Confucius Says

From Alvin Rabushka's Thoughtful Ideas blog quoting Confucius: “I do not instruct the uninterested; I do not help those who fail to try. If I mention one corner of a subject and the pupil does not deduce therefrom the other three, I drop him.” Chapter VII, Verse 8 (James R. Ware).

This is a fence that most teachers walk every day. Confucius set a high standard and I suspect he seldom, if ever, waived. Teachers care! But each has a point at which she or he is obligated to move on, to move past the student who just will not try. Policy makers and administrators know this and make similar decisions regarding employees and teachers, however, they are in denial when it comes to the classroom. Schools have limited resources. Trade-offs will be made. Accept it.

Standardized and Most Grade-determining Tests--the First and Last Word

One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year. --Albert Einstein--

Round and Round We Go

Every child a college graduate. On the surface it is a ridiculous goal and those of us who matriculated in the 1950s recognized it as such a long time ago. Did the goal-speakers really think that college graduates would expect to become plumbers, electricians, roofers, cosmetologists, mechanics, or thousands of other skilled and unskilled laborers? Or dd they plan that these jobs would be performed by disillusioned college dropouts? Maybe now that Harvard's Graduate School of Education concluded the obvious in a report released today, those who are ardently pushing the unqualified 70 percent into college will refocus their efforts (doubtful in the short run--schools are not very nimble). From the report:

Our current system places far too much emphasis on a single pathway to success: attending and graduating from a four-year college after completing an academic program of study in high school. Yet as we’ve seen, only 30 percent of young adults successfully complete this preferred pathway, despite decades of efforts to raise the numbers. And too many of them graduate from college without a clear conception of the career they want to pursue, let alone a pathway for getting there.

We knew this in the 50s when high schools offered at least two tracks, the minority track being "college prep." Round and round we go.

You Gotta Love Sir Ken

Does he nail it? If so, now what?

Confucius on Responsibility for Learning

Over in Beyond School, by Clay Burrell (a wonderful read), warning that it may not be "politically correct", quotes Confucius from Analects 7.8:

 The Master said, “I will not enlighten a heart that is not already struggling to understand, nor will I provide the proper words to a tongue that is not already struggling to speak. If I hold up one corner of a problem and the student cannot come back to me with the other three, I will not attempt to instruct him again.”

As teachers should we be held responsible for students learning the material, for students learning to learn, and for students wanting to learn? I side with Confucius and say none of the above. This is not to say that caring teachers should not offer interesting and engaging learning opportunities.

The crux of the question is, "should we be held responsible?". Apparently Confucius refused to 1) instruct students who could not or did not want to learn and 2) refused to accept responsibility for their not learning. We may covertly refuse to accept responsibility for these same students, however, we are contractually and increasingly culturally obligated to do whatever it takes to ensure that they learn the state-, district-, or school-directed curricular material and retain it at a certain percentage level at least until tested. And many of us are encouraged to and evaluated on our proficiency at instilling in our students the desire and ability to learn.

The First Explorer to Travel around the Horn of Africa

Walking past a history classroom yesterday, I heard a teacher, probably reading from a test, ask, "Who was the first explorer to travel around the Horn of Africa?" She then listed four possibles. I recognized two of the four and immediately knew the answer to be the first listed, Vasco Da Gama. I doubt, however, that I would have been able to answer that question had it been a fill-in-the-blank. I'm not sure exactly when I learned about Vasco. Probably in late "grammar" school. But I do know that, unless you count yesterday's experience as a "need to know," I have never in the past 55-plus years needed to know that the first explorer to travel around the Horn of Africa was Vasco Da Gamma. I wonder what else I learned that I have never needed and have since forgotten that I know. How much of my education K through masters was a waste of time and effort?

Google Docs

Have I mentioned that I'm a Google Docs proponent? I've tried a few of the others, e.g., Microsoft Office SkyDrive and Zoho and for my and my students use, Google Docs just works. The applications are not nearly as robust as desktop versions of office suites, yet they are more than adequate for most of us. Assuming few changes over the next six or so months, I plan to migrate our school to Google Apps next summer. I find that the three most valuable features of  Google Docs are 1) the cost (free); 2) access from any computer with Internet access; and document collaboration.

If you're new to Google Docs and are interested in getting starting, you might want to view the video tutorials at http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/09/learn-about-google-docs.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GoogleAppsBlog+%28The+Google+Apps+Blog%29.