Jon Schoening’s Educational Blog

It is so intriguing to see the pendulum of educational philosophy and pedagogy swing back and forth from the Primer schools of the United States infancy to Industrialization to Social Re-constructivism back to Basics focusing on Math and Science in a space race to Social Reform again to another Back to Basics to the 80’s and 90’s to NCLB. Where are we going to land next? We are driven by our culture, our politics, and our communities in all decisions concerning education. Each generation will have a different idea of what and education should be. It will always swing back and forth. It has to because no two generations are the same. Some will be more conservative than the next or vise versa, but how much has the good teacher changed. Each generation has stories of teachers that inspired them to go further than they had before. Each generation has a memory of a teacher that helped them grow as a person. And, yes, each generation has a memory of a teacher that drove them crazy and left a negative impression. In that respect, education does not change- the teachers do not change. It is not the pendulum that is the most important aspect of our nations educational system. Maybe it is the teachers “teaching to change to world” one student at a time.

P.T. Barnum said it best when he said, “There is a sucker born every minute.” Yes, schools with poverty tend to struggle in reading, but if you are an administrator and you think some carnival salesman offering you a script is the silver bullet you need, then you need more help than the struggling students in your school. We need creativity and an open forum to bring change, not restriction and regression. The best thing an administrator could do is hire serious professionals, seek their counsel on burning issues, create a platform for open and honest dialog, and then based on the staffs decisions or discussions, do whatever is in your power to make that happen. The decisions being made by the individual school for the individual school. “An educator’s ability to make decisions is absolutely necessary to his or her educational work. It is by demonstrating an ability to make decisions that an educator teaches the difficult virtue of decisiveness,” (Friere, 78).

Note to principal: Don’t trust some salesperson working on commission to have more of an influence on your decision than your entire staff of highly trained, experienced professionals whom know your students better than you ever will. If a staff is not allowed to be a part of the decision making process, an atmosphere of friction and entropy will set in and grind away at a schools foundation and grind away at any respect that a staff has for their administration or policy makers.

If there is nothing wrong with your staff and the only thing wrong with your students is the fact that many live in poverty, then only two things could possibly be wrong. It is either a problem with the program or the administration. How many administrators do you know who would put all the blame of a failing school on their shoulders? None, because the administrator with that mind set turns a school around and leads it out of darkness.

“Deep down, group reading brings about emergence of different points of view that, as they become exposed to each other, enrich the production of text comprehension,” Friere pg. 55. I apply this philosophy in my classroom everytime we try to tackle a big chapter book. And the truth must be told, I have to do the same thing. I can read a text and never gain the same perspective as somebody else in the class. The discussion deepens my understanding.

The fear is taken out of reading a “big book” because the students are attempting to do this together (which still applies to me). Even when the students are reading books on their own, the weaker, less confident readers will choose books that are the same as their friends that are better readers. Fear is a very real emotion no matter how unrealistic is might seem from your point of view, but to overcome the fear, as in reading a big book or writing a big lit. review, it is easier to overcome if you are overcoming the fear as a group; forging through a deep dark cave of uncertainty together, and all the while having a teacher or professor holding your hand or waving the flashlight, pointing and guiding you to the mouth of the cave into the light of understanding.

It can be a scary place being stuck in a cave confused, lost, and not knowing what to do or where to turn. I have seen too many students come into my class having been stuck in the cave for too long, and it is a good feeling to see the light bulb go off and the confidence build, and the fears subside.

Freire said it best in his third letter when he said that educators need to walk and teach with a humble heart and to put away the veil of the authoritarian whom bears the burden of having all the answers and knows everything that is important. Not all cultures are the same as my own. I have to come to grips with the fact that not all people like to run their mouth as much I do.  I love the idea Tateishi shares about creating lessons where students have a more structured involvement in the discussions. That was a great idea. We, as educators, must make it a priority to learn about other cultures beyond key historical figures, battles, and important dates. We need to learn about the people/ the students in our class; that is what is most important.

The big elephant in the room today is stereotyping in its purist form. Why do we attempt to categorize our world into a handful of columns on a statistical spreadsheet? There are hundreds of cultures and languages each with their own nuisances and ideologies. Yes, there are many people from Asia that are good at math, but the Greeks and the Egyptians were the founders of modern algebra and geometry. Why do the people of Greece and Africa not carry the same stereotype as the Japanese? There is an agenda. Now, I am not one of those alarmist conspiracy theorist, but I can be the devils advocate from time to time. At the time when this article claims the stereotype of Asians being great at math emerges, it is a point in our history, the eighties, when the Japanese/ Asian culture becomes infused without the pop culture. I bet you can remember the clothes, songs, and cars. It wasn’t but two generations before that the federal government and Hollywood were pumping out anti-Japanese propaganda during WWII putting down the culture and putting them in a light of ignorant, buck-toothed robots, and we dropped two nukes on their island country just for good measure. Forty years after all this transgressed, the only thing that changed was that Japan and China became economic superpowers, and we needed to make nice with positive propaganda and pandering to save the bottom line.

Our federal government, through census and convenient statistics, create scenarios of falsehood all the time that are detrimental to populations because they have a self-absorbed agenda. I think it comes down to a blame game. If the Asians as a culture are a successful group of immigrants and have been given the same opportunities as all other immigration groups, then it is not the fault of the federal government for the failure of the minority group; it is the fault of minority groups and their culture in question that is not succeeding. In other words, if your culture is not succeeding in America, it is because you need to be more American or more Asian- more like us, less like you. How confusing is that? But there are all lies with a hidden agenda.

The truth is that it is poverty that is to blame. It is hard for a kid that is economically disadvantaged to get a break in this country. Our educational system claims that you can get by alone on merit, but that is only a myth. I wish census bureaus would spend more time telling us what we have in common with one another than telling us how we are different- tearing down walls, not building new ones.

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/22_02/math222.shtml