Practical Theory

This post owes a great debt to to Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There's a long section in Part II where Phaedrus gives his "Two Universities" lecture, and I admit, that that notion has always stuck with me. What this is is an attempt to use that and both apply it to K-12 and hopefully frame some of what is going on in the larger school world today.

Here is the crux of Pirsig's argument about the Two Universities:

That night, for the next day's lecture, he wrote out his defense of what he was doing. This was the Church of Reason lecture, which, in contrast to his usual sketchy lecture notes, was very long and very carefully elaborated.

It began with reference to a newspaper article about a country church building with an electric beer sign hanging right over the front entrance. The building had been sold and was being used as a bar. One can guess that some classroom laughter started at this point. The college was well known for drunken partying and the image vaguely fit. The article said a number of people had complained to the church officials about it. It had been a Catholic church, and the priest who had been delegated to respond to the criticism had sounded quite irritated about the whole thing. To him it had revealed an incredible ignorance of what a church really was. Did they think that bricks and boards and glass constituted a church? Or the shape of the roof? Here, posing as piety was an example of the very materialism the church opposed. The building in question was not holy ground. It had been desanctified. That was the end of it. The beer sign resided over a bar, not a church, and those who couldn't tell the difference were simply revealing something about themselves.

Phædrus said the same confusion existed about the University and that was why loss of accreditation was hard to understand. The real University is not a material object. It is not a group of buildings that can be defended by police. He explained that when a college lost its accreditation, nobody came and shut down the school. There were no legal penalties, no fines, no jail sentences. Classes did not stop. Everything went on just as before. Students got the same education they would if the school didn't lose its accreditation. All that would happen, Phædrus said, would simply be an official recognition of a condition that already existed. It would be similar to excommunication. What would happen is that the real University, which no legislature can dictate to and which can never be identified by any location of bricks or boards or glass, would simply declare that this place was no longer "holy ground." The real University would vanish from it, and all that would be left was the bricks and the books and the material manifestation.

It must have been a strange concept to all of the students, and I can imagine him waiting for a long time for it to sink in, and perhaps then waiting for the question, What do you think the real University is?

His notes, in response to this question, state the following:

The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It's a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.

In addition to this state of mind, "reason," there's a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing. This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address. It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money and of responding to legislative pressures in the process.

But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist.

I don't think that K-12 is the continuing body of reason... I think it is the continuing body of wisdom. Perhaps it is at the university level that we teach reason as our highest value, and maybe that's o.k. To me, the largest goal of K-12 is to teach our students the wisdom they'll need to thrive in the world. Everything else we do stems from that. Math, Literacy, Science... all those things should serve a larger goal of teaching students to be wiser.

And yet, today, so much of what we are focusing on in our schools is the "Second University," as Phaedrus would say. Yes, we cannot deny that part of the job of our Second School is to sort kids for college. It is only the Second School that cares about whether or not you properly file your fifty-page School Improvement Plan. And yes, we cannot deny that our Second Schools must make AYP, and yes, the Second School cares whether or not you use Holt or McGraw-Hill. But our First School doesn't. Our First School -- our ideal -- doesn't.

At best, the metrics of the Second School apes the goals of our First School ideals. At worst, the Second School distracts us... makes us forget what really is important to us. The mistake of "teaching to the test" is not whether or not it is a good test, it is that it reduces our goal to the Second School, not the First.

The hard part about the First School is that it's ethereal. It defies attempts to strangle it into rules and regulation and replication and simple metrics of who is and isn't achieving. The First School isn't accountable to others, it is responsible to itself, to the very purpose it serves.

But even though it's hard, in fact perhaps because it is, that's why we always have to keep pushing ourselves to find ways to serve that larger goal.

(Found this first on Bionic Teaching... made my own. Fun.)

Something I've never understood about those who would put accountability and high standards -- which usually translates to a standardized experience for kids -- as their first virtues in our schools is that there are, in every school, those students we love for whom the normal school or classroom experience does not work. For urban educators, this often manifests as the student who lives a life that most teachers can't imagine.

