Dancing Crocodile

Dumbing down

2011-08-14T18:14:00.013+02:00

Time travel

Forty years ago I was struck by a short story written by the science fiction author Isaac Asimov. The story is about a young boy's utter disappointment with having been spurned by the computerised assessment procedure which matches talents and jobs in a future society. Instead of having his brain instantaneously programmed for the job he aspires, interstellar pilot, he has been referred to a weird institute, a boarding school without any technical feature available to the students. After a couple of weeks he has an interview with the head master, who explains him that, instead of being glum, he should rejoice belonging to a happy few. Being programmed automatically with all necessary skills and knowledge for a career is meant for the mediocre majority of people who are completely satisfied being effortlessly provided with a livelihood. The boy's assessment produced evidence of a highly creative mind, capable of devising programmes the others are provided with. His brain must not be programmed, he has to go all the way, reading books, there is no short cut to new thought.

From the Earth to the Moon

Just as Jules Verne's “From the Earth to the Moon” presaged space exploration in the twentieth century, this twentieth century Asimov story predicts twenty-first century education. Of course neither Verne nor Asimov were spot-on with their description of tools and methods. Shooting people enclosed in a bullet to the moon was a bad idea, if only Verne had thought of a rocket propelled contraption, he might have expedited the endeavour. So far there is no technical tool to store information in a human brain directly, but Asimov's idea of immediate interaction of machinery and human brain seems less far-fetched than it was forty years ago.

Going elsewhere

A readily available example of how the human brain may deteriorate by offloading work to a machine is the implementation of navigation systems. Finding your way in the environment, especially in an unknown area, asks for mental mapping, while circumventing obstacles and keeping track of the right direction, and computation of distances and time. During the evolution of our species people with resourceful brains, who were proficient in finding out where to go, certainly prevailed, while others starved in places they could not escape. Until recently a travel to an unknown destination started with studying the map to find out a route where to ride your horse, or drive your car, for that matter, thereby building a mind map of the journey. Most Londoners will use some memorised map of the Underground when commuting, possibly completely different from the neatly printed graphic I have to consult as a tourist in that city on the day of arrival.

Taxi drivers given brain scans by scientists at University College London had a larger hippocampus compared with other people. This is a part of the brain associated with navigation in birds and animals.
Source:BBC News, 14 March, 2000

Now it is possible to drive to an unfamiliar address without having the slightest idea of the route. One only has to follow the arrow on a screen or voiced orders from the navigation system. No internalised map is needed, nor any idea about the sun giving a clue of the direction, or whatever. Just obey the orders of the machine. A couple of years ago a Dutch lady nosedived her car in a canal doing so.

How we got here

Such development of machine aided behaviour is bound to have effect on our brains in the long term. Functions of our brain have been transferred already. The need of memorising rules for spelling and grammar has lost importance when the machine takes care of correcting your texts. Training in mental calculation seems obsolete when your pda takes care of complicated arithmetic. Why bother about memorising the capital cities of Europe when such trivial data can be retrieved from the internet in an instant?

These processes have been going on for a long time. I surmise it is possible to describe culture since neolithic times as a process of offloading individual brains to trained specialists and tools. In this view even the invention of writing has had a huge impact on the storage of information in the brain. Once upon a time the history of a tribe would be conveyed by long stories, myths, songs, and rituals which were memorised verbatim. Undeniably the invention of writing has contributed to our survival as a species, and it clearly bolstered our struggle to master nature by science, to the detriment of our innate talent to memorise huge amounts of information literally.

In limbo

Apparently nothing can be gained without a loss. When it comes to education we may feel that we are in limbo, where the gains are not visible yet, while the losses are imminent. Testing memorised knowledge or skills requests denial of use of all machinery, which seems rather awkward. In The Netherlands some schools provide their first formers with a lap top only, no text books needed. The general attitude towards education mirrors the ubiquitous computerised information transfer: school must produce results without effort by the student, the onus is on the teacher and his curriculum, in which bite size chunks are spoon fed. This is our twenty-first century version of Azimov's helmet which programmes the brain within a second with all the information needed for a future life.

Here and now

All depends on the definition of “future life.” If education aims at participation in the economy, at the acquisition of skills and knowledge to make a living, then we must draw a dismal conclusion. There is no need at all for a high rate of literacy and numeracy among the population. In the nineteenth century a huge mass of capable book keepers, excellent in arithmetic, was the bedrock of economic progress. Now a computer calculates rents, interests, debts and profits. Employees must be able to push items under scanners, put things in machines, assemble machines following lists of how to do it, wrap products in nicely decorated paper, read patients' diagnoses from screens, that's about it. They will get paid for lowly jobs and must splurge on consumer goods, preferably electronic gadgets that keep them occupied with games, music and other entertainment. Of course we must train a limited number of gifted students to devise the products that are for sale, to provide medical services, or to work in the entertainment industry, as a singer or soccer player. It is best to test students at an early age to find their special talents, and to steer them in the right direction, so as to prevent unnecessary distraction. These students are trained at universities. Some of them, higly gifted students, may even need to read books, and communicate about these at triple A universities to produce exciting new content and to advance science. A couple of universities will do, Harvard, Princeton, Oxbridge, Shanghai, Mumbai, Cape Town and Rio.

Such education is heading for the ant heap. Each human being is a node in a world-wide super brain which has detached itself from the well-being of its components. Free will of a brain contained in a physical body is just a delusion of that individual brain, which must be placated with limited choices, for example whether to go to the pub or to the theatre, in order to preserve the illusion of personal identity.

This image of a future world is not other-worldly. To me it seems a fair description of the world we live in.

Ready for take off

We may also stick to our delusion of the free will. Then “future life” means fulfilling all our potentials, not just for some, but for all of us. We are to enjoy our life individually and to share this joy with our neighbours, friends and family, wherever we meet them in the global community, for real or on line.
This puts a wholly different complexion on school. We don't train our students for making a living, we educate them to create a meaningful life. We don't want a bunch of morons around us, do we?
So a high rate of literacy and numeracy across the population really matters. Our mutual efforts may possibly lead to a learning world government controlled by educated voters, thereby solving the problems of the planet. Someday we might travel to the stars to meet the others, out there.

Lost and gone

By the way, if you happen to know the title of this story by Azimov, I would be grateful to hear from you, the title disappeared from my memory, I read the story in an anthology which I lost, and without the title I lack the search word to find a book with the story at Amazon.com, all of which proofs my stance, unfortunately.

Learning Styles

2011-04-16T17:25:00.001+02:00

Kolb's model of learning styles

A bugbear of mine is the concept of "Learning Styles". As a young class tutor I was convinced that it would be useful to children to be aware of their personal way how to do things. So I investigated into the ideas about learning styles and discovered a torrent of theoretical stuff, nifty questionnaires, models and so on. The students mostly were not too interested, linking the paper work and discussions to their personal behaviours and penchants improved their gusto only slightly, they agreed readily on the matters at hand. I never succeeded to employ these insights in my tutor lessons to the extent that it really had any impact on the success of students in school. It just did not catch on.

The scientific base

After a couple of years I made an appointment with the linchpin in the Dutch educational research on learning styles, a university worker. He warily informed me that the whole idea of learning styles had developed as a management tool in private enterprise, that the concept gratuitously had been transferred to education, and that he could not give me a clue how to employ learning styles in secondary education. Nevertheless, learning styles could made sense, but only if you linked them to vocational training or academic fields. Each field entails some learning styles and precludes others. Being aware of that is useful to students at the level of higher education as it can prevent failure. That was all he could offer. He had done a thesis on it. I was very grateful for his answer, because it was plain and unambiguous, and based on years of scientific thinking on the topic.

Meaningless advices

I learned something then. Firstly, do not introduce strategies without content. Your lesson will be meaningless, as there is no base to measure or experience the strategy and thereby it will not catch on. This is a very risky thing to say, as it logically exempts a lot of stuff we are supposed to teach. Just to give an example: a school may be asked by parents or the inspection to show what the school does to teach children not to bully each other. It is quite easy to respond to such a demand, materials galore are to be found to discuss bullying, have the children fill in papers and express their feelings in circle time, just put some lesson in the timetable, a tutor lesson, and have all the tutors go over the material with their class. Everyone will be very happy about it, all students will agree that bullying is bad and their parents will praise the school. However, my law says it will not prevent bullying, and the only way to make clear that bullying is not acceptable, is to quash it when it happens in such a way that everybody gets the message. As bullying is a perennial problem you can be sure that you will be able to show off your results when the inspection team comes to assess your policy in this respect, be sure to archive a report of the proceedings.

Vacuous concepts

Secondly, do not trust concepts, formats or routines that are not related to your subject and that you cannot embed in your own expertise developed in the classroom. A lot of ideas teachers are clobbered with just are fads. Even something claimed in the context of "Evidence based education" may not be evidence based at all. In a plethora of quangos professional educators earn their bread and butter by producing and copying ideas how to advise and train teachers. They have to come up with something in their word processors, haven't they? They get paid for it.
A good teacher will read his background materials, not only pertaining to his academic field but also on education and teaching. It is rewarding to experiment with classroom routines systematically and to implement new insights in lessons, to discover new ways to reach out to the students. But the classroom is decisive, if something does not work at all in the trenches of education, it should be ditched.

Punch and Judy

2011-03-07T13:09:00.003+01:00

Students can be quite skittish about speaking in front of the class in a foreign language. I discovered that performing a hand puppet play is a great shot in the arm. First formers are vacillating between the magical world of early childhood and their budding rational mind. Having their puppet speaking instead of themselves somehow pushes them over the threshold.
Punch and Judy offer an intriguing gateway into typically English folklore. Puppet shows are available galore at the internet, for example this one. An interview with a a genuine Punch and Judy "professor" will provide a nice learning experience by listening to native speakers.
Being an art teacher I can easily have the children make their own puppets. But that is not really necessary, in my experience anything that can be manipulated above an improvised hiding screen may represent a character in a puppet play, for example in a show titled "Mr Brush meets Ms Dustpan". If you don't buy this argument, any toy shop will provide you with puppets which are more traditional and not prohibitive.
Also you don't need an elaborately decorated booth. Just a cardboard box with a hole in it will do. I have noticed, to my amazement, that even when you don't hide at all, students keep looking at the puppet in your hand, not at the mouth that actually produces the voice.

Group work

2011-01-30T17:12:00.016+01:00

Three students are building a structure in space out of bamboo sticks and rubber bands

A couple of years ago my team leader asked me, why I seldom had students working in groups in my art room. I opened my mouth to answer "that Art was about dealing with individual perception and about individual expression of these experiences," only to close it immediately, as I realised this was just a personal stance which might not be valid across all art phenomena in every historical or cultural context. Even worse, if my argument didn't stick at all, I might have to change my practice.

The loneliness of the learner

The idea that the outcome of teaching must be the learning of the individual student is the bedrock of school education. Most course work requires students to process tasks individually. Grading results invariably is done by assessing individual progress.
This practice is ill-suited to prepare the student for real life. No major feat of human kind has been achieved individually. Even the most extreme examples of gifted solitarians, say Darwin, Einstein, Van Gogh, never could have achieved their remarkable results without febrile communication with the scientific or artistic community of their time.

Van Gogh did not cut his ear in an act of art

Unfortunately in my subject, Art, the solitary individual, heading into no man's land all by himself, at the risk of his mental health, for the benefit of all, epitomises the ultimate artist. It is a nineteenth century concept that is kept up by art critics, art historians and especially art dealers, who groom the public into believing that what they are looking at in the white rooms of museums and galleries are gateways into a realm of unique experiences by godlike individuals. Which is nonsense, a lot of Warhol's work was produced in his Factory by employees, no art pundit is able to distinguish authentic Picassos from forgeries produced by the notorious Geert Jan Jansen.

Louise Bourgeois' work Nature Study (pink rubber on a steel basis, 1984-2001) can be traced back to various images of the Ephesis' Artemis. The idea of inserting multiple female breasts in a sculpture was not a novelty.

The life and work of Louise Bourgois shows that even when an artist works for a long time in solitude, creating her higly personal things, this does not mean that she is disconnected from the world at large. Her work draws on autobiographic content in an idiosyncratic style. Albeit, the subject matter and form can be traced back easily as we can share the feelings underlying the work and recognise the nifty tricks developed by artists in the twentieth century to poke our sensitivity. We admire the work because Louise Bourgeois is not unique, she evokes memories and experiences we all can relate to. Of course she was an expert, as Bach was, or Einstein. Those ground-breaking artists and scientists all were gifted, sure, but they worked their heads off to process the material they got from others and the world around them into something new. They didn't do it all by themselves, all alone.

The artist's workshop

Going back in time, we must conclude that the lone artist in his studio, creating for an unknown audience in a free market, is a recent invention. In a lot of Rubens' paintings we are looking at Rubens' brush only in the flesh of the buxom nudes, which the master would add after his apprentices had filled in the background.
Moreover, when “Art” includes all the artwork done by architects, illustrators, designers, all those people who work in teams to invent buildings, games, websites, magazines, clothing, then whole the idea of creating individually is ludicrous.
So, when it comes to teaching art, we are ill advised when we take the exception for the rule.

Working in a large group. The students cut shapes and patterns of own preference. However, where patterns meet they are to find a solution how to combine their various patterns in such a way that a sense of unity is achieved.

The concerted effort

Bearing that in mind, I don't take it to be very wise to emphasize originality in the art room. Originality comes with expertise, my students are far too young to have made ten thousand hours of deliberate practice, needed to reach the level of an expert. If a student feels he needs to copy Walt Disney's Donald Duck, I will teach him how to recognise Disney's scheme. Neither do I care too much any more for individuality in art work.
After decades of teaching art at last I have freed myself from all kind of bugbears I've been struggling with for a long time. Now I just listen to my students. If two girls ask me: “Can we do this together?,” then I may answer “Yes, why not?” Whenever I set students to work in groups, the atmosphere in my room brightens up, the chatter is functional, discussions become edifying and we enjoy the others' contributions to a shared goal. We are enjoying our work, just as the workers who built the cathedrals in medieval times must have enjoyed working together at building for posterity. My pupils study art at school, they are not lunatics in an asylum.

Visiting schools in the UK

2010-12-06T13:41:00.006+01:00

A young man fetches his eleven years old boy from school. He is dressed in a nylon anorak from under which a long frock falls low on his calves. He is bearded and wears an Arabic cap. His right hand clutches his son's left hand. The young one is wearing the attire of the western male, a suit, white shirt and tie. It is the boy's school uniform.

To me those two clutched hands bridge Samuel Huntington's “Clash of civilizations”. I made a one week visit to schools at Small Heath, one of the most depraved urban districts of the UK in terms of employment, crime rate, health conditions and housing. Not so in terms of schooling, I learnt. The three schools I visited, a primary school and two comprehensive schools for secondary education, were all located in this area, and all three of them were appraised “outstanding” by Ofsted, the UK school inspection board. Of course these schools had not been chosen at random, I travelled with a group of Dutch teachers, on a study tour organised by the international branch Inet of the Specialist School and Academies Trust. Nevertheless, how is such a remarkable result achieved?

The Head

Firstly you need a visionary, charismatic school leader. The type of person you go along with, even when you don't buy into all the minutiae of his plans. One school was upgraded by such a leader within four years from the bottom of school ranking to the top. He expanded the school's remit from the school's premises, fenced with barbed wire, by reaching out to the community around it. One of the strands in his programme meant offering courses to adults. “Only the parenting course didn't catch on.” Such a leader is good at attracting sponsorship. The school's brand new van drove us from the hotel to school every morning and I guess such a vehicle can't be bought with state funding only. Not only is he a good manager but he motivates his staff on a daily basis. During briefings to all staff early in the morning he stands in the line of heads of departments, listens to their messages and shows his approval. He joins the roars of laughter. He meets all students weekly in the main hall and addresses them.

