As my anniversary of absence from the physical classroom has arrived, and as chatter about returning to that space in fall 2021 increases, it’s a perfect moment to reflect on what I have learned, and even treasured, about this year. Like many others I had never taught remotely despite a three-decade-long teaching career in higher education. So the transition was abrupt, terrifying, and transformative. As someone who had spent a lot of time thinking about pedagogy even before this moment, and having already transformed my own classroom structures from conventional teacher-centered-learning to student-centered, I may have been in a somewhat better position than many others to confront the new situation.
This also coincides with the publication of my edited book, Ungrading, which led to my giving a set of talks and interactions and podcasts and workshops on this subject. In this moment I am assembling a quick off-the-top-of-my-head list of positive things about this year. Most of this year I’ve opted for “microblogging” on Twitter instead of writing blog posts, but I think this requires a little bit longer post. I am mostly writing about higher education, but much of this also applies to K-12 schooling.
I’ve learned and learned and learned, exhausted even when it goes really well. I’ve spent hours preparing for things that take just a moment to enact. I’ve created new plans on the fly. I’ve probably done a third less in each class than I used to. I’ve second- and third-guessed myself. But as I contemplate the end of this strange period, I realize that there are many good things, and I need to appreciate, convey gratitude for, them. I don’t know if I will ever get to Part 2 of this list, but I am leaving open the possibility. The curriculum of blogging, like in my classes, is open. ![]() ![]() t’s spring in the Midwest, and I’ve been walking in my neighborhood. Mid-May is the season of flowering trees, the return of loud yard equipment, and the end of the school year, either post-graduation for college or just short of the end for K-12 schools. And, as always, I find parallels between how our society regards nature and how we regard children. In both, I see strange mistakes made in the last century. They have to do with confusions between ends and means, and with disregard of obvious ill effects, and with non-attainment of goals except by violence. I want to compare lawns and a fixation on degrees and credentials. Here’s some advice: If the goal in a residential yard is a perfect green mat with no flaws, then put down a carpet instead of a lawn. You can skip the pesticides, herbicides, runoff, bee-destruction, water waste, labor, and noise pollution. If the goal for schooling is a credential and a degree, then offer the degree for a fixed amount of money. You can skip the cramming, textbooks, cheating, anxiety, and labor. If the goal is college admission for the poor, then offer a lottery. You can skip the application process, the unfortunate high student-advisor ratio, the sense of low self-esteem, the suspicion about affirmative action. If the goal is college admission for the affluent, then offer a lottery. You can skip the college admission counselors, the test prep, the summer service abroad, the Adderall, the ghost writers, the false self pretending to like resume-padding activities, the adult puppeteers in science fairs beginning in elementary school, the system-gaming with early action, the applications to twenty colleges. If the goal is good jobs for all….then make that happen. School won’t—hasn’t—done that. We are pretty confused as a society between ends and processes. We have images of peaceful landscapes where harmony soothes the spirit. We have images of restful suburban lawns emulating British aristocratic manors and estates. We have images of docile, productive, knowledgeable children—a sort-of noble goal. We have aspirations of educated, reflective citizens. We have a need for effective workers. We like the idea of both equality and equity, equal opportunity and equal outcomes. We have ideals of equality, merit, and humaneness. But we aren’t getting what we want. We are often getting ersatz versions of what we want (with exceptions), along with a lot of serious side-effects. In lawns and education, a rethinking is in order. Personally, I’d willingly take a few weeds, or a lot of weeds--bees love dandelions in the early spring, when there are few other sources of energy—over the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico. I’d take a few students daydreaming and being inefficient over drugged, depressed, competitive zombies. You? Professor Marjorie Faulstich Orellana of UCLA suggested that there is a “‘Love’ Revolution” underway in education as reaction against the punitive and judgment-drenched testing, measuring, accountability tide. One of the mysterious, frustrating things about teaching in college is that we rarely admit that we do it out of love.
Strategies are the main learning outcome of all those years of school. Anyone who flunks strategy basically flunks school. With Netta Avineri and Eric J. Johnson, I've addressed a report in the Washington Post on the many contextual factors affecting children in poverty. The well-intentioned plans to teach poor families of color “better” or “the right” ways to be parents ignores recent work that now points to a culturally sustaining education that builds on the knowledge of students of color rather than erasing it.
Challenges to authoritarian states’ control of language can be so complex that they exceed the states’ ability to manage them all. Electronic expression of resistance and increasing embrace of non-Mandarin linguistic varieties reveal powerful linguistic insights in China, which are evident too in the so-called Umbrella Revolution that took Hong Kong by storm (hah!) in fall 2014.
While a controlling state wishes to limit expression, citizens creatively employ every possible communicative modality—music, video, images, Arabic numerals, puns, Chinese characters, Roman letters, foreign words, writing, speech, sound, vision—and choose among varieties of speech and writing at their own discretion. The resources they employ reveal limits to the officially enforced boundaries—linguistic and conceptual—of China. http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/chinapolicyinstitute/2015/06/16/linguistic-challenges-to-chinas-centralizing-control/ ![]() Why are people poor? Why do children of the poor not thrive? The latest explanation for why children coming from disadvantaged households do not rise in this land of equal opportunity, why they do not do well in school, is that they are exposed to “thirty million fewer words” by the time they enter school. If only it were so simple. Read it on Huffington Post, or click "Read More" |
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