Teaching – Page 20 – Science teacher

January 31, 2018January 22, 2022

Educon 2018, Part I

I got into medicine damn near accidentally. I left with intention.

Which is not to say I did not belong there while I did it, nor does it mean I did not enjoy it. But I left to become a teacher, and it was a good decision. Still, nobody asks “Why did you go into teaching?”

The question I’m asked:

“Why did you leave medicine?”

There are a lot of reasons teaching is better than medicine (and many reasons why medicine beats ed), but one thing medicine has all over education is the Morbidity and Mortality Conference, a regular meeting where, behind (mostly) closed doors, we dissected each other’s mistakes.

Some mistakes cost limbs, some cost lives.
We made the mistakes, we were made to own them.

I have argued long and loudly that our profession is too nice, we play too well together, we fear criticism.

And then I went to Educon, a convention held at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, founded by Chris Lehmann.

He’s the one on the left, photo via Jose Vilson’s work.

We dissected each other, publicly and passionately. In the next few weeks I hope to share a bit of what I learned in Philly last weekend (including do not smack cars even if it’s pushed you off the crosswalk, Philly Pholk are a tad sensitive).

But let me start with this–Educon made me proud to be a pubic high school teacher.

Turns out I’m not the only one who does not play nice….

January 16, 2018January 8, 2022

Your screen or your life

An essential quality of technology, from the spear to Skype, is action at a distance. Technology enables us to have an effect on people and things far away. In general, the more advanced the technology, the further away it is able to impose an effect.
Doug Hill, author of Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology

Our lives cost the lives of others. That’s always been true, and will be so long as we breathe.

Technology allows us to forget this.
Technology encourages us to forget this.

Experts spew on about a global community, but their hands never touch the blood and feces of the life around them. They barely touch their own.

You want every child “connected”? So do I.
It’s what’s at the other end of the connection that matters.

I have killed other living things, deliberately, but not slowly.
I have slaughtered animals with stones, with knives, with awareness.

We pretend the machines bring us knowledge.
We confound information with awareness.

I wish we spent as much time teaching a child how to use a knife as we do a Chromebook.

I could live without my computer a lot easier than living without my knife.
Modified from a few years ago.

January 15, 2018January 22, 2022

Trumped up pedagogy

“No, no, no, I am not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed.”
45, January 14, 2018

President Trump gets under my skin; if you’re here, he probably gets under yours, too.

Many teachers mumble to themselves, and occasionally to each other, how gullible “those” people must be to support him. How can anyone believe what the man says when the evidence screams otherwise?

And then we shuffle off to our classrooms, arms full of papers and books, pockets full of markers, and do what we do. We teach using the best, the very best research education has to offer. And we do it wrong.

We cater to learning styles, we worship the learning pyramid, we tell kids to go figure out this world on their own.

All of it nonsense, but belief (or pretending to believe) is part of the American cult of pedagogy.

Every week or so I immerse myself in the Trump radio universe–I listen to the hosts, I listen to the callers, listen to the myths and the closed loops of reasoning, and it starts to generate an internal rhythm that makes sense. Throw the sense of community in it (and make no mistake, the nationalist/racist movement deep in our bowels depends on this) and this stuff is like cocaine to caged rats.

We do the same thing in education.

A little self awareness goes a long way.

Of course he’s a racist….but you might be, too.