Secondly the school instils confidence in children and makes them ambitious. The school doesn't concede defeat, nor does it accept that the best children from poor backgrounds can hope for is a career as a taxi driver. Every student must get the education that enables him to materialise his talents. The school wants the academic inclined students to attain their A* levels and go to university.

Behaviour policy

With such aspirations the school cannot allow its students to indulge in silly behaviour. Sitting at the back of classrooms I only once in those four days saw a student do something which contradicted goal oriented student attendance. She took the pin out of the headscarf of the girl sitting before her. This was not perceived by the teacher, but the harassed girl griped and was expelled from the classroom straight away. To my amazement the insulted student left without any objection, while the perpetrator smiled smugly. In an other lesson I heard the teacher say: “I put you on a C1”, referring to a certain level of misbehaviour in a scheme for students understandably represented in “The Behaviour Snake.” You had better avoid spiralling down the curves towards the beak of the serpent. Ultimately you are sent away forever. I hadn't even noticed something was going on.
I witnessed this wonderful discipline at all three schools. All students seemed meek and obedient, not to compare with the rumbustious boys and chattering girls I meet in Dutch education. The whole situation seemed wholly otherworldly to me. I can come up with two explanations only. Possibly a school population of only immigrant students is more amenable because they share a completely different parental background. In their cultures the revolution of the sixties never took place, so to say. The other rationale might be that the discipline system is enforced rigorously in a concerted effort of all staff because everyone understands that giving some leeway would set hell loose. Probably both thoughts are valid: the problems we have in The Netherlands with young boys from Moroccan background often is explained by the gap between the rather loose Dutch society and home where they are flogged by their fathers.

Control

Just as school cannot allow students to create havoc, can it allow teachers to have it their own way. The outcome of lessons must be secured. So every lesson I observed started with stating goals to achieve by students. Students were asked to appraise their knowledge and skills with respect to this goals. Subsequently the lesson was executed, after which the students had to reflect on their success during this lesson. The teacher then would comment on their reflection by giving feedback leading to advice how to improve. This format of four steps was implemented in an amazing variety of ways, but always it would lead to evidence on paper, to be archived. I learnt that heads of departments checked their teachers and thereby produced more paper work to be delivered on demand. Clearly Ofsted has a stranglehold on every level of the hierarchic structure, felt every moment of the school day.

This ubiquitous lesson format guarantees a basic quality in any educational arrangement. The four steps are good practice. All lessons I observed were well executed by skilled teachers. The level of attainment by students was remarkable. I definitely took home a lot of ideas to improve my own practice. Albeit, the time spent on producing evidence on paper painstakingly cannot be used to produce new teaching tools and invent new directions. Some of my art lessons are adventures, for me and for my students. “Actually, I don't know what you are going to come up with,” I quite often hear myself explain to a student. I have not become a teacher to execute lessons only, though mostly this is what I do. I like to explore what teaching and learning is about by experimenting with unpredictable results. My teaching is learning, and it defies formats, not all of the time but sometimes. I guess my teaching would not be acclaimed in an English school. Ofsted would not approve of it.

Content and Language Integrated Learning

One can't help comparing when being in a completely different setting of your own job. At primary school I observed a reading lesson. The lesson prepared the kids for the Standard Assessment Test. That means teaching to the test. In Dutch schools the same lesson could have taken place in preparation of our CITO-test. In both countries the results of the tests are crucial, not only for the child but for the school as well, as the outcome will position the school in rankings.
I admired the quality of reading and the level of answering quite difficult questions, comparing these aspects with the reading abilities of my students in Dutch and my bilingual students in English. So I asked the teacher how many of these kids, twenty eight there were of them, spoke English at home. She answered promptly: “One.” This may not necessarily have been the one white kid in the room, there are a lot of people from Poland in the UK.
I teach in a Dutch immersion programme in which children are taught in English across half of the subjects. The kids in the English classroom are involved in an immersion programme in which all of their subjects are taught in a language not spoken at home. All these kids are bilingual, not just the gifted middle class kids as is the case in my school. These students speak Asian or African languages at home. All the teachers I met are involved in an immersion programme with a deep impact on the lives of their students.

Diversity

My colleague of art told me that, after having evaluated the results of a lesson on portraits, some of her students repaired the transgression of a taboo by scratching the eyes from their drawings. The English enjoy the advantage of having a tradition in wearing a uniform at schools: it hushes up differences in cultural backgrounds. In this district of Birmingham the school uniform includes a headscarf with the school's logo for girls who wish to cover their head. Also the school instils proud in diversity by organising “Diversity Days” which feature cultural backgrounds.

Conclusion

The most remarkable difference between the schools at Small Heath and my own educational environment in The Netherlands is the grip school management has on the classroom situation. Compared with these schools a Dutch school resembles sheer anarchy. A teacher in The Netherlands is quite autonomous with respect to his classroom management, the content of his lessons and the feedback he gives to his students. Any school leader wishing to steer his school towards a shared goal has to fight obstinate staff. At the Small Heath schools clearly all staff complied with diktats issued by the school management. Although this may be rooted in a different tradition it can also be related to the context in which the schools have to function. Having to cater for children in a multicultural inner city area sets clear targets which ask for a concerted effort by all teachers.

The Education Buzz Carnival #7

2010-10-29T13:26:00.000+02:00

An "eclectic smattering of things buzzing about in the EduSphere" is to be found at Bellringers.

Backfiring: Assessment of Administrators

2010-10-22T12:48:00.010+02:00

The management course

My head of house aspires to be a school manager. A week ago she sent me a form which I filled in with my feedback, cautiously, as personal trainers somewhere were going to use my assessment to judge on her proceedings in a management course. I bet she asked me because she knows I am versed in the lingo. Of course I was highly complimentary, which was not too difficult, because she really is doing a fine job, and I commented on something which could be worked on, as I know that you have to give something to the vultures.
This was the first time in my career as a teacher that I had been formally requested to comment on an administrator's performance, even then only for a course outside the school's remit.

Why do we let off our administrators scot-free?

What struck me was that the leader of our team was quite amazed that I had observed some flaw she was fully aware of but had been able to hush up so far while communicating with her superiors, who take her to be excelling in this particular management tool. In fact all of the teachers who attend the meetings she presides over have noted her proclivity for ad lib performances. Being a teacher she could have known that, we all know that our students spot immediately that we failed to prepare our lesson thoroughly, and those students accept such a lesson only if the improvisation is brilliant. If not it will be mayhem. My head of house has a radiant intelligence which make us teachers accept her poorly prepared meetings, we let her get away with it. In fact we like her a lot, which is fine. It would be better though to have well prepared meetings which offer us meaningful content instead of wasting our time with material that could have been delivered on paper beforehand as well.

It is time to backfire

I consider it grossly unfair that teachers are assessed by administrators, in which students' feedback and results are pivotal, while administrators are assessed by their superiors only. This highly corrupt system leads to administrators asking teachers to perform at an unattainable level. If only we produced the yardstick with which to measure our administrators, that would be a wholly different kettle of fish! It is about time we backfire using the same techniques and ideas we are being buffeted with all the time.

Foolish goals

For example: if administrators are asking us to differentiate our instructions for different learning styles, then they should realise that this logically entails allowing teachers different teaching styles. This would forbid them to issue a format for all. Instead they would have to observe our lessons, find out what we are good at, and what we could improve, and what just is out of reach given the limitations of our individual personalities. It certainly would make them more realistic. Assessment of administrators by their target audience, teachers, would close the gap between school leaders' aspirations and our daily grind.

PS

By the way, there is no scientific evidence for such a thing as "learning style." Differences in "teaching style" can be observed in schools everywhere, but it seems to me to be something to overcome, it is not a fixture. I've chosen these terms only as they represent the otherwordly atmosphere of educational buzz quite well.

Source image 1 / image 2

Life's a Carnival–the Education Buzz #6 Halloween Edition

2010-10-13T17:55:00.018+02:00

Life's a Carnival–the Education Buzz #6 Halloween Edition is up. It certainly gives you the creeps.
For example: meet the author of Bellringers in a most appropriate setting.

Source image

The Ruler

2010-10-08T23:16:00.010+02:00

After some weeks the first formers have settled in the new school. They have learnt that this new system predominantly is based on very short meetings with adults, lessons lasting only fifty minutes. All these teachers seem to have different ideas about what can be tolerated, and most of them are not too strict. Some give a lot of leeway. So it's time to see what you can get away with. In the art room you even are allowed to walk around.

A boy complains to me about an incident in which a mate broke his ruler. Unfortunately this happened behind my back. I ask him, what he expects me to do. He can't name the perpetrator, neither can I. That's it, isn't it? Take it as a thing in your experience. He smiles benignly. So I ask the class, nobody fesses up. Then the bell rings and the lesson is over. I forget about it.

Now this boy keeps returning to it every so often. Not every lesson, he doesn't nag. He isn't being insolent, he just smiles: “What about my ruler?” He holds me accountable, that's clear.

Most students learn quickly that the new school is a jungle in which minor infringements of rules that were severely implemented in primary school not even are observed. You'd better keep track of your belongings in such a dangerous world. If the behaviour doesn't obstruct the teacher's aims, you seem to be let of scot-free. The kids have to learn yet that bullying will backfire. Some teacher will notice, inform the class tutor, another teacher will complain, some casual talk in the staff room and things start rolling. But just a broken ruler in the art room will not do.

So this boy keeps reminding me: “What about my ruler?” Somehow his busted ruler has grown in his mind, I guess, and he surely makes it grow in my mind. This isn't any longer about a ruler, it is about the ruler. I am supposed to rule. I am the ruler.

Next lesson I will donate him a new ruler. It will break the ice to for a conversation about his role in the peer group.

The Education Buzz Edition #5

2010-10-01T14:54:00.002+02:00

Bellringers' Carnival of Education Buzz #5 offers a florid pattern in gaudy colours from which I pick a flower to soothe my worried mind: there is zero scientific evidence for the Learning Styles Fad. Treat yourself at Bellringers'!

Randomisation of responses

2010-10-01T03:32:00.010+02:00

How do you single out students who are to answer to your intriguing questions? Professor Dylan William proposes six novelties in the class room to boost teaching, one of which is to abolish the hands-up habit. Instead we are to choose students at random to reach out to the lazy ones in the back of the classroom.

Some sort of randomisation process is required, Wiliam long ago decided, and his unorthodox solution, as demonstrated in a new BBC2 series, The Classroom Experiment (part of the channel's very welcome School Season of programmes), is to write the pupils' names down on lollipop sticks, the teacher then pulling them at random from a pot. No one can hide – everyone is potentially in the firing line.

Such an idea doesn't seem ground-breaking to me. I am sure that any seasoned teacher has his own nice tricks to circumvent the active clever kids who are so eager to spout the right answer, some highly idiosyncratic pranks to attract the attention of any one and to get every one involved in thinking.
These are my favourite ones:

The nursery rhyme.
Any form of poetry will do, but I prefer silly rhymes like
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, / catch a tinker by the toe / if he squeals so let him go / eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Of course you are to point at a student at each syllable, actually you can feel the attention of the class mount nearing the end of the lines. The student who is put on the stage never refuses to co-operate as it is completely clear that he has been chosen at random. I have lots of rhymes stored in my memory over the years, to prevent boredom by repetition, Dutch poetry for most classes, and English nursery rhymes for my immersion classes. A spin-off is that it convincingly demonstrates that learning stuff by heart pays off. Also you can use the jape to inculcate your students with wisdom using quotes like Shakespeare's "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
The Roulette
I put my pen or pencil or whatever pointed object at hand on the ground and give it a twist. While it swivels students often raise their buttocks to see what's happening and when the object rests, I extend its direction to the student. Dodging kids are severely punished of course. The teacher has to accept all ramifications and in case he is singled out he has to produce the correct answer himself.
The Countdown
Just ask some student to give a number lower than the amount of students in the class and perform a countdown. Frequently this is used by clever kids to place the onus on some friend, but as a teacher you observe the rapid eye movements, and you have the right to go left or right, at any moment, only to end at the culprit's desk. This takes high-speed calculation and if you make a mistake, you end with the perpetrator's neighbour, which is fine, as the complete class is aware what you were trying to do, and nothing is more suited to attract the students' attention than a teacher fooled by his own histrionics.
The Lottery Price
If you have established the procedures listed before then you could try this one: Just single out a student whose voice hasn't been heard too much lately, ask him/her " Give me a number lower than [number of students in the group]", and react being surprised: "That's right!!!" to any number the student comes up with. This one never fails to raise laughter, and, what is more important, it makes clear that you are never subject to any procedure what so ever, not even to the ones you invented yourself. You are the alpha person in the room, aren't you?

I' am curious about your ruses. By all means, please, publish them in a comment to this blog

Source image: http://www.arghhh.net/roulette.html

Dangerous Myths #1: “Rote learning stinks.”

2010-09-16T23:55:00.027+02:00

This boy is participating in a workshop photography at my school. He knows how to upload a photograph on the internet, but does he know how to use this wonderful digital tool to communicate meaningful content?
It wasn’t that long ago that rote learning, and the regurgitative mimickery that is its most common form of expression, was the educational model under which students laboured during their primary and secondary years. They were expected to behave like inert intellectual vessels into which a series of teachers would dump ever-more complex packets of information and ideas, like computers receiving their regular software upgrades. But with the rise of the Google-powered universe and the ability to locate information about anything, any time and (almost) anywhere, the need to remember the dates of the Hundred Years War or the name of Canada’s fourth Prime Minister has become an academic skill nearly as quaint – and irrelevant – as using an abacus or perfecting one’s ability to write in script.
Source: http://www.unlimitedmagazine.com/2010/09/new-school/#ixzz0zifpOnZI

Such a text drives me crazy. It mocks traditional schooling by describing a caricature, and it reduces academic knowledge to mere storage of unrelated meaningless facts. I bought my first computer in 1986, how could I possibly have treated my students as computers in which to dump software before that moment? The use of the metaphor reveals that the writer lives in the here and now without any idea of even the recent past. He lacks rote learning of history. I can tell you, treating students as "inert vessels" was asking for trouble thirty years ago, as it is now.
I challenge everyone to point at any relevant human achievement that came without rote learning, repetitious training of memory and mind.

Nothing comes for free

Even learning the mother tongue comes with thousands and thousands hours of immersion in the language in a native environment and numberless try and error situations and this at a young age when the brain is highly susceptible. It takes the toddler two years to come up with a sentence. Becoming an expert in your native language, being able to express subtle emotions and complex thought takes up to ten years, just as in any other province of human achievement. Ten thousand hours of practice over a period of ten years that's the rule of thumb if you really want to be good at something.
Learning to speak seems to come naturally and with ease. It's hard work though, and we must admire those little kids that go out of their way to communicate with us, don't laugh at their stupid mistakes, they are learning!
When it comes to schooling: there is no way to escape the dilemma that school has to educate the students in subjects which to a large extent are meaningless to them. As teachers we have to put our pupils in the vanguard of the battle of our existence, they must master the knowledge base which has been created in our culture over a period of thousands of years. This can't be done without boring repetition. Creativity is based on broad and deep knowledge, stored in the long term memory.

21st Century Skills???

