If you can bear to type without popping a major brain artery, could you maybe offer highlights? Either that or some insightful comments on your journey from arm-chomping third-grader to the articulate and opinionated soul you are today. Dorene Cornwell
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It starts with the history of California public education. Sometime around Reagan as governor, the state was running something like first or second place in the national stats, with New York as first. White flight suburbs didn't want to pay for `failing' inner city schools. I was up here in Berkeley and Oakland by that time. But I knew what getting tough on education meant in LA. My mother had been an elementary school teacher. She was constantly struggling with credential requirements, night classes, staying late for staff meetings, chronic problems with bilingual kids who she joked were not bilingual since they they couldn't read in Spanish or English...
When I was going to school, class room sizes were running something like 35 kids to a teacher, split sessions, etc. back in the `good old days'. Money. it was always about money. Teacher pay sucked. We were part of the low income working class because mom didn't make enough money and stepdad was unemployed a lot. She didn't have enough seniority the first few years so they kept moving her around. I counted it up and I went to thirteen different elementary schools, three junior high schools, two high schools.
All of this together meant that there was not enough time. Add a bad teacher to student relationship, a marriage breaking down, and kids start acting out. They don't know what is going on, they just act. They are angry and frustrated because they can't learn in existing conditions. It takes patience, care, calm, quiet, enjoyable conditions and time to learn. That's all.
None of this is a mystery. Many of my friends are teachers. One is in middle school, one in high school, and another in state college system. The latter struggles to make ends meet between part-time, non- tenture track and whatever he can scrounge off federal grants. They all complain about money, time, bad or politicized local and state boards, and poor administration---what Max hinted at. That's what they all complain about. By now, I don't know where California ranks these days, but somewhere in the bottom third. Every year there is a budget crisis.
I haven't followed the Obama administration's doings in public education, but I am get the idea he'll be more of the same. When I saw Michelle Ree last night I just hit the ceiling. Get rid of these people. The news story just happened to focus on what looked like second or third graders doing they reading circle, wiggling in their chairs. I suddenly remembered what it was like to not be able to learn to read. I was behind in reading until I discovered science fiction at about twelve. Suddenly there was something fascinating to read about, some place to go, some place to explore. It was even worse in math. I could barely make myself get through the requirements. I started drinking at fifteen just to kill that ants in your pants feeling you get doing meaningless homework.
Then I discovered something by accident in math, long after---simple ideas of line, shape, space. The underlying reason for my failure to grasp what was going on stems, I think, from what I would call the procedural method of teaching. Just teach the procedure to get the result. It's a kind of formulaic method. Some people can learn that way, and others can't.
I was just reminded of these differences in teaching style in a quite unexpected way last week looking at a 900 page Java programming book. It was designed on the formulaic method. By contrast the older Fortran and Basic books followed what I'd call a concept development method and were much shorter and more compact lessons. This shows up in a difference of style in scientific and commercial computing worlds. In the scientific world, the whole point is understanding the concept. In the commercial world, the whole point is obfuscating the concept---because therein lays the copyright, the propriety construct, as Tayssir pointed out.
There is a highly interesting and advanced break point in math. Students can get by in the procedural system for a long time, often until their first encounter with abstract algebra. They hit a wall. Suddenly they have to start thinking in a new way.
To get back to the point. A lot of primary and secondary education is dominated by the argument over using procedural or concept driven methods. What is terrible, from my point of view is getting rid of everything interesting and fun like art, music, theater, dance, field trips, games, sports, etc. There is a lot out there to learn, think about, and do in different ways that somehow comes back to bare on other thought and learning processes. Teachers need the freedom to orchestrate all those activities and alternate between methods in some creative fashion to move their kids along. The whole push for academic performance through testing and procedural learning just turns school into utter torture and drudgery.
I had a long ago friend in LA who became an elementary school teacher through teacher corp. They dumped him in the inner city classroom for his first placement, somewhere near USC where he did his training. He had started off as an anthro major and figured out a whole year of fifth grade worked up around evolution, dinosaurs, geology, the rise of mammals and arrival of man. So all the reading, writing, and even the math sections were build around archaeology and anthropology where he got to cave men and the like at the end of the year. All this was ten times more interesting because the natural history museum and the La Brea tar pits were short trips away. He could schedule field trips several times a semmester. He was really teaching Darwin and field study biology. He was my sort of model teacher.
My first real way out of the downward spiral of arm chomping maniac was my fifth grade teacher. Mister Mendenhall. He did a very similar sort of plan. He built his plan around colonizing the New World from New England to Mexico, from the Puritans to Cortez. My little water color painting of a Spanish galleon which I copied from a model I built, went to the principal's office to be hung, instead of me. I built a string puppet from scratch and dressed him in grey cloth with a white collar, like a Puritan. I made the paper mache head and painted it. I studied pictures for hours. I was learning the history of the Americas and never noticed. We did a little play and dressed up. We did puppet show stories and learned how to make them move. We were having too much fun.
CG