Diane Ravitch, 7/30/11

In future years, students training to be teachers will study about The Tipping Point in American Education: The Summer of 2011.

From that historical perspective, this period will mark when our nation’s Humanistic intentions for learning and teaching were re-asserted after a 20 year period of neglect.

It will be recounted enthusiastically how teachers, parents and community activists rose up in great numbers— to realign the American public school system to a tradition 2,500 years old of idealism, democratic values, individual self-expression, intellectual rigor, physical and artistic discipline, and, most of all, balance.

Did this particular weekend and this timely assembly of fire-driven forces CAUSE enough pull-back actually to reverse the direction of the historical pendulum?

These events at the end of July and the commitment of participants to go forth as a movement now plants a beacon, drawing together the positive— perhaps even spiritual— forces already gathering.

VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS OF THE RALLY

CNN COVERAGE

How I Got Involved

My Great Barrington  WHOLE CHILD INITIATIVE partner, Chris Nye, was invited to propose a workshop at the two-day Conference, which was  hosted at American University. He asked me to join him, and we sent in a description for a 2-hour presentation, “Educate the WHOLE CHILD.” I  prepared a PowerPoint. We discussed activities to engage participants. I printed a few “EDUCATE THE WHOLE CHILD” T-shirts.

Then Chris had to bow out for some surgery, followed by a vigorous recovery.

So there I was, on my own, amongst the activists, the protesters, the militant teachers’ unions, the social justice advocates, the academics, some ordinary school teachers and parents, and even a bunch of socialists and rabble rousers.

We agree on so much, but differ in….

Lots of anger and talk to rile up anger and talk to rile up…….

Harsh chanting…..

Nirvi Shah, guest blogger on Education Week, 8/5, describes: “This movement against high stakes testing and test-based accountability…”

Yes, loud and clear—- AGAINST!!!

But what is the compelling FOR???

The Civil Rights Movement not only had a compelling moral cause, but Dr. King’s emphasis on non-violent resistance made protesting into a spiritually uplifting practice.

“EDUCATE THE WHOLE CHILD” makes Teaching into a spiritually uplifting practice.

Solid, traditional, historical PEDAGOGY is the powerful, moral, spiritual answer to the blatant materialism of NUMBERS-DRIVEN EDUCATION “REFORM.”

Those of us who came into teaching with the political fervor of the 1960′s were fans of Postman and Weingartner’s, “Teaching as a Subversive Activity.” (1969)

After 40 years employed in the teaching craft, in the end, I came to understand and practice teaching as a SPIRITUAL Activity, rather than as a political one.

I’ve been advocating this point of view independently, on my own, for years, as you can see from the rest of this site.

What I brought back from Washington was a willingness and enthusiasm to work with others, as aggravating as others can be. The scene for change is a movie set, moreso than a novelist’s library.

Chris wasn’t there to introduce me to people. Fortunately, my friends, Amy and Tom Valens, being activists, protesters, advocates themselves, were familiar with the network of people participating, and they made me feel part of it.

Amy and Tom produced the film, “August to June” about Amy’s last year teaching before she retired.

The instructional culture of her school in Marin County, California, circa 2006, reminds me very much of the Shoreham Wading River Middle School when it was at its prime, circa 1980— only her school’s community held steadfastly to teaching the WHOLE CHILD, and the North Shore Long Island community did not.

I also met Janet Mayer and her husband, Larry. They are a devoted, long-married couple, both career educators. Janet is the author of As Bad As They Say— Three Decades of Teaching in the Bronx.

My Sister Bronx Teacher had a book signing in the Bronx at the bookstore of a mutual friend, La Verne Harris, the proprietress of Books in the Hood. Janet’s book is a celebration of her teaching career, the honoring of her students, a graphic description of the physical and morale decrepitude in many New York City schools, especially in the Bronx.

In her last chapter, “Deception, Dismantling and Demise of Public Education,” she documents from the authority of her experience and from academic sources and research. No one points her finger so unhesitatingly, and declares so authoritatively that the Emperor is naked and that “Education Reform” is a weave being perpetuated by shyster tailors who pose as educational leaders.

Summary

Across the board, from the Vision of the steering committee, to the participation of our most respected activists like Deborah Meier, Diane Ravitch, and Jonathan Kozol, to those who have been writing, blogging, protesting, pushing and participating all along, to the resurgent teacher unions, parent activists and community organizers, to retired teachers and principals, and to new recruits like Matt Damon and me— the time is now, the momentum is building, and as we join forces in good will, we will save our schools.

NEXT:

TEACH THE WHOLE CHILD ACTIVISM for Teachers, Parents + Community, School Leadership Teams, and School Business Partners

ADVICE TO TEACHER ACTIVISTS

Al Shanker founded my union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).

Commenting on his negotiation strategy, Shanker once famously said, “You can’t get SOMETHING with nothing.”

How can we expect to REPLACE something with NOTHING?

Getting rid of some tests WILL NOT automatically change the mindset that creates Tests.

Teachers will need some help transforming the entire instructional cultures of their schools— those day-to-day learning environments which have become increasingly dried-out, left-brained, data-mad, and materialistically-driven.

When TEACH THE WHOLE CHILD is the stated purpose of American Education again, it will be easier to diminish the urgency of numbers-driven mandates, replace numbers-driven consultants, and eliminate all the cynical numbers-driven incentives.

