Hayward illuminates the many ways in which this distinction plays out in interpersonal interactions, staff and student attitudes, and school culture. She discusses “the Environment” and the aspects of urban life that seem to afflict teachers and staff with a defeatist attitude. She began to draw the connection between pedagogical practices and the political implications of “the Environment,” but I’m not sure I felt the full thrust of her argument.

For me, this conversation has to happen in terms of standing before a roomful of children, deciding which definition of responsibility is relevant for them, and for my relationship with them. In my eyes, that boils it down to a question of trust and fear. Am I afraid of my students, or of what they could accomplish? Do I trust them with powers of self-direction? Do I prefer that my students go through life believing that “being good” and following directions will bring them success in life? What are my personal survival skills—and what, then, do I believe my students’ survival skills should be? Whether I believe in education for social justice or education for a decent job and stable future, self-direction, self-motivation, and critical thinking are crucial survival skills in this day and age for any human being.

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However, what I’ve found is that my students aren’t up to many of the challenges I’ve given them. They are intellectually capable, but have not learned how to listen to each other, speak with intention, interact positively with adults, act out of self-direction, or self-assess their thinking, work, or behavior. When I put them in a situation in which they must make their own decisions about their work, it typically results in low productivity and excessively disruptive behavior. They have been conditioned to expect direction and redirection ad nauseum; external evaluation and correction of their behavior, work, and attitude; constant demands for silence or fill-in-the-blank answers, etc. Any measure of intellectual freedom in school at this point is unfamiliar and overwhelming.

So the challenge is to figure out how to teach the skills a person needs to take advantage of intellectual freedom. I have to figure out how to ease them into it with a structure that supports without smothering. This is where I think Montessori truly got it right: the skills of self-assessment and self-direction as well as speaking, listening, and positively interacting are taught there in pre-K, and cultivated as habits throughout elementary school. If a child has a problem, he uses the resources at hand to figure out how to solve it. But my students have been taught for years that the correct response to having a problem is to raise your hand and ask someone else to solve it for you—and that training continues to be reinforced throughout high school in the name of covering material. Last week, we spent our class time discussing the purposes of education and personal goals. It was a productive activity, but in hindsight I don’t think they’re prepared to make meaning out of discussion at this point. They can generate statements about their own beliefs when given specific questions, but cannot yet engage with each other’s statements.

I know I’m not exactly responding to the prompt here. I think I try to respond to this particular prompt with every lesson plan I’ve written for my class, and my point is that what we’re figuring out as new teachers is not only our beliefs about children and teaching, but how to implement the technical side of things—how to translate these beliefs into the daily practice of breaking big ideas down into small digestible pieces that look good enough to eat.

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Given the dismal life prospects for many of our inner-city children, who overall receive poorer quality schooling and are disadvantaged because of their racial, cultural and socioeconomic background, it seems that our major role should be to help them achieve academically at the highest levels possible, aiming for above grade-level performance, if only to give them a fighting chance in our increasingly uncertain and competitive world. If we want them to perform at high levels, we must focus on literacy and math more intensively. This is in contrast with more privileged children who come to school prepared to learn and equipped with higher vocabulary and whose schools may try to foster multiple intelligences and engage them in all kinds of creative endeavors. It seems that this is not option for our disadvantaged children, who start school less prepared, unless we lengthen their school day. And so we feel we must make difficult choices and prioritize only that which is most important for their future success, neglecting those “extra” enrichment activities. It would seem that we cannot afford to take the time to teach our inner city children to develop multiple intelligences, if we want them to get high reading scores that will translate into high SAT scores that will get them accepted to college.

Could this be a false choice, though? Do we really have to choose between intensive instruction and creativity? Must creativity fall to the wayside if we are to teach lifelong reading and writing skills effectively with the time we are given? If not, the question then becomes: what is creativity and how could we teach it? Can it be integrated into the curriculum or is it a way of teaching and learning? “All children are born artists,” said Picasso, and “we are educating people out of their creative capacities,” adds Ken Robinson. The key is then to design environments that foster creative thinking and learning, where mistakes are normal and tolerated, where play is seen as an opportunity to come up with original ideas or model novel ways of doing things, and where children have opportunities to ask meaningful questions and learn to brainstorm. A few steps in that direction may open up wide avenues for children to explore new ideas and follow new thoughts, especially those whose strengths lie elsewhere than in sitting down and writing. In a world where innovation and creativity are increasingly important ways to adapt to an ever-changing society, it may be that our inner-city kids need that outside-the-box thinking more than other kids! And as the world grows in complexity and challenge, we may find that we need to teach more creative thinking and less sitting and absorbing.

