Beyond School

Sometimes you wish you could just crawl into your monitor and come out in your anonymous reader’s room for a hello and a chat.

Look at the beautiful Google search terms that led this Port Washington, New York visitor to my “Teaching Grammar on the Titanic: On Fear and Irrelevance in Education” post:

“Concrete, real, and relevant teaching.” Such surgical precision.

Port Washington, whoever you are - get in touch.

(Hey, these shout-outs worked with Belgium and Turkey last week. Whatever works.)

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This community is so friendly.

When I started blogging, it took probably a month or more for me to get five comments from “anybody out there.”

Anthony got five on Day One. That’s just nice.

(Photo credit: Angel In My Hand by mighty_falcon on Flickr.)

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I posted earlier about Anthony’s epiphany - that the edublogosphere and www generally offer better learning, and for free, than his US $2,000/term graduate program in educational technology - and his decision to opt out. [Clarification: Anthony didn't really say he was "dropping out" of grad school. He said he was stopping for a while to get a better education elsewhere.]

Anthony just wrote me to share that he’s taken the plunge and started his own journey in edublogging. He’s the first teacher in my school to do that - too cool.

Say hello to this middle school / high school social studies teacher (and former college basketball player - I love being eye to tie-clip with him in the hallways) at his new blog, The Paradigm Shift. We all remember how lonely it was at first.

Welcome aboard, Anthony.

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The first half of this post is written in the (very real) voice of an angry student wanting to “quit school.” The second half is a preview of an upcoming podcast interview with the director-producer of the “unschooling” documentary, “Voices from the New American Schoolhouse,” that I wrote about recently in the “Four Convergences” post. It’s also an invitation for anybody out there to submit questions for that interview, or arrange to call in during it, in this post’s comments.

The two halves of this post belong together. Bear with me.

What Fresh Hell is This?:
When the Desks are Turned….

As regular readers know, I’m a “student” again in this (US) $500 online AP workshop.

I almost “hate” it. And that’s good.

It’s good to sit in the student’s desk and experience the exasperation, the time-wasting folly, the powerlessness, the absurdly arbitrary nature of it all.

Harsh? You decide. Another quick example (after the B+ for assigning a videochat / filmmaking poetry lesson instead of an analytical essay): Course started three weeks ago. Course book was mailed before that, but only included the AP Lit workshop book. No syllabus. On Day One of the course, Blackboard lets students in to see teacher bulletins. I must have missed the mention of reading Their Eyes were Watching God on one of those links. Even if I hadn’t, it takes three weeks for book orders to arrive in Korea. This was a Week Two assignment.

I went to two bookstores with foreign (English) book sections, but no luck. I emailed the teacher, asking for either an extension or a workaround by performing a similar analysis in a different novel. Seemed reasonable to me.

I emailed teacher the day the assignment was due - Sunday in LA, Monday in Korea. (I’d searched in bookstores the day before, so I sent this email within 24 hours of discovering the problem.)

Here’s where it gets interesting. Teacher told me “It’s too late at this point to deal with the geography issue.” Note the language: absolute as the Ten Commandments. And so arbitrary. It could easily be otherwise.

Think about that: am I supposed to learn “a valuable lesson” about punctuality here? Is that the teacher’s role? Is that what I’m paying $500 for? To be told, “No learning activity for you because you were tardy”? And “this is going to hurt your grade, young man?”

At 45, it’s absurd. Given the circumstances, it might be at 15 as well.

Compounding the mood is another maddening fact: teacher and I went round and round for probably two or three hours this week in private emails in which she told me I was participating too much in the forums. Forums participation is weighted 400 total points, while weekly work is weighted 100 points each week, so I spent silly energy trying to tactfully ask teacher to resolve the cognitive dissonance of the simultaneous “Talk / Don’t talk” commands she was giving. In a parallel universe with a teacher comfortable with student autonomy, I could have used that time to discover the problem with the upcoming assignment.

(That tact was hard because a forum, especially online and asynchronous, is open space when I teach classes, and I only interfere when there’s abuse. I still don’t get the pedagogy behind this control, and feel more and more like asking for a refund. I participate a lot, yes, and that’s no different from a fantastic AP Language workshop I took last year, in which much good conversation and good will happened. Why the difference now, with this class and this teacher? Where’s the pedagogy?)

Add to that: teacher publishes assignments for each week at a pace she controls. I’d finished the prior week’s assignment within two days, and had she set up the course for self-paced acceleration, would have seen the unavailable novel issue five days sooner. Why not publish all assignments up front, and assign only the feedback on a tighter schedule?

One last doozie: She requires class members to read every post in Blackboard’s primitive forums (proprietary software like that is so painful - you can’t expand a thread to see it all at once, so you click countless posts that say, “Thanks!” Worse, teacher has disabled all multimedia embedding, so we’re stuck with text only). It’s required for the grade.