As for the 21st Century Skills: I haven't met Whizz Kids at my school during the last ten years. They did exist though, back in the eighties and nineties. Those students taught themselves to work with challenging computers, Commodore 64, Apple II or IBM desktops. Those machines didn't have an easy interface, one had to type in command lines. These kids, always boys, wrote computer software in Pascal or Basic, they saved the results on floppy discs, the hard disk didn't exist in the first years , nor the mouse, for that matter. They worked their tails off, doing their stint of ten thousand hours. They were knowledgeable, I learned a lot from them. The likes of those students of mine invented the hard disk, the mouse and the interactive interface, thereby facilitating the next generation.
I am sorry, but when it comes to handling computers, the Internet, and the digital camera, I am the most versed person in my classroom nowadays. Note that I am a crochety old man, 61 years old now. I used to teach first formers basic html in a couple of hours, but it can't be done any more. My younger students don't feel any need to learn how to customise a site on a basic level, such a skill isn't cool as they know they can publish on the internet without doing any effort. That's the crux: the 21st century doesn't require special skills. Anyone can do it.

An example: photography

I am so glad that all my students can make a picture easily with their mobiles and store the images on their hard disks or compile them at Flickr.com. No need to go over the chemical processing of film rolls and paper. I don't even need to teach them how to compress a picture to an acceptable file size to send it over the internet, that's taken care of by all those wonderful environments in which you can upload your photograph.
One problem is left though. Teaching how to make good pictures is just as difficult now as it was in those old days, attractive pictures that convey artistic beauty, that have a documentary value. Actually that hasn't changed a bit, I didn't need to change my didactics at all. So far for old schooling.

Kafka's world

I can't help feeling wary about my students and myself. We are being disenfranchised by Google, Microsoft and Apple, firms that give us easy tools to express ourselves, seemingly for free, just to gauge our behaviour for merchandising. Actually no thinking is needed for using these tools. Big Brother is here and he is watching our every move. The brainy kids are being entertained now with stupid games.
We must teach our students to free themselves. If there is such a thing as a 21st century skill, we must teach them to build and use free software, devised and maintained by volunteers. Especially gaming could be used to transfer meaningful knowledge, as it is the quintessential rote learning. If not this century will head towards an ant heap in which individuality will have dissipated while building a Matrix which rules all behaviour for a common good no one has anticipated. I believe good old fashioned basic rote learning can prevent such a disaster.

Education Buzz #4

2010-09-15T21:55:00.000+02:00

Choose your table at Bellringer's Education Buzz #4 lunch room! She certainly does us proud. A lot of interesting talk to be heard there. While seated at table 4 I overheard a conversation at table 1 and, being an art teacher, I got dewy-eyed at Curmudgeon's eloquent and rational rebuttal of any attempt to relate teacher salaries to the want for subject skills in the economy. Note that Curmudgeon teaches maths! Thou art my brother!

Source image

Why educational formats are bound to falter

2010-09-06T01:42:00.025+02:00

The school has adapted a new approach to learning. A young expert enthuses the colleagues invoking a Can Do message. The classrooms are refurbished to meet the demands of the new system

Recently ground-breaking research has shed light on the way the brain processes information while learning. I recommend reading Daniel T. Willingham on this topic. I wonder what would happen if the same attention would go to teaching.

The working memory of the teacher

My homespun philosophy tells me that teaching entails a continuous overload of the working memory. A teacher in a classroom perceives student behaviour, and has to to react to it. He offers subject matter, in which he has to be infallible and flaunt his mastery. He transfers his knowledge in an attractive way so as to keep the students' attention. Next to that he keeps track of progress of the group of students as a whole, and of all the individuals in the group if any possible and adjusts his teaching accordingly. On top of that he notices absentees, notes down grades and merits and complies with all other data processing school organisation demands.
During a lesson the teacher retrieves loads of data, names, faces, subject matter, appointments, procedures, agreements, from his long term memory, processes these in his working memory and stores such data into long term memory in an ongoing process. One eye always is on the clock.

The Zen of Teaching

Being a coach of newcomers I have observed a lot of lessons of fellow teachers. To me it is clear that the solution to the problem of the teacher's overloaded work memory is to offload it. It is impossible to rev up the brain to a preternatural speed for meeting all the demands of the job. How a teacher reduces the data stream that besets his working memory draws on his personal aptitude and experience. In a sense teaching is a study of zen: the master is an expert in not-doing. Which is not meant to say that he is doing nothing.

Not-doing

The expert teacher is a master in Wu Wei. He knows when to act and when not to act.

The expert teacher focuses his perception. He only perceives student behaviour which thwarts the lesson, or gives a clue about progress, other data are skimmed only to be thrown away immediately. He neglects havoc that will peter out without any fuss but he responds fiercely to seemingly minor nuisance which he knows can grow into something bad.
The experienced teacher is fully aware of his personal flaws and qualities. Some of his tools are based on innate qualities. If he is a good story teller he will exploit his skill in wonderfully presented lectures to a rapt audience, for example. He likes storytelling so his work will be effortless in such a lesson: sheer joy. Other didactic forms may be more difficult to realise, only to be achieved by hard work at the edge of what the working memory can do, but he has learned how to implement these formats when needed for his aim: having students think deeply to store information in their long term memory for future use. He is an old cunning fox with a plethora of tricks at hand. Some class room situations however he will circumvent, having learnt that those settings take too much of his mind and cause him to lose track of content or students' behaviour or progress, no matter how enthused fellow teachers may be about such a didactic approach, or the administration, for that matter.

The Headmaster's Fancy

There is a rash of theories on students' learning, Constructivism, Structured Co-operative Learning, Thinking Skills, Learning Styles etc. To me it seems awkward trying to find a common denominator in twenty-odd young participants while neglecting the key figure in the classroom. The onus is on the teacher to implement these theoretical suppositions in everyday graft, isn't it?
Of course it is equally difficult to find a common denominator between all those different teacher personalities as it is between students.
Politicians, ideologists and administrators trying to solve the conundrum of a perceived deterioration of education buffet teachers with theoretically based formats to implement in the classroom, even to the outrageous foolishness of prescribing the setting of furniture in the classroom.

Gung-ho versus Wu Wei

The new format your headmaster fancies, which supposedly will give new impetus to learning at your school is not going to work at all, for the simple reason that teaching has nothing to do with implementing a certain format. Effective teaching involves changing formats all the time, taking into account the subject, the current topic, the special needs of this group of students, group dynamics, the stage in the learning process, availability of materials and all the other intricate patterns underlying learning at school. It is infinitely more complex than just implementing one format for all. Which format is chosen for a particular lesson must be decided by the teacher, based on his expertise, his evaluation of his group of students, within the capacity of his monitoring. What students need in the first place is an equably balanced leader in the classroom. It is on the teacher to decide how to keep up an impeccable peace of mind while at work, not as an act of selfishness but on behalf of his students.

The royal route

I believe there is one route only to excellent education: furthering excellency in teachers. This can be done by raising the entrance level to the profession, no teacher, whether in kindergarten, primary or secondary education, should be allowed to teach without a university degree. Ample time must be allocated within the teacher's annual task to further and ongoing development of knowledge and skills. The teacher should epitomise the life long learner as an example for all. Theories on education should be developed in the classroom where they can be falsified immediately.
This is an extremely expensive route, and that is why politicians will never wade into it. Only one country has really taken steps into this direction: Finland, and that's why Finnish education stands out in international comparisons.

Classroom settings

2010-09-02T23:58:00.002+02:00

The Coach

The Circle

The Islands

In Dutch secondary education teachers and students are bundled through the building by the timetable, changing rooms frequently.
At my school three classroom settings are to be found: the “Coach”, the “Circle” and the “Islands” setting, to be seen in the pictures on the left. Some rooms are a mixture of these settings, the art rooms, in which I work mostly, combine the Islands setting with the Circle. I can change by moving the students without moving the desks. Most rooms are smaller and do not allow so easy a transformation.
The “Coach” is the quintessential lecture hall. It encourages working in pairs though. The “Circle” suggests a meeting of all and is suitable for lecturing and working in pairs. The “Islands” setting is meant for group work, in foursomes. Working in pairs is possible, lecturing is virtually impossible.
Tests require the rigid Grid, a Coach with separated desks.
Most classrooms have a Coach setting. In fact the Coach has always been the norm. Students have informed me that my lectures are boring and I have often infuriated a colleague by refurbishing a Coach into the Circle or Islands, without restoring the situation in which I found the room before leaving.
It has often struck me as highly idiosyncratic that teachers, when having a meeting in a classroom, wish to communicate with all face to face, so they immediately shove the furniture into the Circle. After the meeting they always rebuild the Coach co-operatively. Apparently they prefer lecturing but hate being lectured.
Now the administration has issued a diktat that in our new wing for younger students the Islands setting is the norm. Structured Co-operative Learning (SCL) is all the rage now.
Our administration is not too bad. A couple of years ago colleagues of a school nearby found the tables welded together in an Islands setting when returning after vacation.
This is going to be a hilarious show. I'll keep you informed.

The Education Buzz #3

2010-09-01T21:18:00.002+02:00

Visit Life's a Carnival–the Education Buzz #3 to read about the troubles and the delights of your fellow teachers across the globe. Some of these posts make me realise how fortunate I am, enjoying my job here in the sticks in a backwater of The Netherlands, amidst woods and fields. All those nice kids riding to school on their bikes. The true heroes of our profession are to be found elsewhere, in sordid urban districts.

Energizer

2010-08-26T23:23:00.007+02:00

This one I recommend. It always works, if you believe in it yourself. It can be done only if the number of students is even. If not I suggest you give someone the runaround. Certainly the headmaster needs urgent information, whatever.
Act like the severe strict teacher the kids know you can be. Pass on sheets of paper, one per pair of students. Tell them to clutch hands. Do glare fiercely at the two boys who don't like sharing hands until they follow suit.
Explain that each couple now has one pair of hands available, a left one and a right one, right? Tell them you are going to show how to fold a paper air plane. They are to co-operate with their pair of hands to copy your procedure.
Turn a blind eye to students who swap now: left-handers have to be expedient in a right handed world.
Be sure to be able to show how to fold a paper plane model that is somewhat beyond their ken, that they haven't seen before. I f you have never folded any paper plane, then leave this post. Try something more serious.
Of course, as the teacher you are, you understand that you have to demonstrate this above your head against the blackboard or whiteboard with your back towards the class, to prevent any confusion about what's done left and right. Don't crick your neck when looking over your shoulder to synchronize the moves. End with counting down for take-off.
I believe I invented this activity myself. But I'm not too sure about that. As an artist I am an expert in nicking ideas unconsciously.
This year I started with a cover lesson. A colleague of the maths department had taken ill. There is a lot of mathematics in folding paper planes. I bet you can come up with that yourself.

The Engine of Culture

2010-08-21T15:36:00.001+02:00

Michelangelo Buonarotti,
The Creation of Adam, 1508-1512, detail.

This post was triggered by a post Art as Salvation or Education on Joanne Jacobs' blog and was partly published as a comment there.

We stand on the shoulders of the likes of Galileo Galilei, Michelangelo Buonarotti and Siddharta Gautama. The engine of human endeavour is revved up by three disciplines: Science, Art and Religion. These main strands of our expertise cannot be circumvented when devising a curriculum in secondary edation.

Religion

To start with the latter: even when you are an atheist like I am, you have to come to terms with the meaning of your life, or the futility of your death. The quest for the answer is a religious journey. Atheism, Islam, Christianity, or Zen, all those different ways to solve the riddle of our just being here for a short time only are all intricate patterns of do's and don't s, procedures, and systems of thought. They are bodies of knowledge and their findings should be communicated in the school's curriculum, not to foist a particular religion on the students but to have the question of meaning at the core of the curriculum. You may call it philosophy if you distrust the term religious studies.

Science

The impact of science on our world is obvious. I suppose that's why politicians and administrators emphasize the importance of science and maths in education. I agree with them completely.

Art

Piero Manzoni,
The Artist's Shit,contents freshly preserved shit, produced and tinned in 1961.

Visual artists have been asking profound question's about our cultural codes throughout the twentieth century. Their weird art works cannot be frittered away as just "shit." It is the art teacher's job to clarify the thoughts underlying such a work to make it understandable to the students.

source image

Art is epitomised by its products being rendered seemingly effortlessly. The sparkling colours of the painting, the high pitch of the trumpet, the terse prose in the novel, the beauty of the chair you sit on, the accessible design of the website, the wonderful proportions of the building, all these riveting expressions of art seem to come naturally and with ease. I guess that's why art is often underestimated in education when decisions are made about budget and curriculum.

The artists who perform these acts are experts in their disciplines. They don't want you to feel obliged because they worked so hard to attain this level. They just thrill you with their skills.
Be sure: they have worked doggedly for many years to make you feel enthralled. And they need you. They need an educated public that perceives their colour combinations, discerns the melodic line in the symphony, recognises the style of the chair, and appreciates the post modern whimsical approach of the architect. Above all they need the applause or jeers that tell them what is ugly and without merit and what is beautiful and contributes to our well-being.

That's what we do as art teachers in secondary education. We teach the audience for the artists. Every so often we have a talented artist among our students and we will show him the way to a profession as an artist. But that is not the main thing. Neither am I very interested in developing hobbyists who take up art for leisure at a later stage in their life, though such a thing is not to be sneezed at. Art classes are not about making lovely art only. We teach creative procedures, artistic principles, art history, and the making of art to create a knowledgeable audience for the artists. Thereby we rev up the engine of our culture with a divine spark and advance the quality of our lives.

About dogs, kids and standardized tests

2010-08-20T01:04:00.009+02:00

Can we compare the kids we meet in our class room with dogs? Are we trainers or educators?
Source image

Jason Flom has posted a highly peculiar metaphor at Ecology of Education. He has been on vacation to Scotland and has admired the remarkable skills of the Border Collie.
This leads him into thinking about a crucial dilemma in education. Shouldn't we accept that some children are inept at maths or science, or history?

It isn’t that many different breeds can’t be taught to herd, lead high-altitude rescue efforts, or kill foxes. They can. It’s just that teaching all dogs to do things which one particular breed can do better than any other doesn’t make much sense.
We accept the reasonableness of that argument for dogs. We reject it for kids.

His observation of dogs shepherding in the Scottish highlands triggers Jason Flom into rejecting standardised tests.

Think a promising trumpet player shouldn’t be kept out of the school orchestra or pushed out on the street because he can’t remember the date of the Boxer Rebellion?

This is a lousy metaphor. It is based on poor ethology. It results in detrimental ethics.

I have had a happy dog for sixteen years

Dogs are bred to demonstrate predictable behaviour to meet to their master's wishes. Being descendants from wolves, domesticated by mankind, they love to follow the leader of their pack, which happens to be a human being. That's why dogs are eager to show their innate qualities and don' t need to overcome their flaws. Dogs are not aware of their flaws. Don't teach your dog to overcome his dependency, it will result in a mean companion. You can train your dog to do tricks based on his natural behaviour, retrieve a stick and so on. That's all.

There is a difference between training and education

Humans are educated to enable creative versatile behaviour with which they can react to unpredictable circumstances independently and thereby pursue their personal happiness and shore up the common good of their tribe. They may heed the chief's stance, but only if it makes sense.
That's why they need a broad knowledge and understanding even in those fields in which they are not that talented. They need to learn a lot of things. Being able to learn a lot of things is the quintessential talent of our species. Homo sapiens is a far better learner than Canis lupus familiaris.

You do not own your classroom, you owe it to the world at large.

Secondary education must guarantee that everyone can participate in society and contribute to the survival of the species. That's why everyone has to attain a basic curriculum. On top of that everyone has to develop his natural talents for making a living as an expert, as a plumber, a rocket scientist or as a trumpet player. We need all those special skills and talents.
But we definitely need the excellent trumpet player to have also an educated opinion on matters of science: he has to vote on legislation which deals with environmental issues, for example. We don't want daft voters, do we? We don't want to treat musical talents like dogs who are rewarded with a cookie or hug when showing their tricks on request of the master, do we? We don't want the plumber to be invoked as a politician's running gag “Joe the Plumber,” do we?