More importantly, the mindset of TEACH THE WHOLE CHILD will immediately influence the instructional culture of every classroom, invigorating the actual day-to-day learning experiences American schoolchildren receive from their teachers.

TEACH THE WHOLE CHILD will transform the instructional culture of our schools and classrooms

• Children and teachers will be more engaged with art, music, dance, drama, sports, gym, sewing, woodwork, metal work, handwork, manual labor, Community-based Learning.

• Teachers will be planning lessons engaging their children’s multiple intelligences.

• At staff meetings, pedagogical issues will be asserted and interdisciplinary projects will be conceived, planned and scheduled.

• The school budget will support instruction for children rather than numbers and data production for the state and federal governments.

• Re-defined “teaching teams” will now include the full participation of otherwise marginalized arts, physical education, library, and vocational education teachers.

• Trained and experienced professionals will re-think curriculum, local learning standards and appropriate assessments in light of TEACHING THE WHOLE CHILD.

• Professional Development will expand, not contract the personal talents, skills, intelligences and creativity that teachers intuitively bring into their practice of teaching.

Teacher-Activists can transform American education by practicing their craft as GUERRILLA TEACHERS.

GUERRILLA TEACHING MANUAL

LINKS

GUERRILLA TEACHING 1 /Why We Need to be Guerrilla Warriors in Our Classrooms

GUERRILLA TEACHING 2/The Imperial Power of The LEFT (BRAINED)

GUERRILLA TEACHING 3 /You Can Practice Guerrilla Teaching Tomorrow

GUERRILLA TEACHING 4 /Just Show Up

GUERRILLA TEACHING  5/ Push Pedagogy

GUERRILLA TEACHING 6/ The Historical Rage Against Reason

GUERRILLA TEACHING 7/ The Basics of Guerrilla Lesson Planning

Try a Little Mindfulness

The Yin and Yang of a Drama Lesson

The Spiritual Power of SPOKEN WORD in the Classroom

2

ADVICE TO PARENTS AND COMMUNITY ACTIVISTS

1. Use the AUDIT below to research the publicly documented as well as the hidden costs of testing and test preparation at your school.

2. ASSESS your school’s level of commitment to the WHOLE CHILD

AUDIT: EDUCATE THE WHOLE CHILD

Exactly how much money are you paying for testing in your school? What is being cut out of your school’s budget in order to pay for these federal and state mandates? Request an account of your schools’ expenditures for all standardized testing, test preparation, and test-related teaching time. You must consider the costs of testing materials and test preparation materials, including transporting the materials. Consider the pro-rated salaries of teachers and supervisors accounting for time on testing and test preparation. Include scoring and reporting costs. Account for all test-related instructional services for students, including after- school programs and on Saturdays. Pro rate teachers’ and supervisors’ salaries for hours of test-related meetings and professional development. Also count cash and prize incentives for supervisors, teachers and students.

$$$  COSTS OF TESTING at Your School $$Testing Materials, including distribution costs$$$

Test Preparation Materials, including distribution costs

$_____

Pro-rated Salaries of Teachers and Supervisors Accounting for Time on Testing and Test Preparation

$_____

Scoring Costs

$_____

Reporting Costs

$_____

Test-related Special Instructional Services Including After- School Programs and on Saturdays

$_____

Pro-rated Hours of Test-Related Meetings and Professional Development for Teachers and Supervisors

$_____

Cash and Prize Incentives and Rewards for Supervisors, Teachers and Students

$_____

Total for Testing and Test Preparation

$_____

Total School Budget

$_____

ASSESSMENT: EDUCATE THE WHOLE CHILD

Assessing WHOLE CHILD EDUCATION at Your School

Consider READING INSTRUCTION for the WHOLE CHILD in your school.

What stories do your children read?  Why were those stories selected by your teacher?  What lasting values are expressed in those stories? How are such lasting values discussed and put into practice in your children’s classrooms? To what extent do your children recite poetry and spoken word in class? What poems, literary passages or famous speeches do they know by heart? To what extent do children act out literature in the classroom? i.e. put on plays?

Consider PHYSICAL ACTIVITY for the WHOLE CHILD in your school.

During your children’s school day, how are times for narrow ranges of movement balanced by times for broad ranges of movement? Is MINDFULNESS practiced in any classrooms?

Consider ARTISTIC EXPRESSION for the WHOLE CHILD

To what extent do your children regularly sing and dance in school? How often are assemblies held in your school where students perform for each other? Do their artistic performances demonstrate professional  instruction in music, dance and dramatic arts. Does their art work demonstrate professional art instruction?

Consider the WHOLE CHILD IN THE COMMUNITY.

How can the children in your school participate in Place-Based Education, Community Service Learning or other programs where students apply social and academic skills learned in the classroom directly into their communities?

Consider the WHOLE CHILD AND CIVIC VIRTUES

Does your school have recycling program? Are conservation measures apparent in the school culture? How is good citizenship promoted? What evidence is there of school spirit? How do students behave when a teacher is not around? When greeting a stranger, do students actively shake hands and make eye contact?

3

ADVICE TO SCHOOL LEADERSHIP TEAMS

Become a WHOLE CHILD COMMITTED SCHOOL  (link)

4

ADVICE TO COMMUNITY AND BUSINESS PARTNERS

Preparing children for the future means investing in ALL their capacities today.