But what’s in the forums? “Schooly” assignments in which we play high school and write literary analyses of teacher-selected works. We write our analysis, then we give feedback to others. Fine, okay. It can be fun, within limits. But this isn’t an AP Literature class. This is “Teaching AP Literature.” Why so much “playing the student,” instead of focusing on the pedagogy? Yeah, I get the idea of shaking off rust. But it shouldn’t be the major focus.

The more important assignment, though, is our lesson planning for AP Lit - you know, the “teaching” aspect that we teachers enrolled in the course for? Hold your hats, because here’s a bigger doozie: Teacher does not require us to read each others’ lesson plans, and give feedback.

Instead, she alone gives feedback on those - in an email, with a numerical grade.

I’m sorry, but that’s simply bad teaching in my book. I don’t care much if somebody finds fault with my interpretation of a Shakespeare sonnet. I do care if somebody finds fault with my lesson plan design. I’d love to see my classmates criticize that. I’d have 20 peer-teachers. My teaching, and my students’ learning, would benefit.

But no. I have one teacher only here: The capital T teacher, the expert who gives grades to fellow adults. Note the hidden curriculum. Again, absurd.

There’s no less pleasant feeling than righteous indignation. Who likes feeling self-righteous? But I’m burdened with it.

So cure me of this. As usual, dear reader, I beg you: tell me what I’m missing.

For the record: there’s no space on the forums for suggestions to improve the class. I have emailed suggestions, with little response. In the classic “park the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff instead of installing guard-rails at the top” move, those suggestions come only at the end of the course, with the end-of-course evaluation. By then, it’s (fittingly) academic.

Why This Bad Luck is Good Luck

If nothing else, I’m re-living the experience of all intelligent students who have to swallow their insights into how their teacher could foster better learning - and better morale.

And the convergence of this experience with my recent explorations of unschooling, of Illich, of Downes, and of the Sudbury schools couldn’t be more serendipitous.

Danny Mydlack, the New American Schoolhouse documentary director, told me in an email that he’d posted the full documentary in segments on YouTube. So I started watching it tonight to prepare for the interview.

I’m not finished yet. But so far, here is what I consider the film’s most powerful moment. Listen to this young man explain why - after a life in public schools - he did nothing in the full first year of his attendance at this self-directed “unschool.” (His clip starts at 4 minutes, and he hits his brilliant stride at 5.30):

Such power in those insights. One day, I hope student voices this honest and insightful are common posts in our edublog readers.

So here’s the invitation, again. If you want to watch the full documentary, it’s posted in ascending order - bottom to top - at Danny’s page at YouTube. It’s very well-done, and worth the hour.

And if you want your questions or comments included when I interview Danny - or if you want to join us on Skype - just comment below and have your say.

Interesting journey these days. More and more, the problem doesn’t seem to be “dropping out,” as much as “dropping in” - or being dropped in, in a perfect use of the passive voice - in the first place.

Treat a student like an infant - even a 45-year-old one - and you get an infantile student. This post is proof.

I look forward to “de-toxing” when it’s all over, and getting back to what I want to learn, for free, grade-free, and above all – teacher-free.

–
*Sorry for the re-post. I want RSS readers to enjoy the epigraphs from the Greeks and Chinese - a stylistic touch I’m learning from Diane’s writing at Journeys. This is another thing I don’t like about aggregators - they don’t update revised posts.

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Patrick Higgins Shows the Love (Nice poster skills!)

So I’m hanging out with Mac last night, late, in Korea, doing homework for my (sorry) pretty uninspiring UCLA online workshop, and then Mac said: Brrrrriiing.

It was Patrick Higgins (of the excellent Chalkdust) in New Jersey, on Skype. He was giving the second day of his workshop to interested teachers in his school, and had invited Konrad Glogowski (Canada grade 8 teacher and writer of his Blog of Proximal Develpment), Carolyn Foote (librarian in Texas and writer of her Not So Distant Future blog) and, apparently desperate for a third guest, this writer of the B.S. blog in Korea.

(I thought it was going to be a video, so I put on a shirt for the occasion. It wasn’t, though. All that energy - standing up, buttoning down - wasted….)

Because we all read each other regularly, we all knew each others’ minds somewhat, though we’d never heard each others’ voices. It was nice to connect this way, in real time.

Patrick set it up nicely. His faculty had questions, and we all gave our two cents.

The subjects? Classroom blogging and edublogs as professional development.

It was strange, fun, and stimulating. As Konrad said, we three guests were really learning alongside the teachers in Patrick’s space. And, oh yeah - it was free. I wish I could say the same for that USD $500 UCLA workshop, but can’t, honestly.

(Check out Patrick’s prof dev wikis - Connective Writing and New Teacher Geek Day - worth a look. Especially for the goofy photos!)

Here it is (and thanks for a good time, Patrick. It’s an excellent way to connect teachers in workshops instead of talking at them about connecting):

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