Notes From the North Country

Here’s an interesting idea that was once sort of popular, but seems to have disappeared.  The way to pay teachers more is to break the teaching profession into different “levels.” I came across this idea just recently in John Goodlad’s 1984 classic, “A Place Called School.” Goodlad’s idea is to make teaching less of a “flat” profession — one in which a beginning teacher and an experienced one are roughly given the same responsibilities, and an enterprising teacher has no real prospects for professional advancement or real salary increase beyond leaving teaching and entering administration. 

The other day, I bought my first pen.  I have purchased pens plenty of times, but never bought a specific pen as a deliberate act.  I have always chosen my pens rather thoughtlessly — taken whatever was cheap and generic, or accepted whatever was handed to me by the woman who handles the supply closet where I work.

I did, back in 2015, start asking for green instead of red pens.  As an English teacher marking up student essays, I worried that red was too harsh. Green was more forgiving, more humane.  Did it change the way I graded?  Did I become more “green” than “red,” more compassionate, less inclined to slash or stab at tangles of verbiage, leaving a trail of blood?  Perhaps I did.  Perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophesy.

It’s always a self-fulfilling prophesy, right?

At a moment when there is much discussion of “defunding” police organizations in the United States, I thought it would be appropriate to finally read the most radical educational book to emerge from the 1960s, the book that fifty years ago called for us to defund public schools.  That book is Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich.  

Since the COVID-19 school dismissal, or really going back through this spring, I’ve been on an ed reading tear.  Since I no longer have access to the library (or, even worse, my university library), my newest pleasure has been ordering old or obscure ed books for increasingly low and improbable sums of money.  Robert Welker’s book, The Teacher as Expert: A Theoretical and Historical Examination, I think I picked up for something like $2.58.

In my ongoing, self-quarantined quest to read some of the “classics” in ed philosophy, I’ve just sat down and read The Paideia Proposal.  Written in 1982 by Mortimer Adler, the PP was on Grant Wiggins’s list of ed classics, and I’d heard about it before.  I think I first read about it in grad school, when we read a chapter on ed philosophy.  There were six or seven basic philosophies laid out in the book, and the activity called for you to identify yours. 

After the last few days of slogging through a mammoth blog post about a book that I frankly didn’t agree with much or even particularly enjoy, I thought it would be a welcome change of pace to write about one I do.  That book is The Game, by Ken Dryden.  I’ve probably blogged about this book before, but to me, prolific consumer of sports literature, this is very best one I have ever read.  

Since I’ve been writing so much about education, I thought it would be interesting to look at The Game through the lens of an educator.  What does The Game have to say about education?  What are the implications that can be drawn from the conception of teaching and learning put forth by the book — one that is done at the absolute highest levels of excellence — professional sports.