I've taught those kids who couldn't understand how cosine and sine could help them dodge the streets... the kids who couldn't see how learning about the Reformation would help them figure out where they were sleeping... What was failing my class because they couldn't see how The Great Gatsby was relevant to their life going to do. (For the record, the Great Gatsby is relevant to their life. A few years ago, we wrote a modern version of it, with an upstart rapper trying to crack high society. We read a lot about Puffy as preparation, but I digress...)

So for those kids... how do we serve them? How do we best serve them? Yes, I think we have to ask a lot from all kids. Yes, I think we have to recognize our limitations and know that we cannot individualize curriculum for every single child given our teaching loads.

However, every year, we run into those kids who we know that if we only found a way inside... found a way to make school and curriculum relevant to how to survive the unspeakably difficult lives they go home to after they leave our walls, then somehow we could make their lives better.

The ethic of care suggests that we must take that step with them... and yes, we must then hold them accountable for their behavior and their work, but what wouldn't we do for them?

For those kids who show up every day, but can't seem to find the way to overcome their own lives to do the work of our classes, doesn't our moral obligation require us to see the limits in our units, in our structure, in ourselves, so that we can change what we do to help those kids who want it?

For some reason, as I thought about this blog entry, I kept thinking of the part of the Passover Seder that deals with The Four Sons. The four sons are the wise son, the contrary son, the simple son and the son who does not know how to -- or cannot -- ask the question. I think our schools know how to deal with the first three sons. I don't think we know how to deal with the fourth.

For those students who cannot ask the question... for whom the entire game of school seems like a maze where success is both not fathomable and also difficult to understand the benefits... I think we have an obligation to find a way to take them by the hand and help them find success. I don't worry that our other students will be angry that we "make exceptions" or that they will think it is not "fair" that some students pursue a different curriculum to be able to pass. I think the ethic of care suggests that there are times when we know that what we do for 99% of our students does not work for the last 1% of our kids, no matter what we do.

When we realize that, don't we have an obligation to find what will work for that student? Don't we have to hold the value of the life of that student above the value we place on our lesson plans? I think we do.

Just a reminder... there's only one week left to submit proposals for EduCon 2.0. Given all the folks who have either signed up or told me their coming, I think we're going to have an amazing conference. But we still want more proposals for conversations... be sure to submit yours!

[Update: Link to the conference -- Link to the Proposal Entry]

[Things influencing this post:
David Warlick's K12Online Keynote
Tom Hoffman's -- On Modernism
The words of the students of SLA]

For a bunch of years at Beacon, I taught a senior English class called "Connection and Disconnection in the 20th Century." It was a semester-long, reading intensive class that really was a survey of some of what I thought the major literary themes of the modernist and post-modernist movement were and are. The class was reasonably analog, and despite that, some of my favorite moments of classroom teaching happened there.

This is one of the intro letters from the class:

To the students of Connection and Disconnection in 20th Century Literature:

The desire for connection, to our fellow humans, to a community, to a country, to a God, could be considered a basic human need. In the 20th century, as many of the traditional bonds changed at a speed never seen before, that sense of connection changed or was lost. Much of the literature of the modernist and post-modern, from Eliot and Joyce to Don DeLillo and Jeanette Winterson, has struggled with this theme, and, it is my belief, that we can learn a great about our society and ourselves through an examination of these ideas. On a personal note, many of these texts are my favorites, and many have special meaning for me.

This course is a great deal of reading. It is roughly the same number of books that you would read in a college course. I expect you to keep up on the reading, even when it’s really difficult (and much of it is.) The heart and soul of this course is discussion, and therefore, the onus is on you to read, think, and come to class ready to talk about what you read, even if most of what you have to say is to ask questions. We will, on average, read through three books every four weeks. Also, you do need to get these books – not the poetry -- on your own. These books are all available at the Beacon library and the local Barnes and Noble stores.

Syllabus:

• T. S. Eliot Poetry -- "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Wasteland."
  