No education without testing

Standardised testing guarantees that students push themselves to pass muster in a broad range of subjects, not only in their favourite activity. Without standards they would be too lazy and bail out. The trumpet player might get his applause but the world will collapse

I don't get it

I do not understand my fellow teachers from The United States. I only ran into this contentious issue while blogging. I am ignorant about “No Child Left Behind” or “The Common Core Standards.” I am a humble teacher from The Netherlands, who has been dogged for years and years by the standards of our national exams. But looking at international comparison of efficacy of education, I can only conclude that The Netherlands rank perennially in the top ten, if not the top five, while the United States lag way behind. Albeit, we, Dutch teachers, we are embarrassed, because we used to be in the top three. Apparently we have a problem and we are enviously looking at Finland: number one. Their secondary school concludes also with a nationally graded matriculation examination, devised in the ninetenteenth century, just like our national exams. They keep their exams up like we do.

Dear fellow teachers from The States: heed your chief's caution: you need standardised tests. You need national exams. It makes sense!

By the way

It goes without saying that any promising trumpet player who can memorise an intricate musical pattern is capable of remembering the date of the Boxer Rebellion. If he is too lazy to work at it, then just send him on the streets to busk. He may earn his bread and butter while other people decide on his future.

Life's a Carnival–the Education Buzz #2

2010-08-18T14:39:00.003+02:00

The second Education Buzz Carnival is up at Bellringers! The funniest post in this carnival deals with posters newly arrived college students embellish their rooms with. Apparently Van Gogh's Starry Night, Salvador Dali's surrealism, and De Toulouse Lautrec's poster designs appeal to youngsters just as much as those icons of yesteryear did to my generation fourty years ago.
Another item that struck me when viewing all those dorm room posters to avoid was the visual rhyme between Mick Jagger and Albert Einstein. Having such a poster in your dormroom at least reminds you to speak your mind.

Images: Einstein. Mick Jagger

Exchange through Art

2010-08-18T00:28:00.013+02:00

Self portrait done by a fifteen year old Dutch boy in my class room. Matthias borrowed my beret to decorate his head with for this work.

Today I started working on “Exchange through Art,” an eTwinning project in which students from various schools across Europe will publish their works of art and communicate about it, in English. So far a wonderful Bulgarian art teacher and an amiable Turkish school administrator joined the party. It would be nice to have a fellow teacher from an English spoken country in the project. So if you would like to show off those imaginative drawings, highly decorative ceramics, crafted chair designs, riveting paintings, stunning photographs that your students are going to produce in your art room this year, and have your students write about it and look at works done by students abroad, then please contact me.

Why we matter much more than we think

2010-08-15T09:46:00.004+02:00

I have never read a more succinct description of the teacher's job than ”Why you matter much more than you think” by Justin Tarte. Have look at it! It made my day!

Standardized tests

2010-08-10T12:47:00.017+02:00

Hundreds of students at Ulenhof, Doetinchem, The Netherlands are focussing on their national exam. At the very moment candidates of all Dutch secondary schools do exactly the same test.

Reading all those wonderful educational blogs it strikes me that so many teachers are outraged about standardized tests mandated by government.

Just some examples out of many:

J. at A Teacher's Viewpoint complains that

"The first thing that absolutely must be done is to abandon the absurd notion that anything useful is gained from the current misuse of standardized tests."

Joe Bower propounds abolishment of all grading:

"Ironically, it is the skill & drill kinds of learning that standardized test measure that are taking precedent over real learning. This is exactly why parents need to be concerned when they see rising test scores."

In The Netherlands general secondary education is dominated by the national exam with which students conclude their school career. I wouldn't have it otherwise.

The results for the exam are proof of the student's level per subject, regardless the school where he has studied. The results of all students per school give relevant information about the school's efficacy. And I have to accept that the results of my students at the national exam for my subject gauge the quality of my teaching.

It goes without saying that school has to offer more than just a highway towards an exam. The exam result is only one of many features that make a good school. But our national exam definitely makes the teacher accountable for intellectual attainment measured with a yardstick that is not homespun.

I do not trust teachers, nor schools, for that matter, to devise their own goals and have them decide which level is sufficient. I would not entrust myself with such responsibility.

I have to deliver the goods and services that society needs. School is not a playground in which we are given leeway to implement our best intentions for the benefit of other people's children. Education at school is an essential part of the real world.

The real world can be harsh. A student who fluffs his exam has to resit it next year.

Bilingual Education

2010-08-07T15:07:00.018+02:00

More interesting examples of Dunglish are to be found at
http://halkia.web-log.nl/halkia/2007/01/dunglish.html

Two weeks from now I will meet a new group of first formers. They are eleven years old. I will start my art course with a self-portrait task. This will teach them the words for the details of their face: eyes, nose, ears and so on. Second lesson: types of hair do, curly, wavy, crew cut etc. They have to learn a lot of words for items in the classroom, for the stool they sit on, the desk they work at, the mirror in which they study their features, and the pencil to draw with. All these words cannot be taken for granted. Eleven years old and I am to teach these words? Yes, these Dutch students are taught about art in a foreign language.

Bilingual education

In June my school's curriculum with respect to language education was assessed by the European Platform. We passed muster as a TTO-Junior School. TTO is a Dutch acronym, “Tweetalig Onderwijs” means Bilingual Education. We have a stream of students who have chosen for the challenge of being taught in English in most of their subjects, or, more likely, their parents have chosen this wonderful opportunity.

The TTO-program has run now in The Netherlands for fifteen years. Hunderd and fifty-odd schools are offering bilingual education now and the number is steadily growing.

Foreign languages

It goes without saying that all Dutch students are compelled to learn foreign languages. At the age of fifteen years students in secondary education will have had lessons in French, German and English. Every student has to include at least one foreign language in the exam program, mostly English, most students will conclude their secondary education at the age of sixteen or seventeen with a basic or an advanced knowledge of two foreign languages.

On top of that the TTO-program aims at a proficiency level by immersing the students in a foreign language. Not only do they get language lessons by qualified language teachers, they are being taught in English by teachers of other subjects as well, e.g. mathematics, science, history, geography, P.E, Art. Most schools offer a curriculum in English, two schools only have chosen to do so in German. The rationale behind this choice is that English is the lingua franca of science, politics and international business affairs.

The English spoken classroom.

As a consequence I have to teach Art in an English spoken classroom. I am even supposed to correct poor English, spelling, pronunciation, grammar, the lot! As most of my fellow teachers involved in this program, I am not a native speaker of English. Of course I have passed the Cambridge Proficiency Exam, without such a certificate I would not be allowed to teach in English, however, this hardly guarantees impeccable English by the teacher. I bet you have already stumbled on some erroneous constructions while reading this post, if not being disgusted by stilted language. Teaching art in a foreign language means to convey most delicate content while feeling clumsy lacking the subtle modes available in the mother tongue. So the whole endeavour seems rather pathetic. It is.

Three strata: three languages

Nevertheless we are forced to teach in English, for better or worse. We prepare our students for partaking in the global community. I suggest that command of at least three languages is needed to be successful in life. Those languages are connected with three social strata in which we are to function:

The mother tongue is needed for the family, the street and/or the region. I was raised in Low Saxon, a rural language rooted in a feudal agricultural local setting. I had to learn Dutch at school, my parents never managed to speak it properly. Though Low Saxon is endangered, it still is a must while communicating with elderly people in the region.
The national language, which you need to understand the tax form. Dutch is a wonderful language, with a rich heritage of writing, however only twenty-two million people across the word speak the lingo.
The international lingua franca gives access to the global community. In mediaeval times Latin enabled international correspondence, in the eighteenth century French was all the rage in Europe, now it is English that is ubiquitous, Mandarin may be the next international language.
I guess the Dutch fluffed their chances when they traded Manhattan for Surinam in the treaty of Breda (1667). What if the United States had chosen Dutch for their national language? Dutchmen have been trading goods and services all around the globe for hundreds of years. We wish to uphold this national pride.

The Anglo-Saxon world can afford to be self-contained. For a lot of people living in England or the U.S. the three strata are served by one language only, with minor inflections. The speakers of other languages cannot be complacent, they have to wheel and deal using a foreign language.

Language is the crux

The language problem is particularly acute for immigrant students. Their native language is not fed any more by the environment outside the family, they are struggling to cope with school education in the national language which for them is their second language, on top of that they have to learn third languages within that system.

Dutch students face a peculiar problem. English and Dutch are related languages. So they tend to translate word-by-word from Dutch into English, which results in Dunglish. We can't have that, can we? This is not only about language, it is about culture as well. You have to think in English, you have to be English. So they meet a teacher who is quite formal and polite and unwilling to accept any churlish Dutch way of communication.

Grappling with teaching in a foreign language has learnt me that the language problem is the crux of education. Whatever subject you teach, it is predominantly communicated in words that may be completely incomprehensible, if the language is taken for granted. This awareness has made me a more versatile teacher, even when teaching in Dutch. Next to that, teaching in English has made me a very humble teacher. Being corrected by students is not what you wish for after a long career. I have to work my head off to compete with them.

By the way, I would be very grateful if you pointed at my Dunglish in this post. List the blatant errors in a comment, I will correct them a.s.a.p.

Reference:
This post was triggered by Profiles in Greatness Ep. 4, a wonderful story by Mr. McNamar about his teacher of Spanish, Senora Mosely.

The Education Buzz Carnival #1

2010-08-04T19:59:00.008+02:00

Hurray, hurray, Bellringers did it! Months after the wonderful Carnivals of Education carriage got stuck somewhere in the swamps of the blogosphere she has whipped the coach out of the mire. Have a look at The Education Buzz Carnival. You may discover a most humble crocodile dancing on one of the passenger seats! Hurray! Giddy up!!!

Source image: http://www.le-net.co.uk/woodton/directories.htm

Guided instruction versus Independent Learning 2

2010-08-02T17:36:00.013+02:00

A four-leaved clover only will be found when knowing what to look for

Mr Teacher commented on my last post about “Guided Instruction versus Independent Learning":

Without going in to specific details, surely the best option is an appropriate balance between the two?

Spot on! But what is being balanced?
The content of the lesson cannot be left to the students' inventiveness, as followers of constructivist learning theories all too often will have it.

A politician's ideology

In the Netherlands teachers have been harassed by a fierce lobby for constructivist learning theories during the last decades. This has lead to a thorough refurbishment of our secondary education, aiming at independent learning, the “Studiehuis,” in which supposedly the teacher's role shifts towards coaching students instead of directing students. This is epitomised by “De Nieuwste School,” a school whose curriculum is integrally constituted by students' questions.

Recantation

I have been an ardent follower of these ideas, and I am backpedalling.

Firstly, I have become disappointed too often with the results of learning arrangements in which students have to study more independently.
Most students cannot come up with relevant questions or topics that lead into effective research, or interesting art work, for that matter. Questions are the result of perception. You have to see that something weird is happening before asking yourself what is going on. Wonder about the relation between phenomena is impossible without actually experiencing these. Alas, perception is the result of learning and training.

Another fundamental problem is that questions can't be answered properly without a method of inquiry. Methods are related to disciplines, scientific systems, artistic disciplines, or professional procedures. The subjects traditionally taught at school offer training in these methods. Students' questions often tend to spring the boundaries of these subjects, which may be very interesting. However, these questions do not lead to a coherent learning process in which students really have to think deeply. Especially when expertise pertaining to the question is not available at school the research is bound to be shallow. I am fed up with copy cat answers from the internet, as I am with cliché art work.

Constructivist theories are being outmoded by neuroscience

Secondly, recent research has contradicted shallow constructivist ideas about learning independently. This was mentioned in my post.

Lastly, it has been made clear that the brain is developing at least until the age of twenty. Young students cannot cope with adult learning strategies, planning as adults do. Learning at secondary level cannot mirror the university system. Young students cannot plan their studies. they must be guided.

Between a rock and a hard place

So, what is being balanced? I am not going to ask my students what they want to learn. I know what they need being taught. The content of the lesson is my province, and I aim at the exam programs that run in my country. They need their diploma. That certificate guarantees a certain level of attainment. I may not agree with it completely but I have to comply with it and so must my students.

This content must be balanced with my didactics. Aiming for an exam program not necessarily means teaching to the test. By the way, the program is not that simple, as mentioned, it even asks for proofs of independent learning. At all cost I must prevent these students being bored by education. I need their rapt attention, which means that I have to fulfil their needs, I must give them ample opportunity to express themselves, to wonder, to ask any question. I need all my expedience to guide them cleverly by showing them where to go. Otherwise they get lost in meaninglessness.

Guided instruction versus independent learning

2010-07-31T03:31:00.014+02:00

The image on the left was made by a thirteen year old student after being introduced to surrealist method, epitomised by Max Ernst's painting on the right

Do we have to tell the students what to do, or should invite them to discover what can be done? Recent scientific publications shed new light on this dilemma.

I teach visual art. Generally art is considered to be completely different from science. I am not too sure about that when it comes to teaching.

Art is a discipline, as science is. The methods of art and science may be completely different but both disciplines embody a relation with reality which has developed over centuries within a cultural context . The aims of research may be vastly different, almost opposite, as art strives for a profoundly subjective representation and communicating of meaning on a personal level, where as science seeks objective description and universal truth. Nevertheless, in both subjects there are methods that can be taught, content-related vocabulary that must be learnt, and results that can be compared and evaluated. The dilemma of teaching is the same. Are you in your lesson of maths going to explain Pythagoras' theorem, or are you providing your students with just enough information to have them reinvent the theorem by themselves? Am I as an art teacher to direct the students' perception of their visual environment by giving them precisely defined tasks, or should I give them leeway in an open setting to find their own interesting modes of seeing? In all subjects taught in secondary education each teacher faces the same problem: prescribing these youngsters precisely what to do makes boring lessons, independent learning strategies may enthuse students but they are time consuming and less effective. Especially in the field of art it is poignant that students seldom come up with creative work when given too many options or too vague directions.

Previously I found confirmation of my intuitive experience-based ideas on this dilemma in Daniel T. Willingham's wonderful book “Why don't students like school.” Now I have found an other source: Paul A. Kirschner, John Sweller, Richard E. Clark, “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching.”, EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST, 41(2), 75–86, for download here

The misconceptions underlying independent learning strategies are falsified by results of scientific research as described in these publications. Summarized:

Problem solving draws heavily upon knowledge of facts and experience of methods previously stored in long term memory
Methods of problem solving on an expert level cannot be transferred to the level of novices.

As a teacher I must introduce old ideas and proven procedures leading to predictable results and wrap these in exciting adventures to have students store the lesson in their long term memory, thereby enabling them to use this knowledge on an expert level in the future.

About national identity and literacy

2010-07-29T02:09:00.004+02:00

During vacation one catches up with interesting topics that have been neglected for some time. So I delved into the family history a brother of mine sent me. Some results of his research pertain to my job as a teacher.

Firstly, whenever some issue arises in my classroom about immigrant students or national identity, I will be proud to tell the students that “basically, I am not Dutch, I am German.” Ten generations ago, in the Dutch “Golden Age”, my ancestors, Jacobus Graaff and Engen Zeismuss, married in Stolberg, Germany, and produced a numerous offspring from which I descend. The family entered into The Netherlands not before the nineteenth century.