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What to do, what to do?! I say let them eat cake…or in this case, talk. But then enters the problem of what authority do I, as a UTC resident, hold in comparison to the founder and decision maker of my school. The answer is none. I hold no authority, I therefore feel compelled to comply with what the school rules and guidelines expect. But how does sitting and simply dealing with circumstances that I don’t agree with make me a coffee bean. It doesn’t. So I need to act, or do something, that will somehow combine the school requirements with my own beliefs. Can yin and yang ever truly fit together though? Well duh, that’s how we get the Yin-Yang…so I guess it’s up to me, as a coffee bean, to fight (appropriately and with understanding) for what I feel is necessary within the classroom. I just thought my way into a whole lot of responsibility. In the very least, I can let my kids talk to each other at lunch…I just need to soundproof the classroom door.

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I feel that one of my struggles as a teacher is to find the balance between sticking to the primary goal of teaching my students and finding the time to listen to their life stories as well. I know ultimately these two aims are connected but the nine hour school day does not give the time or space for both of these objectives to be met. Some days, instead of teaching math, I simply want to facilitate an open discussion as to why some students hate math and refuse to do the work. I feel that in our school system, we focus so much on whether students are learning as opposed to how they feel about what they are learning and their reasons for learning. My school pushes this sense of urgency that time should never be wasted and that students should be learning at all time. I agree with this philosophy but I believe we should also take into consideration that students come to school with a variety of issues and instead of expecting them to leave everything at the door, schools should have a time set aside for teachers and administrators to talk to students about how they are feeling or for students to write in their personal journals. This time can also be spent working on character development and life skills.

I believe working this personal reflection time into the school day schedule will address some of the concerns bought up by the authors of “The Corner,” Jane Addams, and John Dewey. “The Corner” portrays a harsh world that some of our students are exposed to. It shows us that there is definitely the possibility that students may have a home life that completely contrasts with their safe and stable school life. By allowing students to have a personal reflection time during the school day, we can bridge this disconnection and show students that we not only care that they are learning but also we care as a whole about their physical, mental, and emotional beings. Similarly, Jane Addams and John Dewey advocate that we should get to know the whole child, not just the student that sits in our classroom. While this built-in reflection time may not be the solution for all of the problems with our education system, it is certainly a step forward as we concern ourselves not just with what our students are learning but also what they are going through in their lives.

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Response on Ethics and Education

Dewey is so dense, and I mean that in a complimentary way, that responding to the entire essay feels overwhelming. Instead, I’ll pull out 3 different points that I was able to make a personal connection to. Hopefully these connections will prove useful in my ability to take action in the social world, rather than as entertaining insights, whose usage cannot extend when actually in the water.

1. “Any conditions which compel the teacher to take note of failures rather than of healthy growth put the emphasis in the wrong place and result in distortion and perversion” (p. 117).
At Baltimore Freedom Academy, in an attempt to make important information about students accessible to all staff, a teacher created individualized google documents for every middle school child. When you clicked on the student a two-tabbed spreadsheet would appear. One tab was a discipline log, a way to document transgressions and what if any follow up took place. The other tab was a parent call log. It struck me when looking over a few students’ spreadsheets that everything written in them was negative. Even the parent phone calls home were in response to misbehavior. I found this very disturbing and composed an email to our principal advocating for expanding the purpose of our google docs. Here are two excerpts from that email,
“…I think it would be great if these google docs could help to paint a more wholesome picture of our students. Instead of just our reactions to the bad things they do, I would love to see notes on some of their accomplishments in school. I’d love to see teachers make notes of strategies they have used with specific students that have proven successful so that I could implement those in my own classes. I’d love to hear about certain strengths adults have noticed about a student that I could build on.”
“Right now I’m concerned that we look at our kids in a negative light far more than in a positive light, and the current usage of google docs is both a reflection of that habit, and potentially a tool to reinforce that habit.”
My principal was in complete agreement and allowed me to add an additional tab that included student strengths/achievements/successful strategies for working with them. To date, I’ve been the only one to use the tab dedicated to healthy growth, but I’m confident that it will be utilized, and hopefully this will help widen the angle with which our staff views our students.