• James Joyce – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  
• Wallace Stevens Poetry -- including "Sunday Morning" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
  
• Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own
  
• Nathaniel West – Day of the Locust
  
• Saul Bellow – Seize the Day
  
• Allen Ginsberg – “Howl”
  
• Jack Kerouac – On the Road
  
• Robert Pirsig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  
• Thomas Pynchon – The Crying of Lot 49
  
• Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle
  
• Don Delillo – White Noise
  
• Gloria Naylor – Linden Hills
  
• Jeanette Winterson – Written on the Body
  

This class will be a little different from other Beacon English classes you've taken so far in that the vast majority of the writing is analytical literary analysis. To help prepare for your papers, and to help you think about our texts, you will write a one to two page short analytical piece every week. This is a somewhat loose assignment, in that I expect you to do some interesting work in these short pieces, but I don’t have a specific “assignment” that I want you to fulfill. As for the papers, you will be doing four papers for this class this semester, three long essays and one major research paper that must contain critical commentary. I know no one looks forward to writing papers, but I hope you view these papers as a chance for you really to explore books and topics that are of interest to you. In addition, we will have the class forum available to continue discussion, throw out ideas, ask for opinions and generally keep the class going outside of class hours.

And that’s as good a place to sum up this letter. It is my hope that this class can be rigorous fun. There’s a lot of work, both reading and writing, but there is also the chance to explore some of the canonical texts of the last century, taking a look at some of the fundamental philosophical questions of the last 100 years. You may find that many of the questions we encounter over the next few months are questions you have asked of yourself. It’s my hope that we find that our four hours together every week is a time of powerful, exciting discussion that we all want to extend beyond the walls of our classroom. I will be posting our assignments on the Beacon Portal, and as always, I’m always on email at clehmann@beaconschool.org. Thanks, and I hope you are as excited about the class as I am.

(In retrospect, yes, I would love to redo this class with all those short pieces and the major pieces as blog entries. I remember toying with the ideas then, but I didn't have a specific audience for the pieces in mind, and at that point, it had been my experience that student blogging without an audience was not that productive. We did use the class forum extensively, and I had many a midnight IM chat with kids about the texts... but I digress.)

I was thinking about this class and its many conversations today after watching David Warlick's K12Online keynote, after spending two days at the T+L conference in Nashville, and after continuing to reflect on the words of the SLA kids when they spoke to a world-wide group of educators. And I think about our rush -- and I certainly implicate myself in this -- to create our global networks. I look forward to my every-five-minute twitter blast. And yes, many of our colleagues are right when they say that our kids are connected all the time. And yes, we all now check our emails when we're out to dinner with friends, or we call our friends from the baseball game to tell them that we're there. And there is much that is good about all of that. Indeed, I wouldn't give it up.

But, I think of the conversations of those classes with my seniors. I think of all the texts we read of people disconnected from the world around them. I think of Eliot's words in "The Wasteland" and Eliot's lament that the modern world, in its rush, in its industrial revolution, in its teeming mass of humanity, had lost its connection to that which makes us human, had lost its connection to that which ties us to the earth and each other.

And I think of what we've lost in our generation. Yes, the students are texting on their cell phones as they exit the bus, but they don't necessarily notice the sunset. And yes, David Warlick's son could carry on a conversation with friends while walking the campus of his new college, but over the two days he would spend with parents before embarking on a new chapter in his life, he was distracted from the company of his parents, and we don't even notice that that might be strange or wrong. And in our classrooms, in our meetngs, in our lives, we have given up the now, the immediacy of our experiences to record it, write it, share it, all the while pulling our attention away from what we do.

And I think of all of us, trying to sum up our worlds in 140 character tweets, joking -- but living -- the idea that "If it didn't tweet, it didn't happen."

And I think of our SLA kids, all with their facebook and myspace and AIM accounts, but all -- to a person -- when asked about what makes SLA special, talking about the immediacy of their relationships. And I think of the richness of the connections that exist. And I think of my old classroom, when we talked about these issues, no laptops, just a wonderful text, some great questions and a community of people debating our small 'a' answers.