Secondly, my family definitely doesn't belong to the peerage. No upper class marriages what so ever. I knew this already, of course, but it is quite poignant that mostly those skilled workers, brewers, copper workers, hatters and brushmakers could not sign their names on the deeds of the municipal administration. They are just mentioned with their names in various spellings, Graff, Graaff, de Graaff, de Graaf, by the town's secretary, who put down down in beautiful handwriting “Comparanten hier hebben getekend, verklarende nooit te hebben leren lezen of schrijven, na gedane voorlezing”, the parties signed here, after having heard the content of the deed, declaring never having learned to read nor write, which was followed by a simple cross in ink.

Now that's something we can be proud of, as the teachers we are. We did it, in the nineteenth and twentieth century. All our students can read and write. They can put their signature on a document.

Academy schools?

2010-07-22T14:12:00.034+02:00

Dutch students at Ulenhofcollege , a Dutch comprehensive state funded school for secondary education, flaunt their caps as a sign of attainment in bi-lingual education. Their formal clothing and the caps are a tongue in cheek imitation of Anglo-Saxon educational folklore.

To me, looking from across the Channel, the British educational system seems unduly awkward. A recent initiative, academy schools, which was piloted under Tony Blair, and is now strongly advocated by the new education secretary, Michael Goves, seems to make an already unwieldy system even more complicated.

All Dutch schools are state funded

Independent schools are virtually non-existent in Dutch education. All Dutch schools are state funded, school education is free until the age of sixteen. A school like Durham School couldn't possibly exist in the Netherlands, as no parent feels that the quality of education at such an institution justifies paying through the nose a fee of £11,022 for a day pupil, or £21,414 for a full boarder. Farming out the raising of children to a boarding school doesn't fit in the Dutch mindset, for that matter. Dutch parents send their children to a school of their own choice in the near distance. Dutch students ride to school on their bikes which means that every school within a distance of twenty kilometres can be reached. The school may charge possibly a couple of hundred Euros annually for extracurricular activities. Even this fee is not mandatory, no school can go to court when a parent refuses to pay.

A constitutional right

This does not imply that all Dutch schools are state or community schools. Starting a school of your own is possible, however one must comply with national law which is quite strict about housing, the basic curriculum, and teacher qualifications. When you pass muster you will be state funded.

This educational freedom (“Vrijheid van onderwijs”) has been invoked by religious communities to start Protestant-Christian or Roman-Catholic schools in the past, recently a lot of Islamic schools were initiated. Also parents' associations have built schools with an ideological stance towards education, based on the ideas of, for example, Maria Montessori, Helen Parkhurst or Rudolf Steiner. So parents do have choices. Homeschooling is not an option though.

Standards in education

The quality of education at the various schools is checked by national inspectors annually. Schools that fail to meet the standard will lose their funding or even will be forced to close. This was incurred by an Islamic school half a year ago.

The results for national exams gauge the quality of all schools in implementing the basic curriculum. These results and the inspection reports are published in national newspapers and are available on the internet. Next to that schools are vying for students by choosing for a clear educational profile, thereby distinguishing themselves from other schools in their catchment area. So parents do have choices.

Though the complaint about deteriorating education is a perennial phenomenon in the Netherlands, just as it is in the United Kingdom, this hasn't been vindicated yet by international comparison. Pisa results of Dutch education have outstripped the UK's results so far. On the other hand the Dutch can't preen themselves on having an illustrious institution like Eton to provide for eloquent prime ministers. Also the UK is doing far better in the number of Nobel prize laureates per million inhabitants which possibly may be the result of outstanding education at university level in the UK.

Social segregation

As seen through Dutch eyes, English education is utterly class defined. The idea of academy schools is meant to solve the problem of poor attainments of pupils in inner cities and backward rural areas. Most peculiarly, schools have to raise £2m to become an academy - from private organisations such as business, faith or voluntary groups. Quite predictably the academy school will deepen class distinctions in education as middle class parents will seize the opportunities while lower classes will fail to do so:

But a leading academic at the Institute of Education, part of the University of London, found that even in Sweden — one of the world's most egalitarian countries — free schools increased segregation. The schools are predominantly based in rich, urban areas and middle-class parents take their children out of community schools to attend them, Dr Susanne Wiborg found.
The Guardian, Swedish-style free schools may increase social divide – study, Wednesday 21 July 2010.

Source: Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek

When it comes to raising the level of education for all, including the lower classes, it would be better to aim for egalitarian free education for all. The Dutch example shows this can be done. The figure on the left makes clear that it doesn't even take more spending in primary and secondary education. The Netherlands and the United Kingdom are both spending below the average of the European Union in percentage of their Gross Domestic Product. Both are doing better on the Pisa tests than Denmark, which allocates most to education.

Albeit, the Dutch can learn from the British how to achieve excellency with gifted students. We definitely need eloquent prime ministers, but only if the politicians' verbosity does not whitewash the state's failure in providing the means to escape the vicious circle of culturally deprived background, unhealthy food habits, poor education and unemployment too many kids are in.

The Pack

2010-07-08T15:02:00.015+02:00

"While it is true that animals are not humans, it is equally true that humans are animals"
Frans de Waal

Just out of the den

In young adolescents the veneer of civilisation is extremely thin. They are urged by bodily changes towards dangerous adventures. Actually they are not aware of risks at all. Their inner clock is running wild, they act on the spur of the moment. Their natural habitat has recently been changed from the family at home in which their place was well defined into the peer group in which they constantly have to fight for their place in the pecking order.

I believe order in the class room should be dealt with on a down to earth level. It is not about rules, decency, tests and marks, mobile phones, expletives or whatever you can come up with to describe what happens in the classroom on the level of human behaviour. Order in the class room is about the pack.

My Habitat

I work in most fortunate conditions. My school is embedded in a rural environment in which strong family bonds still exist. Parents are ashamed when the school invites them for a showdown. The school is very well organised, there is a clear behaviour policy. Teachers are adequately supported by the management in case of trouble. Young teachers are systematically coached by experienced colleagues.

Even in this best of all worlds it happens once in a while that a class runs amok. Suddenly a group of neat young kids finds themselves in a situation in which they cruelly destroy the teacher's ego in a concerted effort. It happened in a tutor group of mine a couple of years ago, they crushed a cover teacher for Latin. It took only one lesson, the colleague was in tears. Individually all those amiable gifted children expressed afterwards that they were embarrassed and utterly ashamed of themselves. It just started, and then they could not stop it any more. They had turned into a pack of wolves.

Theoretical ruminations

Now what branch of science describes this type of behaviour best? I take it to be ethology. Especially the studies by Frans de Waal shed light on the order in the class room. De Waal's work describes the order in groups of chimpanzees as an intricate pattern of political bonds maintained meticulously by the alpha-male and his allies within the group.

What had happened in my tutor class was that the newly appointed cover teacher failed to show plain alpha-person signs in his first lesson, which confused the class so much as to follow their own pecking order. The queen bee of the girls took the lead. She manipulated the complete group into destructive behaviour, just for the fun of it, and to establish her reign. One of the creative rumbustious boys was ushered into the role of hatchet man and he found out what really would be extremely offensive against this weak adult. So the seat of the teacher was covered with maggots collected during an experiment in biology class the hour before. It clearly was a deliberately contrived act by the whole group. Only one student objected, but she was forced to comply with the others.

The event reminds me of De Waal's description of a bunch of young male chimpanzees that foray into the territory of an other group to find themselves some one to kill. A film on Youtube depicts such a gruesome event

Are you the alpha-person?

So order in the class room is about only one issue: are you as a teacher the alpha-person in the class room, or are you not? This is not a simplification, it makes it more complicated.

For example: young teachers often have a mindset which does not allow them to take command of the group. They prefer co-operative amiable behaviour. They are just nice guys or girls. They have never been a leader anywhere. But a teacher must aspire leadership to become the alpha-person in the class room.

Next to that it is not enough just to act bullishly. Bullish teachers challenge bullish students, you don't want to fight every minute in all lessons, do you. Just your appearance in the class room should suffice to calm down the young rebels. De Waal's observations show that the alpha-person is a master in political bonding. He has a deep knowledge of all the relations in the group, and knows perfectly when to bully a young rascal, when to show affection, and he knows how to dole out favours to win loyalty.

The Perfect Class Room

So my metaphor for the perfect class room is a group of monkeys on the rock. Everyone is relaxed and enjoys the day, grooming and flea-picking, communicating and playing. The old monkey on top of the rock sometimes is teased by the youngsters. They pull his leg for fun, not too seriously, as they know that when he comes down, hell breaks loose. He seems to be dozing. But he knows what's going on down there, all the time. He sees to that. He must, if he loses control, they will tear him apart.

References

Images:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Canis_lupus_pack_surrounding_Bison.jpg

http://budongo.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/fsuchimps.jpg

Frans de Waal's quote: Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, How Morality Evolved;Princeton University Press, 2006, Appendix A pg 65.

The 2009 Edublog Awards

2009-12-06T10:25:00.015+01:00

Andrew Old's avatar at facebook

I would like to put a blog forward to The 2009 Edublog Awards.
I work out in the sticks in a small town in a rural area in The Netherlands. Reading blogs by fellow teachers, mostly from the U.S. and the U.K., I come across a lot of information that refers to national educational politics or local circumstances. Reading those texts puts my own teaching in a wider framework which is good.
A main theme emanates from these blogs: hard working teachers are being clobbered by politicians and school administrators to meet demands. Apparently a major crisis is experienced in the countries mentioned, and in my homeland for that matter, which has to be resolved by the teachers in their classrooms. Targets have to be met, forms must be filled in. The teacher has to cope with children's special needs. Differences in cultural background are to be equalized in the classroom. School must make up for the loss of the family as the bedrock of society. 21st Century Skills should replace academic goals of old.
So rightly Andrew Old complains in his blog Scenes from the battleground. He is not just carping, his blog conveys a genuine concern about his daily work with children. He consistently points the finger at fads, idiosyncratic demands and preposterous targets. His voice must be heard and acknowledged. I nominate his blog for Best Individual Blog.

The Returner

2009-11-29T13:34:00.008+01:00

Theo Willems in his classroom, seated before a makeshift backdrop to have a portrait made for a report in the Dutch newspaper NRC-Handelsblad (Published November 28, 2009)

In the photograph on the left you see a retiree who has returned to his class room. 67 year old geography teacher Theo Willems responded to a programme initiated by Dutch government to alleviate the need for teachers. He returned to the classroom.

The call for teachers

It has been estimated that within a couple of years in Dutch education there will be a shortfall of thousands of teachers. Of course most initiatives which face this problem, target at young people. A new academic minor in education has been piloted for example, an other programme copies the successful British Teach First.

Out of tune?

What struck me in the article in which I found this information was that people interviewed about Theo Willemsen's performance acknowledge the quality of his teaching but nevertheless comment on his style. Students seem to appreciate his use of language, which they find strangely correct and rather formal though, but they regret him being out of touch with their sense of humour. According to the headmaster Willemsen's teaching of course is based on rich experience but, as Willemsen talks a lot in the classroom, he does not epitomize the school's ideal teacher, he could allot more time to independent learning.

What happened?

Willemsen's return to his former job occurs only a couple of years after his retirement. Apparently he must have liked his job all his career and missed the kids at school after his retirement. Now what has happened in education during these two years of retirement to make him seem outmoded, I wonder.

Don't retire!

I am over 60 now, and this little story tells me not to retire at all. They will have to kick me out.

They will do that, shove me out firmly and politely, for unfortunately there will not be a lack of young art teachers at all in the years to come. A flock of young artists now studying at an academy of art will discover after their graduation that the world at large is not very empathetic with their ground-breaking works and that they need a steady income for their bread and butter. They only have to attain a minor in education which is not difficult to come by, it will take only half a year of study and training. In my days it took five years.

I will have to change subject. I will head for a qualification as a maths teacher. :-)

References
Photograph: © Peter de Krom
Marieke van Twillert, Derk Walters, Gezocht: juffen en meesters, NRC-Handelsblad, 28 November 2009.

Intelligent design and art education

2009-10-08T22:57:00.010+02:00

In the United States a most peculiar discussion goes on about Darwin's evolution theory versus Intelligent Design. I find strange sentences in blogs like "open the discussion to students, have them present evidence and deliberate on the validity of that evidence." Those are quirky ideas for a science teacher! I can do my work properly as a teacher of art if and only if my colleague of the science department thinks scientifically. How am I to introduce the fuzzy methods of the artist to my students when they fail to see a difference with scientific method?

My students show the beauty of life on earth in their work. Art does not offer any explanation. The elephant is as beautiful whether it has been created by God instantaneously or considered to be a random product of a meaningless process over millions of years. By the way, I prefer the latter description.

To my opinion it is the task of the science teacher to inculcate in his students the method of scientific thought. A scientist does not seek to prove his hypothesis, conversely he seeks deliberately tests to falsify it. The hypothesis holds only as long as it has not been falsified. A scientist knows he never can prove a hypothesis as his tests never will cover all possible circumstances and conditions. There is not such a thing as "evidence" for a scientific theory. Any idea that can't be tested does not belong to the realm of science. If some one can come up with a test to falsify the idea of a teleological direction in de development of life on earth then intelligent design can become a scientific hypothesis. It is an interesting thought and as such it could be introduced in the science room. It would be a nice task for students: "if you really want to study intelligent design you must come up with a test to falsify this idea." It would baffle them because the religious believer is characterized by cringing from testing his belief.

Another aspect of scientific method is that a complicated hypothesis must give way to an easier, less complicated description. Darwin's hypothesis is leaner than the idea of intelligent design. His ideas do not need intelligence to describe the development of life. Darwin's theory can be tested any moment that we discover forms of life, whether fossilized, in the laboratory or in nature. So far no discovery has falsified Darwin's ideas.

The science teacher should tell his students that he is not a believer. He doesn't believe in Darwin. He only sticks at Darwin for the time being. He will jettison the theory immediately when something falsifies the idea, or when a more elegant theory might pop up.

Only if the the science teacher shows off his clear and logical method will my students appreciate the weird ways of art. God forbid them using the artist's methods in the science lab.

Does a bird have horns?

2009-09-18T13:35:00.014+02:00

Georges Seurat
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Detail)
1884-86
Oil on canvas
207.5 x 308 cm
Art Institute of Chicago

Today I found a short post at Teaching isn't for wimps:

Is George Washington still alive? Asked by a 6th grade girl today. She was serious. She did not know. I'm supposed to teach her world history this year.

A silly question?

The child's question seems to be utterly stupid, given the fact that this sixth grade girl certainly learned before about George Washington being one of the founding fathers of her country.

To my experience the question is not that silly. As a teacher of art I often have to rely on historical knowledge garnered in history lessons. I have learnt not to reckon with any historical knowledge at all, despite the respect I have for my excellent colleagues of the history department, no kidding!

Seurat's painting

One of my favourite questions when dealing with famous paintings of the past is about how we can estimate the juncture of its materialization by inquiring into the content of the painting. The picture on the left is a detail of a famous painting by Seurat, late nineteenth century. I like to ask my first formers (11 or 12 years old): 'We know the painter depicted a Sunday afternoon as could be experienced in his days. When was this painting made?: A: Ten years ago; B: About a hundred years ago; C: About a thousand years ago.' They have to raise their finger at the right answer.

Of course there always is a knowledgeable, clever kid who can explain why B is the best answer: in the background a steamboat is to be seen, a steam engine couldn't possibly be used in medieval times because it hadn't been invented yet, and nowadays the steam engine has been superseded by other propelling devices. Other arguments can be found in clothing and behaviour of people represented in the painting but the steamboat argument is most conclusive. Any stylistic argument cannot be expected of pupils at that age.

History or Mystory?

Nevertheless, a lot of students are at a loss with such a question. They have no clue whatsoever.

