Clearing the cobwebs

Found this as I was cleaning files, and as it still rings true to me, will post it.

In twenty years in this “business” of schooling, I've only gradually come to the full realization that all the while I was trying to perfect my lesson plans, trying to understand how I could to come to that nirvana of the full filing cabinet of pre-made, already prepared lessons, I was pursuing failure. I’d mistaken effectiveness for efficiency, denied the inherent messiness crucial to any creative endeavor. I think, sometimes, that the biggest trouble with schooling – the reason that real innovation usually eludes us, is the field's self-perpetuating nature. Those who did best under the industrial era model are now running the show. These are the “good” students – you know, the ones who don't ask questions, don't rock the boat with “unusual” notions. Pair that tendency to complacency with a healthy dose of fear/respect for “authority” and it's a pretty reliable recipe for keeping to the quantifiable. Even when we know (and we do, most of us) that this isn't working to the benefit of our students, we frequently lack the imagination or the guts (or in some cases, both) to make it different. And if we succeed in small ways, we rarely know it – so we’re drawn to what “proves” the worth of what we’re doing – the test scores, the scholarships, the numbers game.
I recently had cause to pull out some old notes from students, (those all-too-rare and precious things you keep in the folder marked Sunshine and read when the darkness is really intimidating). Reading them over, I was struck by a refrain – it goes something like this: “You made it interesting” “I finally began to want to understand” “I used to hate English” and my all-time personal favorite, “You really wanted to know what we were thinking.” Looking back, yes, I did want to know – but that was a pretty suspect position. Why would we want to know what the students think? Don't we know what they ought to think?

So how do we overcome the fear, the layers of “good student” behavior that keep us lockstepping, leaving no children behind the numbers. We're born and/or borne, as Fitzgerald would have it, ceaselessly into the past – trying to create the schools we came from, perhaps consciously, perhaps not. Education rarely enters into schooling. Then, too, we often lack the intellectual stimulation necessary to successfully entertain new notions. Our own educations stagnate and stagger, victims of time, responsibilities and the numbers game. If our students are bored with our lessons as they so frequently claim, how much more so must we be if we've done the same thing for years on end?


There isn't a lesson plan on paper in this universe that can make that happen. All the precision planning and pursuit of test scores will not ever gain for us what we say we want as educators – to make a difference in the life of a child. Will a child remember that in your class you had beautiful lessons? Only if those lessons are true