“The linear-sequential, left-brain drone thinking being drilled into children today for timed tests will ultimately handicap them.”

DANIEL PINK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhKLSTBSgwI

When you are under siege from TOP-DOWN MANAGEMENT in your school district, and your profession is under siege from state legislatures and governors’ mansions, it is time to turn off the smart board (or put down the chalk), take a DEEP breath

And listen to your heart again.

Take strength from the IDEALS that made you become a Teacher.

Lift your head up slowly from a down-bent composure.

Stick out your jaw as you straighten up your vertebrae.

Bring your shoulders back, your chest out.

Feel your heart’s vibration go out with your breath.

Now dare to stick out your neck in the face of the Philistine!

We practice Guerrilla Teaching to re-establish professional and moral authority over classroom instruction. We express our authority in three ways— by asserting ourselves into our lesson planning, into our school’s instructional culture, and into the national discussion about what the purpose of an American education is.

CONTINUE

GUERRILLA TEACHING 2/The Imperial Power of the LEFT (Brained)

]]> http://mrkatzoff.org/2011/03/guerrilla-teaching-manual/feed/ 2 http://mrkatzoff.org/2011/03/the-imperial-power-of-the-left-brained/ http://mrkatzoff.org/2011/03/the-imperial-power-of-the-left-brained/#comments Sun, 13 Mar 2011 15:21:02 +0000 mrkatzoff http://mrkatzoff.org/?p=4233 If we will create a guerrilla movement among modern schoolteachers, we must  proudly identify our collective spirit with Guerrilla History and Guerrilla Mythology.

Teachers, more than anyone in America, should appreciate what it takes to confront an IMPERIAL POWER with unbending intent and wily courage.

Despite the odds against them, bands of rebels have waged unconventional warfare throughout history against IMPERIAL POWERS who showed an overwhelming predominance in force and influence.

In every age a hero or sage….

A small band of Hebrew Maccabees oppose the Syrian Empire.

A ragtag army of American Colonists oppose the British Empire.

The Rebel Alliance opposes the Galactic Empire.

Gandhi makes GUERRILLA WARFARE a spiritual practice.

Why do we employ an analogy to GUERRILLA WARFARE  to—- teaching in our public schools?

Che Guevara

Cochise, Chiricahua Apache

Miss Jones

THE EMPIRE no longer requires physical territory.

Today it asserts its Imperial Power over our FRAME OF MIND.

THE EMPIRE which we oppose is the predominance of the left hemisphere of the brain over the right hemisphere— Logic, Sequence, Literal-mindedness, Analysis are asserted with supremacy over Synthesis, Emotional and Artistic Expression, Context, a Comprehension of The Whole Picture. MORE

In our school system, the left-brained authority of NUMBERS AND DATA crushes any uprisings of right-brained pedagogical wisdom gained from over 2,500 years of teachers teaching— and thinking about it.

Traditional pedagogical wisdom has been ignored for the past thirty years.

In 2002 with No Child Left Behind, an Act of Congress committed the allegiance of our school children to the EMPIRE OF THE LEFT BRAIN.

THE EMPIRE then boldly invaded and occupied the otherwise sacrosanct public school system—- traditionally a cultural institution advocating “both-sides-of-the-brain” instructional programs.

For more than two decades, our nation’s educational leaders have served as agents of THE EMPIRE and not as advocates for children.

They have been planting their Banners of Rationality into increasingly younger and more innocent territories.

When our students are engaged in learning by playing, THE EMPIRE now requires us to make them sit down and sound out words. A five year old’s success, and ours, is valued by how well he can differentiate between the t-h sound in thin, versus the t-h sound in the.

When we spend time with our pupils dancing, singing, exercising, painting, performing poetry, acting out stories, we are shown mandates from THE EMPIRE requiring children to sit down and write earnestly in workbooks.

The Literacy Movement becomes far more IMPERIAL than empirical when our educational leaders extract a minimum of 120 clocked minutes a day for only one facet of human intelligence.

All teachers know that Harvard Psychology Professor Howard Gardner has described an array of Multiple Intelligences: Linguistic, Logical-Mathematical, Musical, Bodily Kinesthetic, Visual-Spatial, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal….

Our instinct and training tell us to encourage the unique capacities of each youngster in the classroom. In order to fulfill this purpose, we will practice guerrilla teaching.

There was a time in the New York City public school system when teachers had to force all children to write exclusively with their right hands. Today, all American teachers are being forced to make all children think exclusively with their left brains.

The Guerrilla Teacher, every single day, openly teaches THE WHOLE CHILD.

GUERRILLA TEACHING 3 /You Can Practice Guerrilla Teaching Tomorrow

“A kind of epistemological orthodoxy has settled over the modern mind. This orthodoxy has adopted a narrowly quantitative, materialistic, and functionalist view of knowledge with such a zeal that it… excludes feeling, imagination, the will, and intuitive insight from the domain of rationality.”

You survive as a teacher because, no matter what, you are able to retain what you hold most dear about being a teacher.

If you can also make yourself and your students feel comfortable within an unnatural instructional environment loaded with developmentally inappropriate goals and objectives, an environment that you would never have created on your own— then you can insure your survival.

For the short term.

In your heart of hearts— for the long term— you know that you are being required to conduct too much instruction which is, on the whole, no good for your children.

So where do you go for educational leadership with pedagogical questions?