I find it extremely interesting to probe into such a failure with students individually. A panoply of causes results. For example: the student didn't even hear the question, or did not see the steamboat at all, or the shape of the ship had not been recognized as a steamboat, the student thought it had something to do with the monkey in the picture which took his interest, "Ginny was distracting me" and so on. More germane to our subject at hand are two main causes:

Lack of transfer between school subjects. Children have learnt something within the context of a classroom with a teacher, for example in the history lesson about the invention of the steam engine and its importance during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, and the knowledge can be regurgitated in that context but is not available in other situations.
The students have the required knowledge but it is meaningless, it is something out of a textbook which has not been integrated in a body of general knowledge and everyday awareness.

Especially the second one is crucial. Awareness of time is yet inchoate in students in primary and secondary education. The youngest live in mythical time, in which even distinction between past en present are blurred, in which the concept of future is indistinct. It takes a lot of learning experience to develop a personal timeline which can be communicated with others. Even the adult I am can have trouble indicating when a particular event happened ("Eeh, oh yess, hmm, well, it happened about a year after I bought my first house, so it must have been in, say, 1989, give-or-take.") The timeline of 11 year old students is extremely limited. We cannot expect them to have recourse to a shared cultural timeline spanning thousands of years. Such knowledge and awareness must be instilled, and we have to accept that this implies just meaningless rote learning for a long time during which no wonderful answers to tricky questions can be expected, questions such as the as the one I flabbergast my first formers with. It is perfectly normal for them to have no clue and I am really surprised when students can come up with an answer.

Hornbill
Source

This doesn't make my question meaningless. Actually I contribute to their timeline by attaching the steamboat in Seurat's picture to it.

In my view asking "Is George Washington still alive?" is something to inquire into with the student, the question is neither strange nor stupid. Such a question is the source of teaching and learning.

Confusion

The strangest question I ever got was from a thirteen year old student who was drawing a bird. "Does a bird have horns?" she asked. Alas, I failed to delve deep into that question as I had to quash the taunts of her peers in the classroom. I know strange things can happen in your mind while drawing and I would have liked to learn which convolutions in her brain triggered that question. I would have been disappointed if she just had meant to refer to the existence of weird creatures like the hornbill. Albeit, life is more surrealistic than an artist can dream of, let alone this teacher. In particular children's questions can make me aware that my mind has deteriorated into tunnel vision while they still wonder about the time they are to witness.

My Mark

2009-09-13T14:56:00.009+02:00

A nice scale

At his blog Mr. Teacher quotes a wonderful scale of marks by Dr. Terry Haydn with which I can rate my lessons on a scale of 1 through 10, which is the usual range for marks in The Netherlands.

A colleague observes my art room. She considered this to be a very organised lesson in a happy atmosphere. But I can have other ruminations: did they learn what I taught them or are they just happy with smearing paint on a paper while chatting with each other?

Mark your teacher

Until now I have been using a different system: Once in a while I distribute small papers to all students and exhort them to scribble their mark for my performance on it before leaving the class room, anonymously of course, "just drop it in the box on my desk".

I only do this when I actually don't know how they experienced my lesson. Every so often a lesson is extremely joyful and interesting with wonderful communication among students and their teacher, lots of curious questions and excellent results in images. I know that I deserve a 9 then. In other instances I know that I blew it completely. I had to expel a student, which made the rest of them restive and disobedient, or the artistic quality of the work is so meagre that I can only conclude that all my efforts came to no avail. Then I know I deserve an insufficient mark, ranging from 1 to 5, depending on the depravity of the experience.

The Questionnaire

Of course my school asks me to use regularly a questionnaire in which students can tick off their assessment of my work on an extensive list of qualities. This gives detailed information over a prolonged period. The results mostly match my personal view on the particular group of students. Most students think I am a good teacher, but I definitely have some flaws. For example: I am rather chaotic and my mood changes quickly which can make them feel insecure at times. Those aspects can not be changed easily as they are embedded in my personality, but at least I can try to work on them. Sometimes a group makes me aware of a sore spot: "No group work at all this semester?," no, indeed, I didn't even think of it. I just lost track. But such a thing can be repaired instantly.

But the questionnaire can not replace the quick marking at the end of a lesson which gives immediate feedback on the fifty minutes before.

My mark

So I can compare my personal rating system with Dr Terry Haydn's. The best I can get from my students after a lesson is an average of 7. Haydn's list would rate my lessons with an 8. But in the Dutch rating system a 10 is virtually unattainable, in Haydn's system it is. I know some colleagues who definitely deserve Haydn's 10. So let's settle for my mark at 7.5. I guess that would be a B in the Anglo-Saxon marking range. Not too bad. It leaves something to strive for.

A first lesson

2009-09-03T22:42:00.008+02:00

I had them work in pairs on a composition which combines a static background with dynamic foreground.
They produced quite creative solutions.

What I like most of my job is the adventurous side of it. One never knows what's going to happen in a group of teenagers. Teaching can be compared to driving a formula I racing car. One wrong move and you have to collect your bones out of a wreck. Experience does help, but never to the extent that you can allow yourself to lose your concentration for one moment. After thirty-two years of teaching the biggest mistake is the idea that you have seen it all and can keep everything in your stride. You are going to be surprised then.

In particular the first lesson of the year in a new group of pupils I have never met before in the art room is challenging. I prepare such a lesson meticulously, knowing that I will need all my senses and my alertness to perceive and appraise these new kids. I don't know their attention span so I keep the amount of information I have to communicate at a minimum while the task must be challenging enough. Above all I have to establish my routines in the classroom.

It turned out to be a doddle this morning. Nice children, willing to pay attention, no special needs students so far detected. One boy offered me the opportunity to set the routine "How To Apologize Neatly And Ask Meekly For Being Allowed To Enter The Classroom In Case of Oversleeping," (You have to come up with a really good story, do not dare to mention the real reason, at this school oversleeping just does not occur). The group cleaned up properly and without whining. Albeit, some groups start testing the mettle of their new teacher from the very first moment, while other groups appear torpid until some weeks later when hell breaks loose. We will see.

La la land and netherworld

2009-08-15T00:36:00.014+02:00

Dear Craig,

Thank you for your reaction.

I owe you an apology. I commented on your advertising of an e-book in which you set out your system to guarantee class room discipline. I did so by choosing one item out of many and I wrote a snide comment on it. That's not a very nice thing to do and, given your comment, it clearly raised your hackles.

It would have been better if I had had a look at your career and background before funnelling my thoughts through the tunnel of my vision. I would have discovered the rationale behind your advices to inexperienced teachers. A teacher who earns his living at a Los Angeles high school and who has taught at Los Angeles County Probation Camps fights in the trenches of a war. He may call a spade a spade and use it as as it was used in the trenches of the Great War: more effective than a bayonet in a man-to-man fight.

I guess I would certainly have to adapt my teaching to a situation in which I can expect a makeshift knife in my back at any time.

So I apologize.

Having said this in all sincerity, I will not budge on my stance. Though based on a man's rich experience and keen observations in the classroom, very recognizable for a fellow teacher, even from abroad, your conclusions do not cut ice with me.

I work in The Netherlands, in a rural area at a comprehensive school which was rated last year the safest school in the district by external standards. Parents and students are mostly cooperative though once in a while a father may be disgruntled or a student may respond by saying "Klootzak", which is the Dutch equivalent for "Go F*** Yourself". No riots at school, no fighting, any bully will be addressed immediately. So I work in what you call "La la land."

La la land does exist. In fact it is not limited to some school in The Netherlands, where I happen to work. I have visited schools in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, England, and the United States (Michigan). All these schools seemed to be located in La la land. They resemble my school environment in the way teachers and students communicate. All those schools offer attentive, appreciative environments where an education is the reward

In my post I denunciated an example of your advice: in La la land such a teacher behaviour is completely over the top. Here is another quote that I find extremely strange:

"This is all a judgement call–do what you think will help your classroom environment in the long run. In other words, if a student really likes coming after school to talk to you, then chatting with them isn’t going to help your case. "

You see, I like chatting informally with students, before, during and after my lessons, and I know it is helping my case a lot.

In my La la land there is a clear awareness that any group of young adolescents easily can turn into a pack of wolves when they lack a leader. Inexperienced teachers must learn to call the shots and they must learn to do so using their own personality and style. To my experience as a coach prescribing young colleagues a rigid system of techniques is useless. For example: non-verbal posturing may contradict an impeccably implemented technique which makes the teacher ridiculous in the students' eyes.

Expelled from the classroom

La la land is not located in fairyland. Of course I cannot always avoid punishment. You seem to punish a great deal by detaining a lot of students for fifteen minutes? In Dutch education a 15 minutes detention zone after school hours is just risible. One hour is the minimum to make sure that the peer group will not wait for the culprit to bike home together. A favourite punishment is sweeping the school's premises. Especially in autumn that can take a lot of time. Helping the caretaker with the vacuum cleaner heightens environmental awareness. Oversleeping in the morning too often means reporting for duty half an hour before the first lesson for a full week, just to learn to set the alarm clock. This is all done in a concerted effort by all staff to keep anyone sharp towards our targets. It helps the inexperienced teacher above all. He needs support.

I would like to end with a favourite quote of yours:

"This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
(Winston Churchill)

At least that's something we agree on. Albeit, you seem to emphasize the unbending rule, while I prefer to look for the honour and good sense.

Kind regards,
Joep

Homework

2009-08-09T02:55:00.008+02:00

source picture: www.freeclipartnow.com

Today I learned from reading an interesting article on homework by Cathy Vatterott, the first chapter of her book "Rethinking Homework". An extensive review of the complete book can be found at Ecology of Education. It made me aware that homework in the United States seems to be more of an issue than in The Netherlands. Cathy Vatterot subverts some beliefs underlying the cult of homework. I agree with her on some of her arguments, I have doubts about others.

The daily chore

At least at my school homework is taken for granted by parents and students. No parent ever asks seriously whether we could do without this nuisance. Conversely over the last ten years parental problems have spawned private institutions that offer guided home work facilities after school hours. Some parents fork out a hefty fee mounting up to € 300 per month to have their child do the daily chore in such an institution instead of at home.

The necessity

Homework can contribute to learning at school. Certain tasks done at home can expedite and intensify learning in the classroom. Learning foreign languages benefits from cramming vocabulary individually at home. Interviewing grandmother brings personal oral history into the history lesson. Homework can also extend learning beyond the classroom. Our national targets for cultural education demand from students that they visit theatres and museums of their own choice in their own time. This programme has proven to be highly effective complementary to events organized by school within the school day.

Procrastinating the work

Albeit, I feel I must be very critical about dealing out home work tasks to my students. Especially when targets can be met in the classroom I consider it a personal failure to relegate tasks to home work. When home work tasks are given routinely I can see that students relax in the classroom. It gives them an excuse not to learn here and now in my class room. Their natural preference for meeting peers informally immediately takes over my class room management.

Disturbing facts

As a tutor I have inquired into the time management of my fifteen year old students when doing their homework. Equal workloads are being processed by different students in an amazing variety of time frames ranging from fifteen minutes per day through two hours and a half per day. What I find very disconcerting is the strong correlation between school success and failure and these data of time management. Students who fail to concentrate for longer than half an hour on their home work invariably score poor grades, especially for foreign languages, while students who succeed in working for a prolonged period are high achievers.

The waste of talent

This may sound reasonable to the puritans amongst us who believe in hard work as a road to success, and I surely agree that hard working students deserve their good grades, but it cannot be denied that school success clearly is gained at a place and time that are beyond control by the teacher. We cannot allow ourselves to waste talent in such a way. A school system in which homework is the leverage to success is biased against students from deprived backgrounds that don't support concentrating on home work. In addition, Dutch data on school success gives evidence that girls attain better than boys, which can be explained by differences in development between both genders. To my experience fifteen year old girls are on the average more motivated to do homework than boys at the same age.

A fight

2009-08-01T01:04:00.008+02:00

Tonight I listened to two British speakers, Michael Gove, Conservative spokesperson for Education and Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, brought to me by David Price's blog.

Though Dutch schooling, in which I work, and British education (Good heavens, some parents send their children to expensive independent private boarding schools? Why would they do that???) seem to be utterly disparate, these speeches made clear to me that we are in the same battle. People complain about the loss of standards (Gove) while others desperately try to build a new curriculum (Taylor).

Apparently we are in a paradigm shift all over Europe, if not the western hemisphere, for that matter. The fight is about "knowledge" versus "skills".

The issue comes down to the position of the teacher. Is the teacher willing to accept that his training may be outdated while his wisdom is needed? Is he/she an outstanding example of life long learning? If not, we will loose this battle. If yes, students will understand they need their teacher's knowledge, while helping him out with the skills needed for these new media and this new world.

A postcard

2009-07-27T11:42:00.019+02:00

Every so often I meet former students of mine. Especially at a restaurant or bar frequently a well known face serves me as a waiter. So I met Merel.

She finished her examinations one year ago. A very nice girl, quite creative in the visual arts, very intelligent and dyslexic. I never was sure I communicated well enough with her. She often flew off at a tangent while working at my assignments, which I liked. She was amiable but she kept herself to herself. During her last year she vacillated between becoming a visual artist or an an actress. She chose to aim for a career as an actress and subsequently managed to get entrance in a theatre school.

On meeting at the restaurant she told me, eyes sparkling, that she liked the college enormously, she had chosen well and she had found her destiny. Over the weekends she worked as a waitress to earn a pittance.

A week later she sent me a hand made postcard. She had forgotten to write her name on the back, but the front showed an unmistakably recognizable signature in the form of a typical pattern in her personal style.

Her message said: "I fear the world to be a joke, while I take it seriously. Hush!..."

It made my day.

Class room discipline 101

2009-07-16T17:00:00.012+02:00

Roaming the world of edublogs I stumbled upon Craig Seganti's blog on class room discipline. It is a hoard of most interesting ideas about how to keep your class at work instead of horsing around.

Free instructions!

I immediately subscribed to

"Free Report! Five Classroom Discipline Mistakes You Can Stop Right Now!"

I've been a teacher for over thirty years now, and during the last twenty years I never met a problem in the class room I could not cope with, but one is never too old to learn. I might find something new. Moreover, I coach young colleagues some of which are not very capable with respect to keeping order in the classroom and possibly Seganti's advices could be passed to them.

So every day instructions roll into my mailbox. Reading them made me feel itchy though, it took me some time to understand why. Something definitely was wrong with these techniques but what? After some days I discovered an underlying pattern. It made me realise that Seganti capitalizes on the fear of young teachers. Too many of the techniques he advises are defensive. For example:

Stand in your doorway. Stop EVERY student briefly before they enter. Tell them the following: "I want you to go directly to your seat without talking and in an orderly manner. You are to sit down and immediately start the assignment on the board. Without talking. Do you understand?" (Make sure you have an assignment on the board). My preferred 1st day method is to hand them a copy of my rules on the way in to copy onto a clean sheet when they sit down.

You are going to repeat this to each student before they enter.

Self fulfilling messages

Any teacher who demonstrates such silly behaviour should be advised to change his career. Certainly there is no gainsaying that standing in the doorway to receive your students is an excellent idea. But the message Seganti wants to be delivered to the students is utterly wrong. The message assumes that students do not want to learn in the classroom and that they must be told that they are supposed to work. That's nonsense. Students know that they are at school to behave disciplined in order to learn something. There is no need to tell them.

Seganti fails to understand that any message conveyed to the students will be heard and understood, students will react to it with behaviour. This message tells students straight away at the entrance that the teacher considers education to be a struggle. It is an invitation to start fighting.

