If by chance you ever wonder about the value of what you are doing, or the value of your subject, I can recommend to you a short book by Iris Murdoch: The Sovereignty of Good. It was first published a few decades back. I've just discovered it thanks to a friend. It contains three short essays. If you have a background in philosophy (as she does), you might follow, better than I, her critique of existential moral philosophy. What I found exciting to read was her claim that Art and especially Literature as central to the development of the moral character and any notion of the Good. I have posted here, some quotes from the essays that should give you an idea of what to expect should to tackle the whole work.

Two Voices for Humanist Education

Delighted to find two more media voices in support of humanist education. Please visit the New York Times Opinion piece by David Brooks, who you might recognize from his appearance with Jim Lehrer on the PBS News Hour.

Then there is our own Rick Salutin, who began, on Saturday, a series about education and strikes similar notes about the destructive nature of Quality Management and measurement in education. Rick writes in part about Finland, some months after that country hit the news with its superlative educational results - and get this - without a testing and standardization regime. (The irony of this achievement being reported in terms of international test results is not lost on this reader, mind you.)

I'd just add that for a good introduction at least to how our current mess has evolved from perverse notions of "reason" after the enlightenment, do read John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards - and other of this works. He's onto the same cultural problem we are facing in schools.

Merit Pay??

Just in case you missed it, the Globe (Focus Section) of Feb. 6, 2010, did a good piece on merit pay, which has risen again after Barak Obama gave it a nod in the U.S. What I find interesting in this is that when the piece turns to the issue of who should decide on merit, the specter of test scores comes again.

The End of English

The End of English

Summary: Accountability lays the ideological groundwork for a challenge to the Humanist purposes of an education in English. Through its emphasis on measurement, testing, and information, it has transformed the value of English into data. The first stage in this transformation was the introduction of “standards” in the corporate model of the International Standards Organization (ISO) - statements of measurable results for each course of study. A natural concomitant was the creation of the Education Quality and Accountability Office and its regimen of testing to measure school achievement against these standards. Further progress in the diminution of English came as the new education corporation used tests to re-define literacy as a narrow band of skills and strategies, and supported it with enormous funding and resources. English teachers surrendered the term. During the period of reform in Ontario, our subject association, the Ontario Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts, collapsed, and the pressures of reform on local and provincial budgets also determined a huge loss in leadership positions for English across the province. There is an urgent need for us to revive democratic discussion of this new state of our subject, to re-assert our collective voice, and to reclaim the term “literacy” to mean competence in language that is inseparable from the construction of personal and cultural understanding.

English - for the 21st Century

Willard R. Daggett, Ed.D., President of the International Center for Leadership in Education, is recognized worldwide for his proven ability to move education systems towards more rigorous and relevant skills and knowledge for all students. He has assisted a number of states and hundreds of school districts with their school improvement initiatives, many in response to No Child Left Behind and its demanding adequate yearly progress (AYP) provisions. Dr. Daggett has also collaborated with education ministries in several countries and with the Council of Chief State School Officers, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Governors Association, and many other national organizations. The International Centre for Leadership in Education
And here's what Mr. Daggett had to say (Today's Students, Yesterday's Schooling) about English Instruction and its value in the 21st Century in an article in 1994, about the time Ontario education in English was about to face its biggest change in three decades.

Beating Testers at their Game

This anecdote reveals something interesting about the nature of testing and the way it construes literacy. It comes from the early days of Ontario's Literacy Test, but is perhaps the more astonishing considering that at the time the test (without the current course option) determined graduation. Laugh...and weep?

Elaine and the Literacy Test

A couple of years ago I spent about 20 hours with students at a local school who were most likely to fail the literacy test. Virtually all of them presented both ability and behavior problems, but as we progressed I felt perhaps half of them might succeed. Needless to say I focused on very pragmatic procedures.

Elaine was less cynical than most, but quiet and convinced she couldn't pass. She tried the strategies, and with encouragement seemed ready to give it her best shot. I was most anxious for her to succeed. But she didn't. Her score was 5 points off the pass mark, and the school was convinced it should appeal her result.

The appeal failed. It was my sense of what the whole ordeal had done to Elaine that prompted me to write this piece.

Provincial English Teacher Websites

There are just five provinces with active provincial English teacher associations with websites for networking. Ontario, the four Atlantic provinces, and the two territories do not have associations. Here are the links for the five active provinces.