When you ask, “How is this particular practice good for our developing children?,” you want an answer coming from an educator’s comprehension of child development, and not a politician’s assessment of the needs of the global economy.

Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, determines the learning environment for 1,100,000 school children. He is the living prototype for numbers-driven, business-model, blame-the-teachers, numbers-driven educational “reformers.”

In every school district in every state, teachers are being coerced and bribed to participate in the nation’s POLITICAL agenda for our students— which is driven by the BUSINESS agenda for our students.

The PEDAGOGICAL agenda for our students, if set by the nation’s teachers, would grow the next generation of Americans into healthy, well-rounded, well-informed,  thoughtful and heartfelt team players.

Our educational decision-makers do not know children.

They have little idea of how children learn.

They have little knowledge or experience of what it takes to teach children in today’s classrooms.

Wouldn’t you think it would make sense for the school establishment to align our national educational policy and dollars to solid pedagogy and child psychology?

Present practice is a radical departure from traditional practices.

Top-down mandates and scripts routinely violate the psychology, the physiology, and the brain science of child development.

“Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we have strip-mined the earth— for a particular commodity.”

Before committing yourself to Guerrilla Teaching, return to THE SOURCE that called you into teaching in the first place. From the spirit of that initial inspiration, get a feeling for whether now is the right time to re-commit yourself to teaching as your life’s Work. Are you still able to be the teacher you came into teaching to be?

As you see fit, you can start applying GUERRILLA PRINCIPLES immediately to your daily lesson plans and school day.

GUERRILLA PRINCIPLES can inform your participation during faculty meetings and at professional development sessions.

Most importantly, being a Guerrilla Teacher can positively affect your attitude every day you go to school.

From now on, you are empowered to act from the nobility of your Purpose with children.

NEXT:

GUERRILLA TEACHING 4 /Just Show Up

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.

Chuck Close

Follow the force of your Will as it gets you out of bed and into your classroom by 8:07.

Feel how you use that same force of Will to cohere and direct separate and sometimes even antagonistic children together— day in and day out.

“What you yourself call Will is character and strong disposition. What a sorcerer calls Will is a force that comes from within and attaches itself to the world out there. It comes through the belly, right here, where the luminous fibers are.” Don Juan rubbed his navel to point out the area.

Carlos Castaneda

If you do not teach, you probably think that teaching is about transferring information to children based on knowledge gained from college majors.

Once you do teach, you will quickly learn that TEACHING CHILDREN is more about the CHUTZPAH in your soul than about what you learned in your college major.

A principal asks about us, “Can he handle the kids?” with more urgency than, “How well does she know her subject matter?”

When faced with so much disruptive and disrespectful behavior in children, American school teachers have no other choice but to rise to the occasion within themselves and attend to the emotional needs of the child. Transforming anger into love is the penultimate technique you need for teaching in today’s classroom.

Managing all the disruptive impulses that so many children don’t manage for themselves requires an adult’s spiritual qualities, not so much intellectual— patience, perseverance, decisiveness, self-restraint, a sense of humor, the capacity to maintain a positive attitude, loving kindness.

Recognize that each of these spiritual qualities represents a very high standard for personal adult behavior in any workplace, yet such exemplary patience and self-control are taken for granted of people who work in our nation’s schools.

For today’s willful students, the adult must be ever more willful. For today’s hostile students, we are required to behave with impeccable NON-violence. For today’s impulse-happy students, a wise teacher acts with calm equanimity and humor.

The successful American teacher is inwardly and outwardly unwavering.

Our force of Will in the classroom is strengthened by our own daily practice of a dedicated routine of holistic activity before school each day—  prayers, meditation, chanting, drumming, dancing, yoga, Tai Chi, karate, & etc.

If it is possible to gather with colleagues and engage in an appropriate ceremony of  preparation communally, even once a week, all the more power to you.

“It is purported that focusing the mind solely on the movements of the form helps to bring about a state of mental calm and clarity.” Wikipedia, TAI CHI

Your first intent as a Guerrilla Teacher should be to access the force of your own will and dedicate it to the “better angels” of your students.

In this aspect of the Work, there is nothing we change outwardly.

The transformation of American public education will begin from within the teachers.

Outside your classroom, your incoming class is gathering. You have gone out into the hall to get the kids in line before admitting them. But instead of using your physical energy for speaking, nagging, threatening, you direct your attention to your navel area. From there you send out something like invisible beams that hold each and every kid on the line.

CONTINUE:

GUERRILLA TEACHING 5/ Push Pedagogy

A curriculum is relevant only to the extent it touches the inner lives of our students—  their emotions, aspirations, imaginations, fears, resentments, moral values, curiosities, ideals, and their sense of order.

When you introduce Pedagogy into a conversation about what you do in the classroom, your colleagues and supervisors are forced to acknowledge— or ignore— how children naturally and developmentally learn.

Skillfully move your school’s instructional agenda away from Numbers and Data towards Educational Pedagogy based on your children’s biological and social development, brain science, and on recognizing multiple intelligences.

Sample PEDAGOGICAL Questions

How is this good for ten year old boys?

Why are we doing this?

How will this help students to learn?

How does this fit into the whole middle school/elementary/high school education?

Why are we doing this?

How does this meet the needs of our students, developmentally?

How does this correlate to our mission statement and/or vision statement?

Why use a test?

How do tests measure success?

What is the evidence that this is age-appropriate?

