Classroom tools

Edward Cherlin echerlin at gmail.com
Fri Jan 18 04:15:33 EST 2008


2008/1/16 Jameson Chema Quinn <jquinn at cs.oberlin.edu>:
>
> Let's keep our feet on the ground here.
>
> Just because teaching is a field where mediocrity (or worse) often goes
> unpunished, does not mean that expertise is irrelevant. It is possible for a
> bunch of non-teachers on a mailing list to have good ideas, or to discuss
> good ideas they've heard elsewhere. But some of the worst disasters in
> education come from good ideas that turn into trendy dogma. Success comes
> from thoughtful, flexible application and evaluation by experienced teachers
> who believe, and then divulgation that respects the ideas and inclinations
> of those who do not at first believe.

There is a strong tendency for experienced teachers to reject anything
new, just as in every other human endeavor. And we need far more than
divulgation, we need entrainment. Teachers need to discover discovery
themselves before we can divulgate the rest to them. They need to Get
It [TM].

> Most of us on this list are probably similar in our learning styles -
> naturally oriented towards understanding and discovery, resistant to
> repetition. I remember hating many of the most traditional aspects of
> schooling, most particularly the emphasis on formulaic recipes.

Yes, I nearly failed third grade because I could spell, and wouldn't
do spelling homework.

> But when I
> became a teacher and tried socratically to get my students to construct
> their own recipes, refusing to tell them 'step 1 step 2' for anything, I had
> some spectacular failures. One or two students would love it and figure out
> what I was trying to teach in 5 minutes - then get even more bored than they
> would have been from the formula, as I spent the rest of the period getting
> frustrated with students who were frustrated with me because they didn't get
> it and I wouldn't just tell them how. It is a hard balance to strike.

Socratic teaching was devised for a one-on-one situation by a master.
It was never meant for the classroom.

I recommend looking at Caleb Gattegno's work on discovery using
Cuisenaire rods. But you can't improvise this stuff in the clasroom
until you have mastered what others have discovered how to do.

> I've made constructivism work in the classroom a few times, too, and it is
> great. But let me tell you: the less fired up and prepared I am, the more
> likely I am to choose something more traditional. Because when things don't
> go well, constructivism is much worse.

I believe that the actual idea is to get children so interested in
discovery that they will carry it forward, even on your off days. But
yes, you still have to know your material, the children's
capabilities, the likely paths of discovery, and the likely
impediments to discovery backwards and forwards.

However, as Maria Montessori amply demonstrated (and her followers
have almost entirely forgotten) we know very little about what
children are really capable of. We need a serious set of research
programs, and a means of sharing the resulting knowledge. That means
that we need to get a lot of teachers to catch the discovery bug, so
that they will join in collaborative discovery of collaborative
discovery itself.

> Luckily, we here do not actually have control of any schools. If we ossify
> into dogmatic constructivists, we will just hurt our own project, not
> students. If we do not make the tools teachers need, as well as the ones
> kids need, nobody will pay any attention to us, and OLPC will just dry up
> and blow away. I do not want that.

Yes, indeed, control is not what we need, and certainly not what I
want. I want teachers and parents, as well as children, to have the
advantages of discovery.

> And there's another constituency besides teachers and students:
> researchers/administrators/bureaucrats.

Them, too.

> It's easy to paint these guys as the
> enemy. For instance, in the US, standardized testing companies, with their
> seductive call of 'cheap, clean data', have seduced these guys into imposing
> the nightmare of No Child Left Behind, where the test is king. But if, as I
> said above, there are right ways and wrong ways to teach, who is going to
> sort it out if not the researchers?

Researchers have done excellent work that is utterly dismissed by
administrators, teachers, and governments in disasters such as New
Math and the continuing war between the linguistics profession and the
language teaching profession (local and foreign language, both). Even
the controversy between Whole Word and Phonics, which is utter
nonsense. It is impossible to read English without using both methods,
and in addition referring to a dictionary from time to time. I defy
anybody to figure out, unaided, the pronunciation of the astronomical
term "aphelion". (I have already given you a major clue, so you can't
count yourselves. But I do congratulate you if you get it from just
that clue.) Phonics can't handle "once", the 'ough' words, and a
multitude of others, and Whole Word can't hope to handle words like
"supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" when the child first meets them.

> Who is going to help the good models
> spread faster than the bad ones, if not the administrators?

The children, if we would let them.

> So we need to
> focus some attention on having the programs we write help to generate the
> research data that they need, if we want to break the grip of standardized
> testing.
>
> To bring this all back to earth, here's another teacher-centrically-inspired
> idea that I didn't include in the original message: a word processor that
> saves the whole undo stack with the file. It's technically possible: it's
> not actually so much more data, and text is lightweight. It would integrate
> well (from a user perspective; as a programmer, this is no easy job) with
> the Journal file paradigm. And it would help teachers focus on teaching
> writing process instead of just results, and, by the way, provide a natural
> barrier against computer-aided-plagiarism.

Oh, so just as in math, you want the written assignments to show the
student's work, not just the final answer.

The plagiarism-protection idea is tricky. I can think of several ways
to get around that, with some effort. It would be like the spam and
virus arms races. The rest of your reasons are good, although there
would need to be a way to get just the end result into another file.
Well, once we get intersession copy and paste working properly, no
problem.

> --------------------------------
> I sent the above message off-list by mistake. Edward Cherlin already
> responded to paragraph 2:
>
>
> From: Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com >
>
> ...
>
>
> Of course. I am well aware of the New Math disaster and several others.
> That's why *I* am talking about helping teachers discover discovery, and
> complaining that Nicholas dismisses teachers as irrelevant. I also know that
> we have to ask teachers and children what will work in their schools under
> the conditions they have to deal with.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Devel mailing list
> Devel at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>
>



-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay



More information about the Devel mailing list