I love our tools, and when we use them to enrich our connections, to deepen them in ways that matter (like the midnight IM conversation about the meaning of "The Wasteland"), they are powerful and deep and rich. I love that I spend my downtime in my life listening to people and talking to people, rather than surfing for something entertaining and mindless on TV.

But I also remember that there is nothing gained without something lost. And I miss the now. I want Jakob and Theo to be able to live enough in their moments so that they notice the details that we miss when we walk to work, headphones on, cell phone out, text-messages at the ready. Jakob is three, and when we talk or drive, he notices everything. He sees things I miss, whether it's a broken taillight of a car to the outfit that someone is wearing. He lives in his moment fully, and I miss my ability to do that.

As teachers, we learn the value of wait time in our classes, we learn -- and it's one of the hardest things I had to learn -- to value silence in our classes, to be o.k. with it. And yet, in our own lives, we are rushing to fill every moment of silence as if it were something to be feared. And, as we rush to embrace connectedness, as we rush to fill our classes with the world, we need to also teach our kids to appreciate and embrace the moments they live in -- even the quiet moments. We need to help them live in the now -- and we may need to help ourselves remember it as well.

The literature of the 20th century was filled with writers trying to make sense of a changing world, of a world where every traditional societal institution and norm was challenged and threatened and changed. As we talk about the education of the 21st century, let's learn from their struggle, and help our students embrace new and old, connectedness and the now, and let us always try to look at our own immediate worlds -- our present and our past -- with the awe and wonder with which we look at the future.

I've realized something.

Project-based learning is the easiest thing in the world to talk about because it's almost a guarentee that no one will disagree with you. Everyone will nod their head and agree that it's a good thing... but -- and Wiggins and McTigue write about this as well, by the way -- true project-based learning is an inversion of our traditional classrooms in powerful ways.

Here's why:

Project-based learning is not what you do after you've given the test, as supplimental to the test, as anything other than the primary method of assessment of student learning.

In a true project-based learning classroom or school, you may give quizzes to check-in or dipstick for comprehension, but when it comes time to assess what students really, deeply understand about a unit, they do an authentic, student-centered assessment -- a project.

If authentic student work is not the highest-order assessment in a classroom, that classroom is not project-based. It is still relying on a teacher's sense of what students must know for its highest moment of learning. A project puts it into the kids' hands to demonstrate and apply knowledge, skills, content and (if there's a reflective piece) meta-cognition.

Ask yourself, challenge yourself -- if you really want to know what kids know and can do, how do you assess that? When do you really feel like you know what kids can do?

And ask yourself this, how much control do you give over to the kids every day to really own their learning? Have you ever been surprised by that moment when a student took a piece of schoolwork in a direction completely unexpected? And what did you do in that moment?

I'm in Nashville, at the Technology + Learning conference hosted by NSBA. I did a three hour workshop today on 21st Century School Reform. Here was the conference write-up. (And yes, I did use that much edu-speak... but I meant it!)

What does the Department of Education’s School 2.0 initiative really entail, and how do we create schools that can realize that vision? Can we really build a pedagogical framework that allows all stakeholders to use technology to change the way we think about schools and create a transformative experience for all involved? Examine the issues of technology infrastructure, staff development, curriculum design in a One-to-One environment, home and school interaction in School 2.0, and the pedagogical framework necessary to make School 2.0 a reality.

(And yes, there is a level of both hubris and insanity to think that I could tackle that topic in three hours.)

I'll do a longer write-up about what I thought of the session later... I will say this -- the audience feels different than it did a few years ago. When I asked who had heard of moodle, 90% of the hands went up. But we're not changing our practice fast enough, because when I asked whose districts were using it, every hand went back down.

But, as you can see from the slides, this really was about vision and pedagogy first, and tools second. And that, of course, is more what I like talking about anyway. Here are the slides (this was too big for a GooglePresentation. Rats.) And I've created a quick wiki with all the links and the backchannel conversation that was going on during the presentation.

(click the slides to move forward... anyone know how to embed the movie so that people can move backwards as well?)