How does this requirement help balance the instructional day for our students?

Why are we doing this?

When money was allocated for these test prep materials, activities and professional development sessions, what was the cost? What priority had to be cut from the budget to make way for test preparation and teacher evaluations tied to test results?

Should little children use stubby crayons or thin crayons?

Is it developmentally sound or unsound for a beginning young actor to play a character far more complex than she is?

Will children from neighborhoods with high asthma rates benefit from growing up playing the recorder in their classes?

Are dance competitions recommendable for very little kids?

Is the act of teaching children cognitive thinking skills at younger and younger stages in their growth and development desirable for children? What do child psychologists say? Pediatricians? Seasoned kindergarten and nursery teachers?

Again, why are we doing this?

In his autobiography, Frank Lloyd Wright claimed that he learned the geometry of architecture through kindergarten play with blocks.

What is the evidence that this is age-appropriate?

“Play-rich classrooms are mostly gone, replaced by didactic drilling of literacy and math “skills,” worksheets, and, increasingly, standardized testing. Few Americans are aware that the Germans had this same idea in the 1970s, when they switched from playful kindergartens to “centers for cognitive achievement.” But they set up a long-term study comparing the results of 50 play-based classrooms with 50 academic ones. By age 10 the children who had played in kindergarten excelled over the others in reading, math, social and emotional adjustment, creativity, intelligence, oral expression, and “industry.” As a result, Germany went back to a play-based approach to early education.”

Alliance for Childhood’s “Crisis in the Kindergarten”

Sample PEDAGOGICAL Issues

What should determine the content of curriculum, K- 12?

Are there themes and issues at certain developmental stages of a child’s growth which are analogous to themes and issues we can externalize through the curriculum? Isn’t eighth grade the best time, for example, to teach American History when 14 year olds are at that rebellious stage themselves?

When is the appropriate time to teach children about dinosaurs, for example, and the corresponding concept of extinction? Pedagogically, we learn to think of the dinosaur, not just as a gigantic, extinct reptile which lived at a certain geological period in pre-History, but also as an archetype existing within the primal inner recesses of a child’s imagination. “Show your Tyrannosaurus claws! Show your Tyrannosaurus teeth!” “Let’s paint a panorama of the primeval jungle!” “Let’s choreograph a ‘Dance of the Dinosaurs.’ What kind of music should we use?”

For what purpose are we teaching this?

How will this stimulate creativity in our children?

How will this promote independent thinking in our children?

How will this reinforce cooperation in our children?

When we teach the ARTS, just how necessary is it to ground a child’s creative experience within rationality, reflection, and conceptualization?

Once more, why are we doing this?

From the point of view of today’s educational decision-makers, teaching is an outside-in exchange.

The teacher is supposed to take whatever society tells him to teach, and make the child learn it.

From that outside-in point of view, the material content of what gets taught is completely inorganic so that it does not matter what you teach children, nor when, so long as you find the right way to cram it in.

Socrates, through skillful questioning, gets an illiterate slave boy, Meno, to recapitulate the Pythagorean Theorem. What this tells Socrates is that the kid already knew it, not in his conscious memory, perhaps, but in the syntax of his soul, so to speak. The role of the teacher is to instruct the child from the inside-out.

The Socratic Method, pedagogically, accounts for teaching human beings who have an inner life, inborn wisdom.

The American system of public education is essentially run by Educational Materialists who think that children are empty inside.

Writing about the methods of his teacher, Socrates, Plato specifically warned against imposing the force of adult Will to motivate children’s learning. He’s all for motivation from within, catching the flow of child’s natural imagination.

Plato’s pedagogy became part of educational practice nearly 2,500 years ago.

CONTINUED:

GUERRILLA TEACHING 6/ The Historical Rage Against Reason

]]> http://mrkatzoff.org/2011/02/guerrilla-teaching-manual-4-pedagogy/feed/ 0 http://mrkatzoff.org/2011/02/guerilla-teaching-manual-2/ http://mrkatzoff.org/2011/02/guerilla-teaching-manual-2/#comments Thu, 24 Feb 2011 10:57:52 +0000 mrkatzoff http://mrkatzoff.org/?p=3225 Blake’s “Newton”, 1795

The 18th century poet, William Blake, imagined the 17th century mathematician and scientist, SIR ISAAC NEWTON, to be a role model for the “Disconnected Rationalist”—  the measuring man suppressing his immeasurable passions.

Today, we could say that our society has taken Blake’s “Newton” to the extreme, using exclusively the impersonal, Left Hemisphere of the Brain to validate— from statistical data, of course— whatever we accept as True.

The Shifting Truth of Statistics

In South Carolina, about 81 percent of elementary and middle schools missed (No Child Left Behind) targets in 2008. The State Legislature responded by reducing the level of achievement defined as proficient, and the next year the proportion of South Carolina schools missing targets dropped to 41 percent. (New York Times, March 9, 2011)

For Blake, Truth is not validated by statistics, but by instinct and passion.

He was temperamentally what we might call a fundamentalist, except that he adhered to a very unique and personal Christianity.

Blake held Newton responsible for ushering in an Age of Scientific Materialism.

In every cry of every man,

In every infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forged manacles I hear.

