Zhengzhou, May 19: Diary, a discussion with students about their
teachers has gotten me to thinking of my ex-governor of Georgia, Zell Miller,
who said, "It's easier to change the course of history than a history course."
It's so contrary to Mark Twain's description of an education as a dynamic
process of unlearning. It is. An education is transformation. It is loss and
acquisition. It is demolition and construction. It's letting go of the
familiar and venturing out into the unknown. It's self-confrontation. It's
"creative destruction." It's an invitation to a new life. It's the appearance
of new possibility. It is a hint of a new self. It is growth. It is change.
It is personal development. It is newness. It is nurturing new attitudes,
information, performance, and achievement. It is all these for those on both
sides of the podium, for teaching as well as for learning; for the teacher as
well as for the student. Yet, it has become so "stuck-in-a-rut-like."
Somehow so many of us academics in institutions of higher learning have
a not-so-high view. So many of us have convinced ourselves that we are
"complete," that the know-how of teaching is proportional to longevity in the
classroom, that there are no "new tricks to teach this old horse," that we can
remain exempt from the ever-changing mixture of creation and destruction that
is called "life." After all, wouldn't it be interesting to see just how many
of us change our classroom attitudes and way in response to those student
evaluations of us, how many of us change our classroom in response to
neuroscience's latest findings about learning, how many of us actually change
what we do in class after attending teaching conferences. Anyway,
unfortunately, too many of us reach for safety and security and hold on to them
for dear life. There are so few of us who believe that teaching is viable and
vital only if it embraces the liveliness of change in accordance with all that
we are unlearning and learning about the biological, emotional, social, and
cultural processes that go into both learning and teaching. To the contrary,
there's an overwhelming stale odor of fearful "self-protection," "sameness,"
"entrenchment," "in my sleep" and "oldness" about a process that should have a
fresh vitality of some abandon, courage, "adventureness," "creativity,"
"imagination," "inventiveness," "discovery," and "newness" about it. The
consuming drive for professorial job security through tenure, the embracing of
the myth of detached and unemotional "objectivity," the confusion of deep and
lasting learning with tests and grades, the acceptance of a classroom
"amateurism" that rests on copying and perpetuating the old ways, the creation
of a sterile and risk-free atmosphere, the demand for submissive and conforming
institutional accreditation, the desire to reduce the teaching and learning
process to a factory-like production line, the placement of classroom teaching
low on the totem pole in spite of high sounding mission and evaluation
statements, and the quest for renown through research and publication are not
conducive to stimulating classroom creativity and imagination by either teacher
or student. All they do is breed larger herds of sacred cows. Maybe that's
why Einstein is purported to have said that it's a miracle when curiosity
survives formal education.
I don't know, diary. How do we expect students to change if we resist
change? How do we expect them to experience personal development, if we can't
face similar emotional challenges? How do we expect them to pay the emotional
price and take the risk to grow, when so many of us won't? How do we expect
students to have new experiences if we cling desperately to the old ways which
may be tried, but research is increasingly proving they're not true? Diary,
am I naive? Maybe, but just think about this before anyone bring me up before
an academic inquisition to accuse me of heresy and ask for me to be burned at
the stake. What if physics professors in 2011 teach and do research using only
Newtonian mechanics, ignoring the 20th century breakthroughs beginning from the
discovery of quantum theory in 1905? What if biology professors in 2011 teach
and do research ignoring the breakthroughs from the discovery of DNA? What if
medical schools trained doctors relying only the idea of spontaneous
generation, ignoring the germ theory of disease developed in the 19th century
and the use of antibiotics developed in the 1940s? What if chemistry
professors relied on alchemy rather than the discoveries beginning with
Dalton's atomic theory? Sound like ridiculous questions? I don't think so.
After all, that's exactly what the overwhelming majority of professors do when
it comes to the classroom teaching and learning. Let's be honest, if we have
the courage. Most academics operate in the classroom with distorted,
inadequate, outdated, information about teaching and learning. Most are
neither studying nor applying the emerging knowledge we've gained about
learning in just the last twenty or more years. In a way, with all our moves
for assessment, accountability, and answerability based on outworn criteria of
what is considered valid data about learning, we've become more ignorant about
the real students than ever before, more out of touch with the real individual
student, and the gaps between what we do and what we should be doing grows ever
wider. Enough for today.
Make it a good day.
--Louis--
Louis Schmier
http://therandomthoughts.edublogs.org/
Department of History
Valdosta State University www. halcyon.com/arborhts/louis.html
Valdosta, Georgia 31698 /\ /\ /\ /\
(229-333-5947) /^\\/ \/ \ /\/\__/\ \/\
/ \/ \_ \/ / \/
/\/ \ /\
//\/\/ /\ \__/__/_/\_\
\__/__\
/\"If you want to climb
mountains,\ /\
_ / \ don't practice on mole
hills" -
---
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