The Death of Socrates (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Nothing excites me more than a student proving the ignorance of the powers that be.
On Monday, my room was visited for the great beauty pageant of education, the quality review. It wasn’t to observe me, though: the technology teacher had the class that period and it was mostly to observe her. I was sitting in the front of the room, doing some paperwork as if nothing was happening.
The reviewers entered the room, along with the four assistant principals, packed at four corners of my room. They observed, gawked, took notes, asked questions of some of the students. The technology lesson was supposed to be the focus.
My students, of course, stole the show.
As the teacher asked the students about the student surveys they would be taking online, one of my students rose his hand and explained, quite calmly, how the results can be manipulated to show students doing worse than they really are, so that it looks like they’re making progress. My supervisor laughed nervously. The other reviewers gasped.
I couldn’t be prouder. There was my kid thinking critically—with NO coaching—and noting the glaring flaws in the system.
Furthermore, it looked like the review team was looking less at the lesson and more at my room. Charts of Athenian democracy and Alexander the Great’s empire. Student-produced definitions of “civilization.” Projects about energy, including a provocative poster stating that nuclear energy “will blow your mind.” Quotes by Plato and Aristotle above the blackboard.
My supervisor darted to me as I was working at my desk. Usually very calm, she had a look of abject horror: “They want to know about what’s written on the whiteboard.” I had done an introductory class on Greek philosophy the periods before, and we came up with a list of philosophical questions, “big” questions that have no right answer. At the very top right was the ominous “Is God real?”
“It was a philosophy lesson, “ I explained. “Those are examples of philosophical questions they came up with.”
There was no reason to panic. A cursory look at the board would have given that clue: questions like “Where did the universe come from?”, “What happens when we die?”, “What is reality?”, etc. Yet questioning like this makes administrators panic—even as such thinking is critical to becoming a successful adult.
This is why I love philosophy. It makes kids smarter and scares the shit out of adults who think they know everything.
I’ve wanted to teach intro philosophy for a while, but I never found the right avenue: too many “kid-friendly” sites on ancient history are just that: too kid-friendly and not challenging enough. I wanted to use real texts, Plato’s dialogues and whatnot, but the translations were simply too inaccessible for my young kids.
In a weird way, my problem was solved through a rather profane little blog I came across by accident.
Philosophy Bro seems, at least on the surface, to be simply a Cliffs Notes of the great philosophical texts of Western civilization. It includes ancients, Hume, Locke, Voltaire, Russell, Marx, Hegel…you name it. If it were simply that, it would be a great place to get a snapshot of the works that shape Western thought.
Yet for classrooms, especially those in middle and high school, Philosophy Bro is much more.
P-Bro, for lack of a better pseudonym, could’ve easily just given a summary of the main points of each piece in a factual yet dry manner ala Cliffs or SparkNotes or any other study guide on the market. Yet he goes one step further. In a saucy, irreverent, often obsene manner, P-Bro gets at the essence of the text AS A TEXT, not simply as a repository of philosophical thought. He gets the cadences, rhythms, moods and style of each author—which makes his blog special.
Take Plato, for example…an example I used in class, after all. I could’ve easily gotten some thrown-together kid-happy reading piece about how Socrates made people think, and said things that weren’t popular and made people sad and forced him to die. Bullshit. I wanted to find an accessible text of Plato’s Apology, Socrates’ defense at his trial in 399 BCE. Mostly direct transcripts at first (which would make any middle schooler pass out after page 2), but then I stumbled on Philosophy Bro.
Now, to understand my enthusiasm: my intro to philosophy class at Georgetown was basically a boot camp in Plato and Aristotle. We read almost every dialogue, wrote a report on each one, tore it apart line by line. P-Bro nailed it. What’s even better, I got a two-fer: he also summarized the Crito, where Socrates talks his friend out of getting him sprung from jail. In both, Socrates’ zest and venom roll pure, even if the language can be puerile at times.
(Apparently, according to P-Bro, philosophy is naked without F-bombs.)