London, William Blake, 1794

As the Industrial Age was beginning to take hold in England, Blake raged against the linear-sequential, analytical MIND-SET necessary for industrialization. Like sociologists much later, and prescient about the underclass that Charles Dickens would come to describe in illustrative detail, Blake felt dark economic and social forces being released into the human Spirit.

He was more profoundly alarmed by the effects of industrialization upon thinking and perception.

He represented those effects as Mind-forged manacles.

As this grasp on industrialization grew and spread, the artists, of course, came to rebel openly. They changed the Classical forms that exalted reason over passion and that favored the educated aristocracy over the instinctual common man.

The Romantic poets: Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 1798

We see how cable TV’s Mad Men dramatizes the transition from the staid, oppressive, black-and-white, materialistic, conformist and hypocritical 1950′s re: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit into the flowering of a new consciousness and expanded freedom, The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Artistic, social and educational movements which pressed passion over reason, freedom of expression over mechanistic thinking, political freedom over political repression, re-emerged with new energy in the 1960′s.

Forty years ago, political action, artistic expression and open education were moving together at once. The Right Brain, as we now call it, had asserted itself into our politics and culture, and it was getting legitimized in the classroom.

This was the time of Visual and Performing Arts from Andy Warhol, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, Jackson Pollack, guerrilla theater, street theater, happenings, be-ins, Marshall McLuhan’s the medium is the message and Archibald MacLeish’s a poem should not mean, but BE.

Pollack

Ginsberg

Art is a sort of experimental station in which one tries out living.

John Cage, circa 1962

Within this zeitgeist, in public education, we were actively considering the ideas behind the movements for free schools, open classrooms, and A.S Neil’s Summerhill. We were reading Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity. We were immersed in pedagogical questions and experimental practices seeking to re-define the traditional purpose of education.

Because of the prevailing spirit of that time— child-centered, socially conscious, freedom-loving— we embraced innovation in our classrooms. We changed group dynamics with Cooperative Learning. We stood writing instruction on its head with the Writing Process. We used Portfolio Assessments. We played Simulation Games to teach History. We transformed the subject-driven junior high school into the child-driven middle school. We incorporated Community Service Learning into the instructional cultures of our classrooms.

All this is to say that an artistic/social Constructive Irrationality has motivated opposition to existing mind-forged manacles, and has given visual and performing artists positive forms of expression from the full-orchestra Romanticism of the 19th century to the bands at Woodstock, 1969.

CONTINUED:

GUERRILLA TEACHING 7/ The Basics of Guerrilla Lesson Planning

]]> http://mrkatzoff.org/2011/02/guerilla-teaching-manual-2/feed/ 0 http://mrkatzoff.org/2011/02/guerrilla-teaching-manual-6using-constructive-irrationality-in-the-classroom/ http://mrkatzoff.org/2011/02/guerrilla-teaching-manual-6using-constructive-irrationality-in-the-classroom/#comments Tue, 22 Feb 2011 20:31:21 +0000 mrkatzoff http://mrkatzoff.org/?p=3636 1.Teach to MULTIPLE Intelligences

Not that long ago, wise educational administration guided teachers to balance, with rhythmic movement and artistic self-expression, the intellectual instruction they were giving their children .

Teaching required us to be more physical, more creative, more emotionally expressive than how we teach today.

During the time my generation was coming into the profession in the late 1960’s, every elementary education major graduating Queens College had to know how to play simple songs on the piano and recorder.

We learned how to teach for an instructional environment where teachers were still singing with their classes, reciting poetry, teaching basic art lessons, directing plays, and getting their students to perform on stage for regular assemblies.

For generations, this was the range of activities required of the personality of an elementary school teacher.

Your students would also have had Shop or Sewing where they made little pot holders and knick-knack shelves, demonstrating the virtue of working with their hands.

The choral reading of poetry and vigorous vocal recitations, led by your teacher, were once standard practice in the American classroom.

Young children could listen to and imitate the well-articulated human dramatic voices and the earnest human singing voices of their teachers.

2. Back to Basics

So sing with your students, draw with them, make murals together, act out stories, dance and exercise with them, read to them— dramatically. Ham it up!

That’s how you will save American Public Education.

Breathe life into your instruction— YOUR life.

If you knit, weave wool into your curriculum. If you practice Tai Chi, bring movement and concentration into your syllabus. Appeal to your children’s heartfelt desire to serve by engaging them in Community Service Learning activities.

Dare to take the time to balance the analytical instruction you give your students with activities appealing to their other intelligences as well.

Giving more of yourself does not mean more of your time spent correcting student work, or doing administrative paperwork, or in helping kids prepare for their next test after or before school hours.

Giving more of yourself is a spiritual demand.

You choose to expand how much of yourself you are willing to express to your students, and you choose how much of themselves you want to draw out of them.

Amy Valens, in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGCFnbypWUk

August to June, documents a public school teacher, with her community, engaged in teaching the Whole Child.

And if you cannot be wholeheartedly engaged with what you are teaching them— skip it, miniaturize it, trash it, postpone it indefinitely, or get another job.

As you consider the consequences of the Data and Numbers Accountability promoted by your school, take a great leap of faith—  if you create an instructional culture in your classroom by enlivening, awakening, and imaginatively stimulating your students— supporting a variety of ways they will express themselves, then your students will do better on any test that you give them.

They will be motivated.

How could teaching children from your spirit be less successful than teaching to the test in a cut and dry, lifeless manner?