2. “What is needed is not a depreciation of form, but a correct placing of it…it must be kept in subordination to an end, and taught in relation to the end” (p. 122).
In our world of learning targets, objectives, and standards, there is a clear recognition of goal hierarchy. We are encouraged to use backwards planning from our longest term and most abstract goals to our day to day lessons. There is an insistence on the here and now being in service of something larger, and for us to not lose track of that higher end. We just had a professional development session where we were told that we should be able to justify our lesson’s activities in terms of their relevance to the learning target (which should be clearly and visibly displayed for children). Yet I still feel as if we are missing the point and Dewey I think does a good job of explaining why.
“The ultimate significance of lake, river, mountain, and plain is not physical but social; it is the part which it plays in modifying and functioning human relationship” (p. 124).
We are very intentional about number sense serving future math concepts, about phonemic awareness serving reading ability, but we seem to have neglected the even more fundamental question of what purpose does reading ability and calculus serve? This question leads back to the conversation of, “what is the point of education?” A question that is curiously absent from public dialogue considering all of the air time and consideration public education is currently receiving from the main stream media. Dewey has made his case for a holistic end which necessitates the intentional use of information in real actions to better society, which also requires emotional tools in order to effectively navigate. But Bill Gates, one of the most influential people in public schools today thinks that the point of education is “to build a 21st century economy” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/27/AR2011022702876.html). The same learning targets, objectives, and standards that we are given would be executed in very different ways depending on that highest end that we are working towards. It is my opinion that we have not fully attempted to clarify this highest end as a society.

3. “The introduction of every method which appeals to the child’s active powers, to his capacities in construction, production, and creation, marks an opportunity to shift the center of ethical gravity from an absorption which is selfish to a service which is social” (p. 120).
“In keeping the powers at work upon their relevant ends, there is sufficient opportunity for genuine inhibition. To say that inhibition is higher than power of direction, morally, is like saying that death is worth more than life, negation worth more than affirmation, sacrifice worth more than service” (p. 136).
In my Mind Brain and Education program last year, inhibition was considered a skill to be fostered, an executive function associated with the prefrontal cortex whose development was statistically correlated with later life success. It always made sense to me yet I’d feel uncomfortable when talking about it. It did not inspire me the same way that fostering student agency, voice, and morality did because it seemed more in line with conformity than active transformation of the system. Dewey strikes a nice balance here by saying that inhibition does not come first, but it is still important, as a tool for maintaining the momentum of one’s chosen direction. A less abstract example of what this might look like on the ground is an elementary school I heard about where students begin every day by writing their plan for the day. They have tons of room to decide what they intend to accomplish and how, but, once they choose that plan they are obligated to stick with it even if their desires move elsewhere. It doesn’t feel perfect because then you’re inhibiting the youthful spirit, but it feels like an earnest attempt to get the best of both worlds.

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The students are different from the other students I have worked with in the past. The primary difference is that these students seem so much older than their age – they seem to understand deeper truths about themselves and the world than their suburban counterparts. They are young and old all at the same time. Just the other day, a student reminded me that he is 12 years old. I was surprised – somehow I was perceiving him as a high school student; in spirit, the students are much older than their years.

It amazes me that the students possess such great maturity but are often not given the opportunity to think for themselves in the classroom. They have seen so much and through their vast experiences, they have so much richness to ring to a conversation. Yet, school is a place where we strip them of their personalities and even of their ability to be human.

One of my favorite authors is Madeleine L’Engle, and I remember enjoying her novel, “A Wrinkle in a Time” as a child. This school year, We began by reading that book, and I was surprised that none of the seventh grade boys connected their current schooling predicament to the planet named Camazotz in the novel. On Camazotz, all the people are the same, and their minds are controlled by IT – a brain that controls everything and dehumanizes all people by removing their uniqueness, their flaws, and their ability to think for themselves.

While reading the book, I saw my students, looking the same in their uniforms, acting the same out of fear, and not thinking critically but giving the teacher the answers they knew she wanted to hear. There was no discussion, no practical application, no connections made to real life, and certainly no creativity. Like Camazotz, our school houses the greatest evil; we strip students of their humanness only so they can achieve certain arbitrary scores and move on to the next grade. We remove all beauty, all creativity, all of the flaws and failures. We teach our student’s the educational system, bit we fail to teach them how to be people.

I connect with John Dewey when he writes about teaching students how to swim without water. When an education is not applicable to the real world, it is worthless. Without action, knowledge has no purpose. Education should not be oppressive, but liberating.

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