Facilitate Wonder

Don, a few things:

1. Glad to see you back on the interweb. We’ve missed your presence. I hope things are well. Know that I appreciate your words.

2. Placing blame is definitely of limited utility. Couldn’t agree more. While you’re at it, you might as well throw “parents” in as a category. Oh, or administrators, or politicians, or corporate marketers and their media outlets… That list can go on and on. Education simply has way too many fingers in the pot anymore. With that many vested interests, is it any wonder that people place blame?

3. Expecting schools to “solve” social ills just passes the buck onto educators while not really dealing with the myriad of other factors that affect student “achievement”. I’m not sure how much more I can take, personally.

4. I’m not sure schools can “solve” anything. We’re trying to do what’s best given what we’ve got at any given time. I do think that education, in it’s truest sense, is capable of stunning achievements: liberating women from oppression, teaching language as a means of navigating the world, engaging citizens in their government, fostering scientific wonder in the world. Sadly, I think schools are losing their capacity to truly educate.

4a. I’ll be spending all day tomorrow setting up the Science 8 lab exam. I think we’re rolling balls down ramps.

4b. Sigh.

5. I try to shield all that crap from my kids. They still have genuine wonder in their heads somewhere. That’s what I search for. I see it flourish all the time. I just wish I could make it happen more.

Professor,

I love the model, but I believe that you left the most disturbing blame that I have seen too much of in the last several months. Blaming the students. Granted, I may be seeing more of this because of my current school is a direct instruction school – DI or die. The curriculum is boring, dry, and utterly devoid of any Bloom’s skill beyond remember. The kids don’t pay attention, but I certainly can’t blame them. I’d be bored/am bored too. But taking out teacher frustration on students is certainly the most unacceptable form of blame I have seen. If the kids aren’t interested, the blame certainly lies somewhere, but not with the kids.

Erica M.

P.S. I just applied for a job that specifically requested candidates who are comfortable with UbD!

Thanks for the comments. You both raise good points — Joe I love your drive to keep the spark alive. I’m sure you do that with a great many of your students.

Erica — great to hear from you, but sorry things aren’t too cool at the new school. And yes, you’re absolutely right. It’s common and deeply problematic to blame the kids. It’s also incredibly easy to do.

There’s good connection between the two of you (other than both being Colgate alum). The concern about school’s loss of power to truly educate is in both of your posts. I feel a similar but not identical frustration.

Looking back over a century or more of how the educational system is viewed by the popular press (and one would assume the populace) you’ll find the system is seemingly in perpetual decline.

I’m wondering if that happens because people who write about schools are typically older than people who are sitting in classrooms and those older folks got something reasonable out of school and they’re mystified as to why ‘kids nowadays’ aren’t getting the same stuff they did back in the day. (You have my apologies for the run on sentence).

My 19 and 20 year old college students would gripe about how kids nowadays are lazy, spoiled and stupid (blaming the kids as Erica noted). And how schools have deteriorated. I don’t buy it. Schools now, in spite of my own gripes about them, are probably better than ever.

Teachers are better prepared, better resources are available, special needs are better identified and served and on and on. Schools are doing a better job than ever, but I think they’ve never done what I personally think they should do. That’s focus primarily on the building of understandings of the social and natural world in a way that informs action.

I’ll hasten to add that schools do do that for some, but it’s now and always has been a pretty slim slice of the total population.

That’s longer then I meant, and kept me pleasantly away from my grading. Ah well.
G’night!
Don