WHAT CAN BE TAUGHT?

There’s a sequence of jokes about metaphors for people’s minds.  Maybe it started with the remark about a mind “like a steel trap.”  And the riposte, “yeah, rusted shut.”  

This morning mine is not rusted shut but so full of a blizzard of stuff that I’m incoherent.  If you’re looking for coherence, move on.  My mind is like a sheet of flypaper: a lot of tiny moving buzzing bits in no particular order.  But I’m going to try to stick to one question.

What can be taught?

Wrong question.  What can be learned?

Education went horribly wrong at some point which I’m going to suggest was the fulcrum of tipping between teaching and learning.  The idea developed that a young person was an empty vessel to be filled with “knowledge” and then labeled like an egg: “work with hands,” “college material,” “hopeless,” “actively exclude”, “baby maker.”  Or as Aldous Huxley had it in “Brave New World,” alphas, betas, etc.    But there are really only two important categories:  pupils, those who show up and sit there; and students, those who "study."  And two kinds of teachers:  those who think it’s about THEM and those who think it’s about students.  (BUT IT'S NOT !!!  Don't let kids run everything!)

Maybe things changed because so many men came back from war wanting to know things and prepared to find them out for themselves.  Maybe the ensuing prosperity just made their descendants soft.  That generation is gone.  This generation of warriors is about to take hold.  I welcome them.

The first thing is waking up.  Too many people are sleep-walking, even the ones sleeping in cardboard boxes over steam vents.  

The next thing is looking around:  who are all these others?  

Next:  what can I do?  Crawl?  Push stuff over the edge?  Pile stuff up?  Stuff stuff into my mouth?

These three questions cannot be taught.  Not even in day care.  Hopefully they unfold from family and biology before getting to school age, but then they are part of learning for the rest of life.

For what will I be rewarded and for what will I be punished?  Another joke:  a woman had two children, a boy and a girl.  When the girl did something bad, she was punished and she stopped.  When the boy did something bad, he was punished and he did it anyway.  The mother asked him why.  He said,  “It was worth it.”  So -- this is a sexist joke, but people understand stereotypical sexism that labels girls passive and boys aggressively seeking and acting.  All students should be boys.  I mean, “like boys.”  The mother/parent was a teacher: wanting to know what was going on in the student.  Not the curriculum.

I’ve written two curriculi and am proud of them.  The first one could not be taught at the level of competence of the other teachers on the “team.”  “Team” was the buzz word at the time.  I soon learned that it meant I was expected to teach the other teachers.  My arrogance was matched by my stubbornness and the impossibility  of creating a curriculum,   teaching it to the teachers, teaching the students, writing the worksheets, reading research.  

My next brilliant idea was drafting the students to do all this stuff.  We would not use the “given” materials cranked out by compressing sawdust into particle board.  We wouldn’t even saw lumber -- we would grow trees.  “Tell me about your lives.”

Oh, no.  See above:  for what will I be rewarded and for what will I be punished?  We were on a reservation trapped between two forces:  those who wanted to guarantee the uniqueness and potency of the ancient culture of the people and those who wanted to be treated just exactly the same as every other “American.”  It’s a junior high problem:  how to be just like everyone else but unique.  Education means conformity if it’s teacher-based.  The missionary model.

Another story:  Saladin (or some other warrior chief) walks through the garden swinging his sword.  Every flower that sticks up above the others has its head cut off.  Students know this.  It’s safe to be hidden.  It’s as true for teachers as students.  Principals are often old coaches.  They want a team, not stars.  The second curriculum could not be understood by the principal.

One of the basics of learning is memorization, as basic as dribbling a basketball.  Memorize the alphabet, the times tables, all the linking verbs and all the prepositions, as many of Shakepeare’s sonnets as you can manage, whatever Holy Books there are, including the oral Blackfeet-word-for-Blackfeet-word recitation of the “Napi stories.”  (Not the child’s versions with all the penises removed.)  These are keys that unlock so much else.  Go to a cocktail party in certain places and say,  “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote. The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,”  The whole room will respond with,  “And bathed every veyne in swich licour ..”  I cheated -- I used Google.  I didn’t memorize it myself -- I just knew I should because it was a password to that group.  But I didn’t want to go there.   In other times and places it will be Beatles lyrics, etc.   Find the keys and own them. 

You CANNOT teach someone to memorize.  You CAN make it a little easier:  I used to have packs of cards, each with a letter of the alphabet, which I’d hand out pre-scrambled to teams so they could try to get them in proper order while racing against the clock and each other.  Etc.  You could do that for yourself.  You can pressure the students, reward them, assure them it’s important, that they can do it.  Understand I’m only using this as an example.  The principles (NOT principals!)  apply even in grad school.  And after.  You could do that stuff for yourself.

Doing it for yourself is the key.  When kids complained, I used to say,  “If you can’t learn because of them, learn in spite of them. To spite them.”

How did we get so far off track?  Control.  Kids want control.  So do the adults, but the kids notice that the adults are NOT in control.  They can’t control their own health habits.  They can’t control their economic fate.  The parents complain that the teachers can’t control the children, even though the parents can’t either.  They . . .  oh, you know.  Obama can’t stop war, intercept CEO siphoning of assets, etc.  (Are there any teachers left who remember that et cetera is abbreviated etc and not ect ?)

What can be taught?  Not much.  What can be learned?  We haven’t hit the limits yet, except for the limits imposed by our educational systems.  No wonder youngsters leave.  Esp. the ones who are students, not pupils.  They have stuff to do, stuff to learn.

Buzzing.