Category: Uncategorized

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?

Continue reading “New Pens”

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.  

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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.

Continue reading “Are Teachers “Experts”?”

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. 

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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.

Continue reading “Education as Portrayed in The Game”

I had never heard of Pedagogy of the Oppressed until a few years ago, when a teacher at a PD session recounted her seminal first reading of Paulo Freire’s famous 1968 book . . .  and everyone else was nodding except me. Since then I’ve done more reading in ed theory and paid more attention to ed reform trends.  Not surprisingly, I’ve been seeing Pedagogy popping up everywhere.  In ed circles, if there’s one patron saint, it’s either John Dewey or Freire.  Since I just spent a few months reading Dewey, I figured it was high time to read Freire.  This past month, I finally did.

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Today I’d like to write about another classic book about education I’ve just read: E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy.  Then next week I’d like to compare it to another famous work I just read, Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

The main thing I knew about Cultural Literacy was that it was considered controversial when it was first published.  It was grouped with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, which was published during the same year, 1987, right at the start of the first scrapes in the culture wars.  Knowing Bloom’s book quite well, I had some preconceptions about Hirsch’s book.

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One of the bright spots of all this social distancing is that I’ve been able to indulge my inner book nerd. It’s that side of myself that would happily — given a nice cold, grey, sun-less, snow-less, rain-less day — curl up inside the library on some sumptuous leather chair with a stack of books (and these days, if I’m to truly confess, a yellow legal pad and a pen). 

Before we were kicked out of society and sent home, I went on the kind of book-run I haven’t done in years. I raided the shelves in the university library, in my school library, even in one of my coworkers’ classrooms. I’m still worried I’ll run out. There’s a word for this: abibliophobia. The fear of not having enough books.

Continue reading “What Would Dewey Do?”