My advice to young teachers is quite opposite: Stand in the doorway. Show and tell the students that they are most welcome. Make nice remarks. Compliment as many students as possible personally with new spectacles, their hairdo (only when changed conspicuously), nice clothing, congratulate them with their birthday. This must be natural behaviour, there is no need to say something to each student. You can allow yourself a scathing remark to someone to remind him of poor behaviour last lesson: "I'm happy that today you at least managed to be here in time," but only if delivered smilingly. These messages tell students that you are self-confident and enjoy your work, that you like your students and want to meet them on a personal level. Such a reception is an invitation to co-operate during the lesson to come.

Unnecessary rules

Craig expects students to go to their seats in silence. That is extremely unnatural behaviour. Adults would not do that when gathering for a meeting. I'm always astonished that teachers dare ask students to show behaviour they themselves would consider to be unnecessary, ridiculous or even demeaning. Demanding unnatural behaviour is asking for problems.

Then Craig tells us he gives students on the first school day a list of rules to copy. My young Initial Teacher Training colleagues often ask me for such a list: "Which rules must I give them?" My answer is "None." Which is exactly the answer my coach, a very wise man, gave me thirty-two years ago. Students know the rules. Any conversation about rules is a waste of time. You cannot afford to waste time in a lesson, can you?

The teacher is the alpha-person

Of course in the first lesson within five minutes after the bell rings some student will show poor behaviour, sitting backwards while you are talking or a girl will be polishing her nails. That's natural behaviour! The girl or boy wants to climb in the pecking order of the peer group by testing the mettle of this new teacher.
This is the very moment in which you repeat a basic rule: pay attention when the teacher is talking. The first student who loses attention must be addressed immediately, firmly but never frantically. To my experience this is best done, not by referring to a general rule, but by showing or telling that you are personally offended because the student is wasting precious time. This is the decisive moment: the teacher communicates that his lesson is too worthwhile to be disrupted. Students love that. They hate fools who waste their time.

Another very interesting thing happens when you react instantaneously. You show the group that you are the leader, you are the one who calls the shots. This is basic evolutionary psychology: you are the alpha-person, whether male or female. Show off your power by reacting proportionally. When a glaring look is enough you must not overdo by adding words at all. Punishment, especially punishment that is not experienced at the very moment of the offence, is mostly ineffective. It creates resentment and negative behaviour.

Punishment

Punishment is the sword brandished to no avail by a swashbuckling anxious teacher. A pun that corrects poor behaviour is the best. A teacher does not need punishment. He is the alpha-person, and the group of students knows he is in charge. He can afford to give latitude, to enjoy himself while addressing the group, he knows his students. Above all he knows that he is too great not to praise his tribe when they paid attention. "This was extremely difficult to understand, and you really did effort to grasp it!" That's the way.

What's this all about, after all?

Somehow Craig Seganti misses the quintessence of education. Ultimately we don't want the discipline that is created by rules and punishment. Students should behave disciplined because they want to learn, because they understand and experience that they cannot allow themselves to run amok. We fail as educators when we do not show them this rationale with our own behaviour.

Young Experts

2009-07-13T14:23:00.029+02:00

A question

I got a mail from Dan Willingham, in which he formulated a very interesting question: "Do you believe that students can achieve expertise more rapidly than they could, say 50 years ago?" The mail referred to my last post in which I wryly commented on some aspects of his book "Why Students Don't Like School." Fortunately Daniel Willingham doesn't ask for scientific research, he only asks about my beliefs. I'm not a scientist, I am just a humble teacher of art in the trenches of Dutch education. So my answer is based on common sense (I hope) and on years of experience in the classroom.

Stonehenge and computers

I see no reason to believe that the human brain has evolved significantly since the neolithic period. The same brain that erected the large stones at Stonehenge builds computers now. But the environment in which the human brain starts thinking during childhood has changed thoroughly. So it is conceivable that learning may have speeded up over the last hundreds of years. After all this is what formal education at school tries to achieve. I can come up with two classroom experiences that may possibly falsify Willingham's concept of the "ten years and ten thousand hours to become an expert"

Perspective

Every year I tell my third form students that they perform an amazing feat. Within about 6 lessons of 100 minutes they grasp the basics of linear perspective and show these insight knowledge in their drawings. It can clearly be seen in paintings of the fifteenth and sixteenth century that this was a very difficult concept for professionals at that juncture, even after Leon Battista Alberti had set out the technique in his treatise "Della Pittura" (1436). Apparently to professional artists the mathematical trick didn't always relate to their perception of the visual world.

Paolo Ucello, The battle of San Romano (1432)

Ucello painted the fallen lances precisely towards the vanishing point in the centre of the painting. He grappled with the concept of the depth in the picture plane and had to stick to a mathematical scheme in stead of rendering realistically the utter hassle of a medieval battle.

Veronese
Figures behind the Parapet
1560-61
Detail Fresco Villa Barbaro
Maser

The forms of the parapet in the painting on the left show clearly that Veronese had mastered perspective in drawing complex mathematical shapes. But he failed to envisage a realistic image of the dog perching on the banister as seen from below. To our modern eyes it is clear that the poor animal will fall down instantaneously.

So it seems that modern children learn a basic drawing technique faster than the medieval painter. However, we must bear in mind that the modern child has been exposed to images which depict the world according to the laws of perspective to an extent that the fifteenth century painter could not have dreamt of. Fifteen year old students have been pummelled by photographs and screen images on a daily basis for over ten years, which is the time frame Daniel Willingham sets for becoming an expert. The students have become experts in reading perspective in realistic images. So it is not amazing that they master producing correct perspective with pencil and ruler within a couple of lessons, they immediately sense something wrong when making a mistake. Albeit, drawing a dog on a high parapet as seen from below will pose as much a problem to them as it did to Veronese. Over the years I have had only a couple of students that could draw such a thing, and these kids were all self trained artists.

So it is a delusion to think that students learn faster now than five hundred years ago when mastering perspective.

Modern Art

My last post, which triggered Willingham's question, dealt with expert decisions students made while performing a task in the art room. I will not budge on this. My students expertly chose colours, shapes and techniques while making a self portrait and their work can be compared with works done by unquestioned masters of modern art. The picture on the right combines five works done by students and four works by famous artists (Francesco Clemente, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso).

The students deliberately applied techniques that are widely used in modern art to convey expression in a portrait: for example distortion of shape, abstraction by leaving out details, non-realistic colouring and so on. What's more, they used them all differently thereby showing that their choices were not the result of some prescription given to them by their teacher. I trusted them to explore their own ingenuity and so they did.

Craft versus Creativity

There is a meaningful difference between the two cases I am discussing. Learning perspective aims at the production of a realistic image. Until the end of the 19th century perspective was an indispensable tool of the painter. Within the context of modern art this tool may be applied but there is no need for an artist to learn perspective any more because modern art not necessarily aims at production of realistic images any more. Conversely many works of modern art are autonomous, they may refer to the world around the canvass or sculpture, but not by imitating shapes, colours and space in a mechanical way.

The Child Artist

Modern artists have often been inspired by the creativity with which young children depict their world playfully and spontaneously. I don't buy the argument however that children do not have to learn art. The children's spontaneity in making art mostly stops somewhere after early childhood if they are not encouraged to go on. School education can perpetuate their development, thereby fostering their inchoate artistic talents.

Given the fact that most children in our culture start to draw and paint at the age of two or three my students have had more than ten years of experience. I can clearly see though in the classroom that the amount of time spent on artistic productivity varies enormously between my students. The so called "gifted" indeed spent a lot of time on art voluntarily because the activity filled them with joy in which they were not disappointed by the feedback of their environment. Those students bring their own colour schemes and subject preferences into my class room. To others the act of making art has become all but meaningless, they do not feel confident at all while handling a brush or a gouge. A couple of hours weekly in a school's art room is not enough for these students to keep the engine running.

The Self Portrait

The task to make a representation of the self revved up the gusto of even these students and enticed them to make expert decisions. In fact I was startled by the results of some kids that had been hanging back so far. This raises questions:what triggered the interest of these slow coaches and how did they know what to do? Describing the assignment in detail might make Daniel Willingham's question less intangible:

The task evaded the problem of likeness by giving each student a photograph which was transferred to a paper by monotyping rather mechanically for a start only. This choice was based on the teacher's expertise, it enabled the students to skip a lot of troublesome "What to do?" problems. Amazingly a lot of students didn't pay too much attention to the true outline of their face and emphasized abstract patterns and colours.
The task challenged the students to express their knowledge about themselves in an image. They could be trusted to be the experts about themselves, couldn't they? I made clear that it would be quite useless to turn to me for advice because they would know better than the teacher which colours, shapes or techniques would be suited for their goal. I expected them to be experts in the execution of this particular task.
The students have been trained systematically to accept idiosyncratic representations by discussing works of modern art in the classroom. Next to that the pupils are embedded in a culture in which visual imagery in the mass media conveys all kind of messages in a lot of different ways and they have become experts in unravelling unconsciously the intricate layers of meaning in pictures even in their short span of time.
Somehow it was clear to the students that this could not go wrong. Every action they would engage in wilfully while working at this task would be a hallmark of their personality. One student went so far as to borrowing my lighter to burn the outer edge of the paper he worked on. The understanding of modern art in this group did not reach the point of presenting a short text or even a blank paper to the teacher as a token of conceptual art. I would have enjoyed that.

Summarizing: The students did make expert decisions within the scope of a task which was limited expertly by an experienced teacher. The expertise of the students was based on learning processes over some length of time, some of which had gone on all their life.
It goes without saying that no student can be considered to be an expert in modern art. An expert painter knows what to do when staring at a blank canvass in his studio, realizing that his work must contribute to an ongoing history of art that started 40,000 years ago in such a meaningful way that his work will acclaimed by a downright critical world.

Conclusion

I can give an answer to Dan Willingham's question now: No, I don't believe that students can achieve expertise more rapidly than they could, say 50 years ago? But students bring a lot of expertise in the classroom based on years of learning outside the classroom, even at the age of twelve. In a culture that renews methods of communication, perceptions of the world and concepts about the relation between the individual, the group and the world at large more rapidly than, say fifty, or hundred or five hundred years ago, teachers risk to be unaware of what's going on while young kids enter their classroom who are experts in these worldly affairs. If we fail to ask students about their expertise and if we do not adjust to their possibly completely different perceptions students will not like school. They will feel alienated. If we succeed in respecting the kids as experts in their own right school can be a place they like. They might even accept that rote learning is unavoidable to learn foreign languages, become proficient at solving mathematical problems, to become knowledgeable in history and all those other school subjects that they need badly to understand the world they live in beyond the scope of their easily acquired expertise.

A New Renaissance

I believe a Renaissance is going on now. I fear I may make the same mistake Veronese made: learning to implement tricks without acquiring the perception underlying the technique. Some day my students will tell me that my dog falls off the parapet, and I will not see it. Then I will retire.

Willingham and the Art Room

2009-07-03T16:06:00.053+02:00

The great Willingham?

I have been ruminating about Daniel T. Willingham's thoughts on school education in his book "Why Don't Students Like School?"¹ for some weeks now. In this book Willingham summarizes research in cognitive science and sets out consequences for learning in the class room.

His conclusions confirm a lot of my experiences as a teacher. Some myths that teachers have been taunted with lately are being debunked. I was so enthralled with the content of the book as to recommend it to my fellow teachers by quoting Willingham's "Nine principles of the mind" in our school's weekly. Albeit, there are some features of the book that I look upon with suspicion and I keep asking myself whether the book legitimizes school routines that make children unnecessarily unhappy.

Happiness

The title makes me tetchy in the first place. In fact most of my students like school. Of course they like it first of all because it is a place to meet their peers. Next to that school offers challenges that they like to meet. Capable teachers really do succeed in enthusing pupils with their subject. Not few students even love to do their homework though they would not be caught dead admitting it. Willingham's book offers wonderful suggestions for teachers to make rote learning within school routines more acceptable and doable for students. In fact "How to make your students happy" would have been a better title.

Child oriented teaching or academic programme?

My main beef about the book is that by emphasizing purely cognitive learning in academic subjects it denies children's possibilities to learn independently, to be creative in asking questions and to be experts in their own right. There is more to school than learning the answers the teachers know to questions a child never would ask.

Traditional schooling

Training to be a painter once started with chore tasks in the workshop: the grinding of pigments, preparing of canvases. Subsequently the student would learn to copy the works of the master. Certainly he would be encouraged to draw as much from nature as possible next to that. When the student had proven himself he would co-operate with the master, he might fill in backgrounds , the clouds in the sky. Indeed, it would take ten years and ten thousand hours of hard labour to become a master, the apprenticeship Willingham claims to be necessary to become an expert.

Modern art

Modern art changed all that. The realistic image can be obtained by making a photograph. The photograph can be outlined and transferred to a painting and changed. Andy Warhol's portraits of Marilyn Monroe² and Mick Jagger were produced in such a way, and so were the images in this blog, self-portraits by fifteen year old students of mine, with completely different outcome though. These young kids deliberately chose expressive visual elements that matched their self-awareness and they applied these consistently. They made expert decisions. Not too bad after only three years of training at school during two hours per week.

References:

1 Daniel. T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom, April 2009, Jossey-Bass

2 Andy Warhol Prints of Marilyn Monroe

Gifted but stupid

2009-06-21T23:06:00.011+02:00

The school's wall clock

Years ago I had a serious talk with a girl of my tutor group. Testing had set her I.Q. at 153. But she couldn't perform routine school tasks, say learning thirty French words for next day. I was probing into her past to find the reason for her revulsion and distrust. We got as far back as to early childhood and her first school experiences.

Early at primary school she had been told to come to the front of the class to say the multiplication table of two. She didn't get beyond twelve and was told off for it. When the class was exercising the table she hadn't paid attention at all because she had discovered that the answers were in front of her eyes, in the hour numbers of the school clock, she only had to skip the uneven numbers. However, the clock did not reach beyond twelve.

Talent

To me this anecdote epitomizes the conundrum school faces with gifted children. The educator who administered the rollicking might have inquired into the problem better and by doing so she could have detected a budding mathematician. That's what parents of gifted children ask the school to do. The precocious child should have been motivated to develop her inchoate understanding of numbers by building clocks with all kind of number systems in cardboard.

On the other hand, the teacher was right in lambasting the pupil. If her young student had practised the table of two in the way all the other kids complied with she certainly would have succeeded in mastering it.

A school career

The little girl felt aggrieved. This and other experiences ushered in a troublesome school career. When I met her at the age of thirteen she was disobedient, petulant, a nuisance in the class room. Though her parents managed to get her in the top level of the Dutch school system she was completely unable to cope with the school system. Her parents blamed the school. She left our school for a very expensive private school where group size was limited to twelve students per class, quite different from our usually crowded class rooms. She managed to pass the national examinations and got entrance to a university where she fell by the wayside.

How to deal with underachievers

I have been grappling with the problem of underachieving prodigies in the school system all over my career as an educator. I've always been trying to solve the problem by offering these students tasks that appealed to them and challenged their aptitude. I asked my fellow teachers to do so. We implemented special projects for the gifted. Despite our efforts results were mostly meagre.

Especially learning foreign languages, which is very important in Dutch education, proves to be an almost impossible task for students who rely solely on their innate intelligence. Learning to read, write, and speak English, French and German within a couple of hours per week in a full classroom in just a few years even on a basic level is impossible without rote learning. Pupils must practise grammar in the class room. Students have to cram vocabulary at home.

Arguably gifted students may learn a foreign language easily while being immersed in it, but we cannot immerse students in three foreign languages, can we? We lack the environment with native speakers, we lack the time. My school is exemplary in the region with offering gifted students a bilingual education in which they are taught in English for half of the subjects, half of the school week. But even in this situation of immersion students who memorize their personal idiom files by rote learning fare better than students who just wait and see.