British Columbia

Alberta

Saskatchewan

Manitoba

Quebec

Ontario Subject Associations

STAO, Science Teachers Association of Ontario

OAGEE, The Ontario Association for Geographic and Environmental Education

OAME, The Ontario Association for Mathematics Education

OHASTA, The Ontario History and Social Science Teachers’ Association

OPHEA, The Ontario Physical and Health Education Association

CODE, Council of Ontario Drama and Dance Educators

OSEA, The Ontario Society of Education through Art

OMLTA, The Ontario Modern Language Teachers’ Association

ORMTA, Ontario Registered Music Teachers’ Association

Why marks drop at university

Almost everyone has had occasion to look back upon his school days and wonder what has become of the knowledge he was suppose to have amassed during his years of schooling, and why it is that the technical skills he acquired have to be learned over again in changed form in order to stand him in good stead.

John Dewey, Experience and Education

This caught my attention as a teacher who has had to wonder why student marks drop in university, and why university professors don’t have an intelligent response beyond saying that high schools don’t do their job. The linked excerpt comes from Lapham’s Quarterly (Vol. I, Number 4, Fall 2008), and addresses schooling as “preparation” To extrapolate and apply, I think Dewey makes the point that when students learn how to write in high school English, they do so in response to particular teacher notions of what writing is for the material they are teaching. When those students go to university, they falter in the same task because they face another teacher with other notions of writing attached to the material they are teaching, which would seem to make it necessary that, in some degree, the teaching of writing needs to begin again as the university’s responsibility to its students.

On Line Teaching

You might be quite surprised to find how easy it is for you to create a plan of work for some of your students using on line tools and applications. A blog, for example, can be the "home page" of a website you create with instructions for work, and links for students to follow to the appropriate research sites, or to sites where they can, themselves, create web pages that will look quite professional.

Here's an example.

Teaching Poetry

Experiencing Poetry describes an approach for secondary students that tries to side-step, for a time, the thorny issue of "meaning" in order to encourage an experience of poetry by close observation, rather as one might look for a time at visual art, giving it the kind of attention that eventually draws from it some significance. I've published in on Scribd (see link in the sidebar) so that you can see how that application works.

English in the Counting House

The Queen was in the parlour

Eating bread and honey.

The King was in the Counting House

Counting out his money.

As a consultant, I often recounted this story when in the company of Ontario teachers who were panicked by the number of Expectations (outcomes, standards, what you will) they had to address. The panic is different in the elementary and secondary panels, but equally formidable. The elementary teacher is obliged to address dozens and dozens of Expectations from different subjects; the secondary teacher may address three complete sets of Expectations in different courses, and for over a hundred students in each semester of the year.

My story was about a time when I took some senior high school students to a “conference” at the University of Guelph. The conference was a marketing tool. Students could chose to attend workshops or demonstrations in a subject they might study should they choose to go to Guelph.

I thought, heck, I’m not going to listen to some English prof, so I headed to a Physics demonstration on the electron microscope. The fellow there had a stack of large photographic images in front of him, taken by the microscope. The top photograph in the pile, he pointed out, was an image of a small blemish on his arm. But when we looked at it, he drew our attention, not to the blemish, but to the space surrounding it, and to another “spot” in that space.

He carefully set that top image aside, and showed us the second photo which enlarged, and focused on the new “spot,” but again, after pointing it out, he moved our attention to the surrounding areas, and to another tiny spot. Naturally, the next image (#3) was of that spot, further enlarged and with larger spaces surrounding it and, of course, a new spot for our attention. On to image 4….and so on, and so on, and so on for several images that followed.

This raised, for me, an epiphany, and I asked a question something like this: “So what you’re saying is that, depending only on what visual aids we can devise, I could look further and further into my surface and discover there almost an infinity of space?” Yup, he replied.

Needless to say I was struck, like Hamlet, by an understanding that stops action dead in its tracks – which is just about how teachers have felt about the new standards curriculum.

Only, gazing at the standards curriculum is knowledge of a different sort. It’s sort of like someone put on a pair of goofy analytical glasses that made them think they could see infinitely into the structure of learning about language, literature, culture and self, and the wonky glasses engendered a gleeful curricular madness that got set to paper and has become the new “vision” of English. And now we are panicked, gazing at it all. But our inertia is not like the intelligence that paralyzed Hamlet. Our paralysis is more like what we feel when we meet a Polonius: “My God, the man can’t be serious!”

Some time ago, John Steinbeck wrote his take on the Arthurian Legend. In it, Sir Kay was the knight who stayed home to count the equipment and monies available for quest. The rest of the knights and ladies went out on quest, and are remembered for the adventures Sir Kay missed.

So much for the bean counters, and the curriculum model that envisons countless things to do.