You will not be having to offer crass incentives and empty promises of better-paying jobs in the future if you teach children by motivating them for the present.

In writing a Guerrilla lesson plan, you constantly are asking yourself, What are the children doing?

Do most of their activities involve left-brain functions? How much of what you say to them uses explaining language?

If your students’ only opportunity for physical activity is to write at their desks or to raise their hands to answer a question, then ask yourself how you can bring their other intelligences into play.

Young people have limbs, voices and a volition to move.

Does your lesson plan consider what the physical and vocal output is for the kids?

3. Practice Guerrilla Literacy

“A work of mystical fancy does not call upon the emotions of the reader merely for the pleasure the child often finds in such reading, but because the author believes that the emotions are essential in helping the child intuitively grasp that kind of knowledge which is unattainable through the ordinary corridors of reason alone.”

Beyond Words: Mystical Fancy in Children’s Literature by James E. Higgins

Teaching children vocabulary words, background information, comprehension skills (especially guided by Bloom’s Taxonomy), character development, author’s purpose, & etc. are all necessary, but they only exercise a child’s cognitive intelligence.

Most of why we teach Literature has to do with all the other forces of comprehension.

Doesn’t Norman Rockwell, as usual, hit the nail on the head with his illustration, Lands of Enchantment?

Through Literature, we offer children the opportunity to imagine themselves in fantasy situations. We give them characters to identify with and circumstances they couldn’t even imagine on their own. We guide them in how our decisions and our values affect the course of our lives. We study characters who are challenged to be true to themselves. We look at life as an adventure, a journey, a comedy and drama.

We encourage our kids to meta-cogitate about the stories we give them so that they may acquire the inclination to meta-cogitate about themselves in their own lives.

Teach for cognitive thinking skills when you use stories for instruction, of course— but for Heaven’s sake, keep your intentions for instruction to the ideals, the models, the truths, the life’s lessons, the emotions, the big pictures, the delicious language of the Literature you are using.

If your reading matter has very little of all that, then dump it and find more challenging, high fiber stuff.

Don’t get lost in the Left Brain frenzy stirred up by Reading tests. Steadfastly attend to the historical purpose of why we teach Literature. That purpose is the same as it was during our pre-literate days.

Teaching Literature transcends reading and writing acquisition.

You follow in the tradition of the storyteller by the crackling fire.

Your purpose is to open wide with wonder the eyes of your audience!

4. More on Guerrilla Lesson Planning:

The Spiritual Power of Spoken Word in the Classroom

Try a Little Mindfulness

The Yin and Yang of a Drama Lesson

S. Wulfing, Der Kristall

This Old Man,
He played one.
He played knick-knack on my thumb.
With a knick-knack, Paddy whack—
Give the dog a bone.
This Old Man came rolling home.

His wise gaze penetrates you with all he has seen, eyes all the more brightly animated when he is listening to you. His leathery hands are amazingly warm and robust. How long has he owned that tattered Red Sox cap?

He taught ARITHMETIKE, undercover, to children in seventeenth century villages. Having been initiated by the ancient Pythagoreans, he practiced their art (tekhne) of numbers (arithmos).

He usually assumed the identity of some kind of itinerant trades-person, a minder and a measurer of material things— typically operating as a carpenter, merchant, or tailor.

And while he plied his trade, The Old Man would always be looking out for new children to charm, so he could practice the teaching craft on them.

This Old Man,
he played two.
He played knick-knack on my shoe
With a knick-knack, Paddy whack—
Give the dog a bone.
This Old Man came rolling home.

Once upon a time our Patriarch loyally served a Queen who proclaimed him her Rabbi, her Sufi, her Sage, her Wizard. Then he applied for a grant to initiate the progeny of the ignorant, common people into Numeracy.

Into that particular generation, he was called to install the spell of counting out loud.

This Old Man,
he played three
He played knick-knack on my knee
With a knick-knack, Paddy whack—
Give the dog a bone.
This Old Man came rolling home.

One Two, Buckle My Shoe states a simple recitation of the sacred sequence of numbers.

This Old Man, however, narrates the very pedagogy which initiated the modern mind into mathematical syntax.

The sequence of the number line, installed into cultural memory, would serve as the mental architecture for left-brained, material-world concepts to come.

This Old Man,
he played four
He played knick-knack on my door
With a knick-knack, Paddy whack—
Give the dog a bone.
This Old Man came rolling home.

He appeared precisely when Evolution was urging the common folk to internalize a more rational mind, voiced from individualized, differentiated selves, each possessing his own given name.

Prevailing peasant consciousness when he arrived was like a gritty soup, thickened generation upon generation. Those folks perceived things very, very slowly, only the most parochial impressions. They conceived only the most concrete concepts.

This Old Man came to synchronize the folk-soul to the steady tick, tick, tocking of the Universal Clock. He set their minds into seconds, minutes, hours, by days, by months, by years.

This Old Man,
he played five
He played knick-knack on my hive
With a knick-knack, Paddy whack—
Give the dog a bone.
This Old Man came rolling home.

Old Mother Goose had come and gone, initiating Literacy into a prior throng.

She instilled rhymes and rhythms into the collective Nursery. She gently awakened the children’s soft, lyrical hemisphere into a sleepy self-consciousness.

This Old Man followed her with hard-headed, clear-thinking, linear-sequential
Rationality.