So I took his summaries, cleaned up the language a bit (quite a task) and presented to my students. They got it immediately. It was amazing how Socrates’ method, his ideals and his worldview rang true in a funny, bawdy way that kept the kids rolling.
The quicker you get students to think for themselves and to question the world around them, the better you’ll feel as an educator. Philosophy Bro was a great tool in allowing my kids to enter the world of Plato, Aristotle and the other thinkers of our civilization.
…and nothing feels better than scaring the shit out of pencil-pushing administrators.
When the Pagans are Fed to Lions – can Core Knowledge survive as a NYCDOE mandate?
Constantine: He swapped out one lion meat for another. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Usually, when the conquered becomes the conqueror, the outcome is far from bloodless.
When Christianity became legal through the Edict of Milan 313 under the Roman emperor Constantine, it provided for the religious freedom of pagan faiths as well, the same faiths that worked to persecute Christians for centuries.
Yet over time, as Constantine chose to eliminate his rivals, what was a potentially newly tolerant society simply replaced one orthodoxy for another, as Christianity became THE state religion of the later empire. Now it was the pagan’s turn to feel the whip and the fire…and no one learned anything.
In education, this cycle of persecution is alive and well—and a good group’s work could be casualty of it all.
Although it took time for me to warm to it, the Core Knowledge Foundation has really become a system I’ve embraced more and more. Founded by former University of Virginia professor E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Core Knowledge is a philosophy that strives to improve education not just through how children learn, but on what they learn. According to their guiding principles:
A long time ago, I did a column on Core Knowledge, critiquing its insistence on certain baskets of knowledge as artificially constricting and inherently subjective—that content needed to drive skills to find further content, and especially critical thinking. It’s flaws notwithstanding, CK has strengths in advancing content knowledge along with language and math skills. It is rigid, to be sure, but allows room for growth due to its ability to be woven into literacy blocks and natural progressions into subject areas that the class can pursue independent of the program.
Core Knowledge seems useful—which is why I was dismayed when I learned that New York City will be pushing for Core Knowledge to be the curriculum of grades K-2.
Maybe this was CK’s goal all along: to make their system mandatory district by district until it becomes the new dogma. I really hope not. History reminds us that when innovation becomes codified in law, it often loses its original intent for other, more sinister goals.
Ask Lucy Calkins, for example.
Her workshop model, designed at Teachers College, was, like Core Knowledge, considered controversial. It stressed too much free writing. It didn’t teach grammar effectively. It didn’t for children to grow in their writing, much of it stuck on writing about how children “feel.”
Then came the Bloomberg administration, and like Constantine of old, the persecuted was allowed into the palace. With little checks from on high, Calkins and her minions had almost free rein in training teachers, designing workshops, creating massive new models of planning and learning that became (and in many cases, still is) the only accepted model of instruction in this city.
What happened? The original model morphed into concepts, models, plans, curriculum maps—most strayed well enough from the original idea of Calkins that it became something of a joke. Add to this the new pressure of standardized tests, and the dream of creating child prodigal writers turned into factories of learning rote models of answering essays, writing about poems and fairy tales, anything to drive up scores.
It was not designed to make kids more knowledgeable, to be sure. But even Calkins has to admit the veneer of official sanction twisted her original goal to the ends of people less than enamored with student success.
This is my ultimate fear for Core Knowledge.
It’s a great system, and used correctly, it can be a lifesaver for kids who struggle with basic skills. Yet the mandate can very easily pervert Dr. Hirsch’s original intention—and it’s already happening.
The alignment of Common Core-based assessments with the CK program already seems like the handwriting on the wall. As the first results are released and the stats show less promise than expected, how will Core Knowledge address the problem? Is it designed to address the problem?
Or worse, will CK be yoked to the Common Core as a beast of burden?
Core Knowledge is too valuable to be left to the education reformers to be slaughtered.
1 Comment
Filed under Uncategorized
Tagged as Commentary, Common Core, Constantine, Core Knowledge, Core Knowledge Foundation, Cultural Literacy, E. D. Hirsch Jr, Education, Hirsch, New York City, Opinion, Social studies, Teachers, Teaching, University of Virginia