0038: Why Teach? Damn nice to watch an egg hatch.
#teaching #learning #edchat
What’s good about teaching? Why stick with it?
On a bad day, who knows? On a good day, you saw someone become more human than they were the day before. Teaching is a sport that involves months of commitment to doldrums and blank stares. But, the moment a few pairs of eyes come to life, the ice melts and the tests disappear; suddenly, you’ve lead an army to victory against the barbarian horde. The beauty in teaching is the experience of watching someone experience empowerment, even if only a tiny bit, for the first time. It is art to experience awakening.
The teaching profession is not filled with teaching. Teachers are starved to teach. Those few moments of truth and beauty are so enticing and marvelous that all of us show up day after day, and fight nothing but uphill battles just to standby as someone opens their eyes and minds for the first time. Benevolence of selfishness, I’m not sure, but it’s damn nice to be around when an egg actually hatches.
0033: Notes from an Education Underground (teachers become radical please)
#teaching #edreform #revolution
We must move beyond things that are only quantifiable. Our people are being neglected as we focus more and more on quantifying their intelligence. Teachers and students are forced to work mindlessly. Critical thought and the human spirit are being neglected. Students are leaving schools semiliterate and unprepared. We are working toward an undefined and nonexistent goal. We are simply a consumer culture. Do we want a mindless future. Or an underclass?
The value of the arts. The production of culture. The transformation of an individual through the creation of culture thereby transforming a community. We are a spiritually impoverished nation. Beauty and truth unnoticed because of the focus on empiricism and survival. The wasted time in classrooms. Students are neglected because there is no time to explore. Can we look for life in our students? It’s when they’re fully engaged in something meaningful. It’s when they’re given power. We need radical teachers. We need bureaucracy to be lessened in schools. Teachers need to be quality, but so do the people and policies policing them. Learners need to be free. Teachers need to be radical. Good teachers step outside the boundaries of what is expected. They connect with their students as people not students. Teachers empower and lead because they are good people who care and are intelligent. Teachers are and should be radical. The predicament we are in requires a a radical change. Our country needs a revival of arts and beauty and truth. We are poor. The daily grind no longer serves to help our people. We need a breath of spirit. No longer can we toil away in factories. We must innovate and join together. We need a change. Rather, we must demand a change. Let our souls be acknowledged and then awakened. There is life to be had.
We must see to it that the status quo is upset, because it already has been. Our education and culture and grasp of beauty is famished, and so will be our people.
Our youth are innovators, but education is not meeting that inquisitiveness. Schools are wasteful places where children learn to wait in lines and hide their cell phones while ignorant teachers numb their minds as theirs have already been numbed by countless directives from blind administrators. This must change. The school must change. The best work I did as a teacher is when I engaged the learners in my care in dialogue. Whether they were 8 or 18. Our intelligences sharpened each other. We worked together. The curriculum stands as a guide, but in reality is a step by step manual. Is there a step by step manual to becoming more fully human? If you say yes than my words a null and so is the concept of freedom. Freedom is an unexplored concept in our culture and our schools. We are killing America.
