Notes From the North Country

It’s spring break right now, so I’ve got a lot of books on the side table next to what my son calls the “Dada couch.” I’ve been reading Shelby Steele’s book, “The Content of Our Character,” an old book, and one very much out of vogue at the moment, but deeply rich, inward, human.  I’ve also been reading the great Gloria Ladson-Billings — several of her main journal articles (“Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education”) as well as her early 90s classic, The Dreamkeepers.  Just finished it a few days ago, and I’ve got a longer blog post coming out soon about it.  I really enjoyed it — it’s so accessible.  It’s about a lot of things — community, believing in children, why experience in teaching matters (especially with African American students), why teachers must know the children before them.  What a book it is. More on that in another post.

I have also been reading and re-reading two other books:  reading David Tyack’s 1967 historical work, Turning Points in American Educational History, and re-reading passages of John Dewey’s ultra-classic 1915 work Democracy and Education.  These two works, taken together with The Dreamkeepers, form a triumvirate of approaches that I want to ensure, for the rest of my career, that I’m always in touch with.  Let me explain what they are and why they’re important.

Continue reading “Shadows on the Cave”

I have to be honest, my deep dive the other week into the mysteries of Lev Vygotsky’s Thought and Language left me, in the parlance of today’s politics, “harmed” (and possibly “triggered”).  By the end of a few nights of reading Vygotsky’s technical sentences and lofty concepts, my brain felt like a Belgian waffle.  Vygotsky talks about the internalization of concepts; after reading his work, I had internalized a sense of failure.  It’s tough going, dense and abstract, not exactly the kind of thing you can absorb while relaxing on the couch at night, stealing glances at “Lone Star Law.” It takes a sustained effort before you finally start to pick up what he’s saying.  Then you turn to Page 2.

Continue reading “Vygotsky: My Final Take”

Vygotsky Notes: Chapter 6, Thought and Language

It has taken me some time, but I spent the past week working my way through a single chapter of Vygotsky’s Thought and Language.  This post is a summary of some of the remarkable things I found in there.  I choose this chapter because it contains mention of Vygotsky’s famous concept: the Zone of Proximal Development.  But, my goodness, there is so much more in just this single (lengthy) chapter.

Continue reading “There’s a lot there: One chapter of Vygotsky’s “Thought and Language””

I’ve had Lev Vygotsky’s “Thought and Language” on my to-read pile (located on the floor of my office) for sometime.  More importantly, I’ve had Vygotsky himself on my “to-read” pile for sometime, too.  I wanted to take some words here to mentally run through my understanding of him and my context for encountering him — and to describe my initial understanding of his theories — before I write about what I learn from reading his work.

Continue reading “Time to Read Vygotsky”

There have been two experiences lately that have helped me gain a very different perspective on my role as an educator.  More specifically, both experiences have shown me just how narrowly we teachers too often view our roles and view our students.  The first “experience” I had was reading Lawrence Cremin’s work on educational history.  I’ve written about that previously, but I’ll say a bit more about it.  The second experience — an ongoing experience — has been parenting.

Continue reading “Taking the Long View”

There’s a moment halfway through Diane Ravitch’s 1977 book The Revisionists Revised when, pausing to praise the historian Selwyn K. Troen, Ravitch levels the most succinct critique of the Marxist / Critical Theory movement that I have ever read:

Continue reading “Diane Ravitch: The Revisionists Revised”

Yesterday I blogged about finishing Lawrence Cremin’s 1976 book, Traditions of American Education.  Today I happened to pick up his other book from the same year, simply called Public Education.  First of all, a short side note: I love bland, overly broad titles like this.  The other day I was reviewing one of my advisee’s grades with her when we noticed that her geometry class has only one main academic “standard” simply called “Geometry.” That’d be like if I started off my 12th grade classes with a unit just called “English.” I could just say: “Look, I don’t want to restrict what we’re going to learn.” 

Anyway, I’d actually begun this book first, but had put it down and, frankly, just sort of lost it in the swirling chaos that is the living room of every family with a toddler on the loose.  My son is now tall enough that he can just reach up onto counters and tables and select what he wants: box of cookies, steak knife, major credit cards.  It sort of like living with one of those Great Danes who can just walk over and eat off the table (except with less self control, in my son’s case).  So this book had ended up buried in no-man’s land behind the couch and it wasn’t until today that I found it again.  I’m glad I did.

Continue reading “Cremin II: Public Education and the Education of the Public (1976)”

Having read quite a bit by Diane Ravitch, I always wanted to go back and read more by her mentor, Lawrence Cremin, the so-called “dean” of American educational history writers and the former president of Teachers College, Columbia University.  Last month I got two more new Cremin books and I’ve just finished one, called Traditions of American Education.

There are several things I like about Cremin’s approach.

Continue reading “Lawrence Cremin”

The other day I was standing in line outside the coffee shop waiting on my order, as one does now in this time of COVID.  My local coffee shop has erected a giant, rooved enclosure right outside their ordering window, with heaters and everything, and I was standing there, waiting for my drink, perusing a book of educational philosophy I’d been delinquent in returning and was on my way to do so when I came across one of the chapters I’d been skipping over for some time: behaviorism.  I leafed to the end of the chapter, where the sample writings are, and found myself transfixed by one of the passages, a write-up by BF Skinner called “The Etymology of Teaching.” 

Continue reading “Skinner’s Metaphors”

Just read a fascinating book: The Teaching Gap by James Stigler and James Hiebert.  Originally published in 1999, this book was recommended by the late Grant Wiggins in an old blog post. When Grant Wiggins recommends a book, I try to read it.  He’d lauded it as something of a “modern” classic.  

Continue reading “The Teaching Gap”