 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.
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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.
 The correct and inevitable guilty verdict in the sad case of the “Atlanta Cheating Scandal” is a reminder that the current system of high-stakes testing drives all participants in schooling to their wits’ ends—and beyond. Surely parents want the best for their children, teachers want the best for their students, administrators want the best for their schools, superintendents want the best for their districts. But when it all boils down to a few numbers, and the numbers can, carefully, surreptitiously, and illegally, be changed, it should not surprise us that the temptation to do so becomes irresistible, in some cases. [image source: http://www.featurepics.com/FI/Thumb300/20110801/Cheating-Test-1956141.jpg] Both are seventeen. They are too young to vote in places like the US. But we need more of them!  If metaphors organize our thinking and if there is no genuinely neutral way of speaking about anything, then it is worth looking into the dominant metaphors used.
School is a domain that has been referred to in ways that help and in ways that harm. I would like to propose an old-made-new-again metaphor, The Garden, that might help, but this time with a century of ecological knowledge included. I suggest education as permaculture.  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"  A huge shakeup in the world of higher education was announced on Wednesday: The SAT would again be transformed. But the bigger questions are hard to address, so like Ptolemaic astronomy, we fix the details without questioning the system. Rand Paul plagiarized, as did Fareed Zakaria, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, as have done some of my students and probably yours. Maybe you plagiarized, too. Survey statistics suggest that up to three-quarters of college students plagiarize, whatever that means to them.
But what is especially noteworthy in this week’s case, after a series of reports of Paul’s using others’ work as his own, is his response: “I will now footnote everything, just like in college.” This is a signal. It signals that he will comply with the fussy norms of academic citation—but only because we are making him do it. He is exaggerating the expectation, in a kind of lampoon. Read on....or read it on Huffington Post. Just the other day one of my undergraduate assistants reported a friend's boast that he had not read anything for school since fifth grade. A student at an excellent university, successful, "clever," "smart," he can write papers, take exams, participate in class or online discussions. Why would he have to read?
Students sometimes don't buy the class books. Professors are shocked. Several years ago a student told me that she regarded all assigned reading as "recommended," even if the professors labeled it "required." Were professors so dumb that they didn't know that? Read here or on Huffington Post: |
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