical fury of Illich (ironically writing much earlier), Sizer seems a bit dated in his analysis (the exception being Illich’s pre-Intranet concept of cassette tape how-to libraries). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Friere Foundational analysis for learning as a dialogical process, with a overdue and sensitive look towards the implications of power relationships in the teacher-learner interchange. CRCL’s success seems to stem from Friere’s ideals of identity built out of critical dialogue, and the trumping of analysis over formal convention. Savage Inequalities/ The Shame of The Nation, Jonathan Kozol Kozol is a great complainer. It’s important to remember that the tragedies of Jim Hill are not a local or regional problem; schools are failing to serve students in much the same way all over the nation, and have been doing so for quite some time. Teachers Have it Easy, Daniel Moulthrop, et al A great anecdote-based indictment on the idea that teachers have summers off, that they have fluff jobs, and that they can support a family with their current salaries. Some interesting examples of re-imagined pay scale models, and lots of insight as to why excellent young teachers leave the profession before it’s too late. No Excuses, Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom It’s important - with all the left-leaning heavy-hitters above - to take some time to see what the critical elements of the right wing are focusing on in terms of the educational crisis that is the achievement gap. No surprises - it’s test scores. The Thernstroms, however, offer some unavoidable and nauseating analysis of the implications that decades of data have brought upon the achievement gap between white and black students - which seems to have gone nowhere since desegregation, and which seems to still exist independently from socioeconomic status. Thought far from an apology for environmental determinism, No Excuses is a different kind of tirade against educational inefficiency. Their main trust seems to be upping the ante on teacher quality and building-level culture control, which I’m all for.
I have no intention of describing in this page either a coherent or consistent body of thought regarding a “philosophy” of education. To offer the pretense of being anywhere near this is to be profoundly mistaken. I do intend, however, to list those ideas and gut reactions that have weathered the various philosophical mood swings of the past two years. Furthermore, since I’m going to appear skeptical or critical at times (please do not confuse this with cynicism), I must try and preempt the “what should happen, then?”/ “it doesn’t seem like you have any ideas of your own”/ “you’ve complained a lot, but offered no plans for doing anything about it” response by stating the following: dissent is never invalid; changing a structure or a system must begin with a deep analysis of its pitfalls; any mathematician worth his or her salt knows that the most important part of solving a problem is understanding it (“it is foolish to answer a question that you do not understand. It is sad to work for an end that you do not desire” ~ Polya). In this respect, all I can offer at this point are not answers but points along a process of understanding.