This Old Man
he played six
He played knick-knack on my sticks
With a knick-knack, Paddy whack—
Give the dog a bone.
This Old Man came rolling home.

From Buddha we have learned how the instrument of the body is imprinted by mental and environmental processes. The World tattoos itself onto our skin, it pinches our last nerve, it emblazons itself onto our organs, and then it comes to Mind.

one knick-knack on the thumb…
two knick-knacks on the shoe…
three knick-knacks on the knee….

Note his method of physically striking the pupil in progressive sequences.
The steady rhythm and the increasing count instilled the physical craving
to compute.

This Old Man,
he played seven
He played knick-knack up to heaven
With a knick-knack, paddy whack—
Give the dog a bone.
This Old Man came rolling home.

The Stranger practices his craft on young minds and meat. The guardian dog barks out his suspicions. Alas, Fido is easily distracted by a bone.

This Old Man,
he played eight
He played knick-knack on my gate
With a knick-knack, Paddy whack—
Give the dog a bone.
This Old Man came rolling home.

The antique “dunce cap” makes for an interesting collateral study of bygone instructional technologies.

You think of this quaint object of juvenile humiliation from the antique, black and-white Spanky and Alfalfa classrooms of the 1930′s, along with the hickory stick.

An errant pupil was ordered to sit, isolated, on a stool, facing a corner of the classroom, wearing  this conical cap. Branded a “dunce,” he was terrorized into self-consciousness by the righteous teacher’s rally to ridicule.

The dunce cap’s positive instructional purposes have been lost for generations, and its pedagogy for mental development has long been forsaken.

In former times wizard and witch wore such as antenna over the skull cap. They utilized pyramid power to sharpen their wits, no doubt amplifying their meditative transmissions.

Properly placed on the head, applied in a corner of the room’s solid architecture, the technology of the dunce cap was supposed to provide focus to a vague spirit, centering him in his own corporeal body and physical space.

This Old Man,
he played nine
He played knick-knack on my vine
With a knick-knack, Paddy whack—
Give the dog a bone.
This Old Man came rolling home.

Today, our Mystery Teacher’s ultimate successes are omnipresent.

Behold these children raised in an increasingly materialistic, mathematical, and man-made environment. New souls are exposed to abstraction, quantification, and sequence at earlier and earlier stages of their earthly life.

A child conceptualizes a glass of milk independent of any Momma. Numbers and letters lie flush up against her daily bread.

Babies are initiated into the number system by fluorescent, even grotesque picture books on supermarket shelves, on high definition television sets, and from the unearthly humanoid voices looped into computers.

This Old Man,
he played ten,
He played knick-knack
all over again
With a knick-knack, paddy whack—
Give the dog a bone.
This Old Man came rolling home.

Not within a university Mathematics Department, but at a cottage in the woods up the mountains, you’ve come to find him, now retired.

You see that the villagers know him very well, but not as the Master Arithmetic Teacher of your sacred quest.

They know him as a gifted ornamental horticulturist and landscaper. You’ve noticed the neat, orderly fields of flowering shrubs and leafy things, not unlike cultivated rows of desks and seats in certain old- fashioned classrooms.

He’s in there, of course. You can see him through the window, hunting and pecking and fuming on the keyboard. He’s shooting an angry email off to a neighboring farmer whose plants have withered from neglect, and to the Commissioner of Education for doing likewise.

You knock timidly on the door.

“Come in! Come in!” he bellows, transferring to you his irritation with the errant Commissioner, or neighbor.

Suddenly, you are thunderstruck!

In the presence of The Master, your heart goes wild. It’s him! It’s him! You feel so lightheaded, even dizzy.

You suddenly want to bolt out the door and run away. But you must stay. You must ask the question you have been sent to ask, not just for yourself, but for a whole new generation of Math Teachers. Now, you have been told, is the final opportunity to get his answer.

A flourish with the mouse and he is done expressing himself electronically.

A few more clicks and the impressions on the screen are routed through cyberspace into the virtual mailbox of either negligent farmer or negligent Commissioner.

The Master suddenly pivots to you and swallows you up in his gaze. Instinctively, you close your eyes tightly, and just blurt out your question:

What is the best thing we can do to teach today’s kids Math?

With that ever-ready wink on his crafty old eye, he says the answer is simple:

“Teach them to play with their own digits first!”

He holds out both hands, wiggling all his fingers, then he performs:

Little fingers dance with me—
One, two, three, four, five.
Little fingers dance with me,
You are quite alive.

One goes up and
Two goes down,
Three goes up and
Four goes down.

What do we do with little Five?
Little Five shall take a dive.

Little fingers dance with me,
One, Two, Three, Four, Five.
Little fingers dance with me
You are quite alive!

He exits his little characters to behind his back, and then he boyishly bows.

That done, he changes into his maroon Aloha shirt with the 23 hula dancers, grabs his hat, bolts out the door, suddenly stops, turns, smiles to you, waves goodbye, delighting in taking off his hat and making his final bow.

With a nod, he tumbles and chuckles, giggles and tumbles.

He creates a whirlwind of air and dust, and summons you to “take a spin” with him.

But before you would, or even could, there before your very eyes, he is rolling out of corporeal matter, submitting himself to be transformed into pure energy.

First a wave, a beam, a steady flash, a zap, a certain glow, and then he’s gone.

You are flabbergasted.

In the distance, that’s Fido barking again.

Something, he smells, is Unreal.