Learning is not just fun

I see things differently now. Gifted children have a wonderful brain, an excellent working memory. That brain has to be challenged by intriguing tasks. This makes kids happy, it motivates them to work, to go to school for that matter. But before all we must train them to store knowledge in their long-term memory. They must learn to memorize. (cf. D.T. Willingham) When we fail to discipline them in doing the tedious work of rote learning they will founder at some stage in their career when deep knowledge is required.

Returning to the story I started with, this girl should have been given the task to build various clocks in all kind of number systems in cardboard. Next to that she would have benefited a lot from learning the multiplication tables by heart just like the other kids.

References:
Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School, acognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2009
Images:
Twelve hour clock at images.netshops.com
18 hour clock at Crowbert's photostream Flickr.com
Life time clock at techna.bob.com
Radians-wall-clock at nerdapproved.com

Different systems

2009-06-03T20:14:00.009+02:00

These masks indicate huge differences between pupils while processing the same task

Different views

Two fellow teachers comment on a story in my blog. They seem to appreciate the ruthlessness with which a child is denied promotion to the next year because she fails to meet academic standards. Dutch education tracks students into homogeneous ability streams. Students have to double the year when they fail to pass muster in a minority of the taught subjects. But I consider these idiosyncracies to be backward features of a system, remnants of nineteenth century practice.

A beautiful song

Some ten years ago I attended a rehearsal of a High School Choir in Michigan. I was flabbergasted. Pupils I had met earlier that day in a special needs class and students aiming at university level cooperated in a wonderful aesthetic experience. In Dutch education those children would not meet whatsoever within a school setting.

Count your blessings

Possibly daily frustrations give rise to a tendency to find greener pastures elsewhere, in a different school system where we perceive what we lack at home. That attitude is not very fruitful. School systems are rooted in local history, they express community values. The Dutch experience in particular makes clear that rash major transitions are not possible without jeopardising quality.We used to preen ourselves on our national school system. Recently we had to discover that we are not in the premier league any more. In a state of transition you risk ditching what you were good at before having gained what you need.

Good practice

The Fins are the champions. They offer consistently the best education of the world as measured by the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). But I take it most causes for this success cannot be easily transferred to other school systems. Neither the Fins' national love for reading nor their high esteem of the teaching profession are to be found in The Netherlands nowadays: a paradise lost can't be regained. What could be transferred though is the compulsory master's degree for every teacher, from kindergarten teacher to science teacher in secondary education, for each and everyone. I guess that really would be something.

Ha!

I'm happy to be a teacher of art. My students have been selected but fortunately not with respect to my field. So I have a motley collection of skills and talents in the class room. I have to allow for these differences and I must cope with them.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder

2009-05-30T09:22:00.014+02:00

Singer
Work in wax by a 15 yold student diagnosed with ODD and ADHD

The loss of the village

In his blog "Obedience" Andrew Old beefs about disobedience in the classroom, and rightly so. Without students' accepting that the teacher is the alpha person education is impossible. Andrew's arguments point at a ubiquitous slackness in Western culture. An African saying tells us: "It takes a village to raise a child". Apparently we are no villagers any more and children are at a loss in a highly individualised global city. The result is mayhem in the classroom.

Extreme behaviour

In the extreme the problem is represented by the definition of Oppositional Defiant Disorder:

frequent temper tantrums
excessive arguing with adults
active defiance and refusal to comply with adult requests and rules
deliberate attempts to annoy or upset people
blaming others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior
often being touchy or easily annoyed by others
frequent anger and resentment
mean and hateful talking when upset
seeking revenge

This behaviour is connected with neurological disorder. This makes sense: in all cultures of all times some people have been behaving anti-socially. These troublesome kids are in real danger of becoming criminals, or greedy bankers for that matter. Every so often we have one of them in our classrooms.

A lot of lunatics?

Albeit, I can't buy the percentage of kids purportedly suffering from this condition: five to fifteen percent of all school-age children. That's an outrageous number and it does not match my experience of over thirty years of teaching. I do not expect all children to be obedient and meek all of the time. I am an educator and it is part and parcel of my calling to correct poor behaviour, laziness, heckles, foul language and solipsistic ideas. I teach young adolescents after all. The predominance of pupils are reasonable and willing to learn, I can communicate with them and enjoy them, knowing that they will outgrow insolence and petulance.

To the detriment of lessons

In my tutor group I have a girl who has been diagnosed with ODD and ADHD. Dutch governmental policy has it to place children with special needs in the normal classroom. This child may benefit from the example of other children, at least she realises that her behaviour is not considered to be normal. However, her condition seems to be contagious. Some other students take pleasure in the aggro caused by her histrionics and one boy shows copycat behaviour. Teachers are harried, parents complain about the learning environment of their children. At the end of this year the girl will have to leave the school because she cannot meet our academic standards and can not be promoted to the next form. I have no doubts about her innate intelligence, she falls behind because she cannot concentrate and work on a daily basis. She does not accept guidance.

The singer in wax

The art work shown in the images above was done by this girl. To my amazement she worked on it for several hours fully concentrated. Whenever she has set a goal for her art work all symptoms of her neurological disorder disappear. Provided she has an interest in the topic at hand she will work at her drawing or sculpture with rapt attention over a prolonged period. I advised her to aim for a career as an artist. She is not extremely gifted, but she is capable of producing interesting work. Even more important, in the arts a highly eccentric personality is not uncommon and will be accepted more easily. This might give her a chance to find a place in society. But she baulked at the prospect of having to spend time on art theory and art history.

Don't blame the teacher

Bearing in mind that ODD, ADHD, PDDNOS and all those other afflictions described in DSM IV do exist and have a base in physical disorders that can be detected and measured by scans, I am inclined to think that the number of students suffering from these conditions is highly exaggerated. By medicalising anti-social behaviour our society denies the underlying problem: too many parents fail to discipline their children properly in a stable and safe environment. Because of inadequate caring, excessive consumerism and lack of rules lots of children do not develop a sound personality. As a result they cannot communicate reciprocally. Emotionally they keep functioning on the level of a three year old child.

Teachers cannot solve this problem at a later stage.

The Art Laboratory

2009-05-22T12:24:00.032+02:00

This girl is working in my classroom. She is as concentrated as not even to be disturbed by the photographer.

Apparently the assignment I gave her compelled her to do a good job. The result fulfilled the demands included in the task given to the class. It had to do with expressive quality in art by exaggerating form aspects.

I introduced this task with the question why art can be appreciated across cultures and referred to the idea of "Peak Shift," introduced by V.S. Ramachandran

So I guess she learned something about that. I can not be sure because the scope of the course didn't allow an extensive test.

Her gusto may have been triggered by the sheer size of the work, which exceeded anything she had worked on before.

A wonderful book

I am reading a book by Daniel T. Willingham these days: "Why Don't Students Like School?". The content is very satisfying for a teacher. In Dutch education teachers have been harassed by ideologists of every ilk since 1993 when the government implemented a major change in secondary education. Willingham is a cognitive psychologist. His book debunks a great deal of the myths that underlie deprecating views on proven teachers' routines. Recommending this book does not mean I want to fuel those colleagues who are unwilling to reflect critically on their daily work with children. It goes without saying that teachers have to adapt continuously to ever-changing demands of society. Nevertheless, the book keeps me smiling while turning pages because it confirms that a lot of ideas about learning are not supported by science at all and some are falsified by research.

I adhere to Karl Popper's legacy

I consider my classroom to be a laboratory in which the teacher's hypotheses are tested against children's motivation and visible results of learning. Remember I teach art. Nice products do not guarantee effective learning, but poor products show clearly that something went pearshaped. Enthused children are not necessarily proof of good teaching, boredom is evidence of the converse.

The gap between theory and practice

Background reading is indispensable for a teacher. The try-and-error in the classroom must be subsumed into intelligent thought of others. Often I have experienced a gap between literature and my everyday experience. Neither did Skinner's pigeons resemble my students, nor did Marxist education in visual communication appeal to them. Constructivistic ideas seeped into my work with meagre results. So mostly I resort to common sense based on over thirty years of experience. Only recently does theory bridge the gap. Willingham's book is wonderful. But there is not very much on Art Education in it and I have some objections. I will get back to that a.s.a.p

Bingo!

2009-05-20T22:06:00.016+02:00

Boring content

One of the objectives of my lessons is to sensitize teenagers to historic art styles. They need that for their national exam. They will be asked to compare images, such as the crucifixes you see on the left, and connect these with styles, e.g. Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque.

A 16 year old student will not be intrinsically motivated to study on such a content. Of course the teacher collects slides to show the class, works of art that epitomize each style. The best thing you can hope for as a teacher is polite silence while you go out of your way to describe characteristic features, point out differences in details, explain composition and expression. If you are a good storyteller you may even have their attention, however to no avail. After a series of lessons on those styles they will not be able to categorize an image that is new to them. I found out why.

Useless words

The problem is in the talking. When you try to get the message across in words you work on the wrong side of the brain. Historic background of art, names of famous artists, difficult descriptive words, reasoning about relations, for the student all these words build up a farrago. Mostly the verbosity has to be interrupted intermittently to tell off sniggering girls. If the teacher is very eloquent, he may mesmerize his class into a mutual delusion of understanding.

Four words only

Only four words are needed to begin with: Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque. These words can be introduced in ten minutes with a couple of images. The sole goal is to store these four words in the working memory of the students. They are no morons, this will be successful. Subsequently show them a multitude of images, not chronologically but completely at random. They get 15 seconds per image to guess the style of the art work. Then give them immediately feedback about the correct answer. They can reward themselves with a tick on a paper, and if you like mayhem in your classroom they may shout "Bingo" if their answer was right. You really need at least a hundred images in a Powerpoint presentation. The images can be grabbed from internet sites such as The Web Gallery of Art. No talking, no explanations. "Just look at the picture and guess what style." Students like gaming and they discover to their amazement by their tally that failures slump during the game. They really start recognizing styles. That's extremely rewarding. Also by repeatedly thinking about their choice a hundred times the four words will be transferred from working memory into long term memory.

We are all gifted

I believe such a lesson uses an innate human skill: face recognition. We are good at distinguishing subtle differences while looking. We use this capability to categorize people and objects. We can even recognize familiar people from behind, by looking at the back of their heads. We don't need to think in words to perform remarkable feats

This recognition is the bedrock to build upon. It is the start of the learning process. After that experience chronological order can be memorized and the relation between historic backdrop and style can be explained. To achieve true understanding words are needed. But recognizing different styles comes first. That doesn't warrant lengthy explanations, only training is needed.

Expertise

2009-05-18T21:38:00.004+02:00

Today two guests covered a lesson of mine. My first formers were to participate in scientific research in which their perception while gaming at the computer was questioned, in particular their awareness of advertisement pop-ups at the edge of the screen.

I have a lot of experience with trainees. Of course they lack experience, but mostly they are pupil oriented, communicative and aware of their task as a teacher.
However, these guests were a student of psychology and a computer expert. They were not trainees from a teacher training. I had my start routine, which in this case had to include amiable lambasting of some rumbustious boys and less friendly ticking off a latecomer, introduced the guests and let it go.
They managed to get their message through, more or less. Inviting thirteen year old students to play a computer game is not that difficult. Albeit, the psychologist said quizzically: "They listen better to you than they do to us."

What struck me was that I had to tell this young woman that she should explain to my students what the test had been about at the end of the period and how their participation would contribute to scientific progress at large. I take it she thought lollipops would be enough reward for my students. The lollipops were enjoyed by the pupils, but the sweets certainly did not meet my demands, so I had the lady explain the aim of the test and the first formers were given the opportunity to ask questions.

The event made me realize that the teacher's expertise is taken for granted, even by the teacher himself. I cannot assess the quality of the scientific experiment at hand but treating first formers as if they were guinea pigs definitely makes poor psychology.

Three-dimensional

2009-05-13T21:20:00.015+02:00

Work by 15 year old students

The pictures on the left show one work seen from different angles. It was made by two students. I had them work in pairs, as it is convenient to have four hands available when assembling pieces of shaped cardboard. The parts were stuck together with adhesive tape. The students discovered that all directions in space are attainable with just a few joints.

The complicated form is balanced on a very small foot which adds a delicate sense of equilibrium to it.

Magic Material

2009-05-11T20:51:00.006+02:00

All materials have tactile qualities in their own right. A great deal of the immense joy an artist experiences when crafting can be explained by the direct touch on the material.

Rubber certainly triggers a palpable joy.

Its flexible resilience results in unique experiences when cut, twisted, stretched or woven. My students love it. Rubber is a perfect material to teach them never to tangle with material but to go with the flow and to be surprised with the result that the hands create while the brain just aimlessly observes.

On top of that: rubber is affordable. Worn out bicycle tyres are free to have at cycle repair shops, at least in The Netherlands, as the shop owners have to pay to get rid of them. So the budget keeper fancies this material as well, which is not to be sneezed at during a credit crunch!

Pictures: Works by 15/16 year old students

They do me proud

2009-05-10T22:31:00.000+02:00

Every so often a teacher strikes a chord with his students. The animal in the picture has been made by a thirteen year old girl. The hybrid animal, assembled out of plywood parts and subsequently painted, shows that she has grasped the idea that art is not just about imitating reality. She created an object that conjures up a completely new and mindboggling creature.

Dancing Crocodile

Dumbing down

Time travel

From the Earth to the Moon

Going elsewhere

How we got here

In limbo

Here and now

Ready for take off

Lost and gone

Learning Styles

The scientific base

Meaningless advices

Vacuous concepts

Punch and Judy

Group work

The loneliness of the learner

Van Gogh did not cut his ear in an act of art

The artist's workshop

The concerted effort

Visiting schools in the UK

The Head

Behaviour policy

Control

Content and Language Integrated Learning

Diversity

Conclusion

The Education Buzz Carnival #7

Backfiring: Assessment of Administrators

The management course

Why do we let off our administrators scot-free?

It is time to backfire

Foolish goals

PS

Source image 1 / image 2

Life's a Carnival–the Education Buzz #6 Halloween Edition

The Ruler

The Education Buzz Edition #5

Randomisation of responses

Dangerous Myths #1: “Rote learning stinks.”

Nothing comes for free

21st Century Skills???

An example: photography

Kafka's world

Education Buzz #4

Why educational formats are bound to falter

The working memory of the teacher

The Zen of Teaching

Not-doing

The Headmaster's Fancy

Gung-ho versus Wu Wei

The royal route

Classroom settings

The Education Buzz #3

Energizer

The Engine of Culture

This post was triggered by a post Art as Salvation or Education on Joanne Jacobs' blog and was partly published as a comment there.

Religion

Science

Art

About dogs, kids and standardized tests

I have had a happy dog for sixteen years

There is a difference between training and education

You do not own your classroom, you owe it to the world at large.

No education without testing

I don't get it

By the way

Life's a Carnival–the Education Buzz #2

Exchange through Art

Why we matter much more than we think

Standardized tests

Hundreds of students at Ulenhof, Doetinchem, The Netherlands are focussing on their national exam. At the very moment candidates of all Dutch secondary schools do exactly the same test.

Bilingual Education

More interesting examples of Dunglish are to be found athttp://halkia.web-log.nl/halkia/2007/01/dunglish.html

Bilingual education

Foreign languages

The English spoken classroom.

Three strata: three languages

Language is the crux

Reference:This post was triggered by Profiles in Greatness Ep. 4, a wonderful story by Mr. McNamar about his teacher of Spanish, Senora Mosely.

More interesting examples of Dunglish are to be found at
http://halkia.web-log.nl/halkia/2007/01/dunglish.html

Reference:
This post was triggered by Profiles in Greatness Ep. 4, a wonderful story by Mr. McNamar about his teacher of Spanish, Senora Mosely.

Images:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Canis_lupus_pack_surrounding_Bison.jpg