From teaching children to draw straight lines in numeracy
classes to insisting on specific fingers in music lessons, we all have
championed principles around which our profession has been built with neither
any consideration for the uniqueness of learners nor any thought for their
individual preferences. What if I want to draw curves? What if the idea of not
pleasing my teacher terrifies me? What if I prefer to have my right hand up on
the saxophone? Why doesn’t anyone tell instrument makers to make saxophones the
other way? If everyone thought the same way about the same things there would
be no inventors on the planet.
We evolved ‘standard’ expectations which have held too many
children back for too long. We think this or that is why they are in school. We
leave little room, or none at all, for expecting them to be themselves. Sport
coaches have had to bench students who got low grades in math. Worse, we sold
these ideas to parents. At a time the best singer in school got denied
performances because her dad felt awful with her grades in an examination which
has no bearing on the girl’s preference – music. Good to mention that some
parents didn’t buy into it. I once had a mother who pulled her daughter out of
the laboratory to my music room afternoon after afternoon.
Understand, students are humans, albeit young. They came to
this planet on purpose. That one reason should drive our school system. The day
– or semester – we begin to care less about language grades when a student is
soaring in physics, is the day school gets worth their while. Let them be! Let
them take the lessons knowing they don’t have to fit our stereotypes. We have
gained too little developing children from neck up. This principle of erroneous
perception of learners’ purpose is a societal fault line needing an
immediate fix.
Fixing the Pompous Principle
At a jazz masterclass I asked a Berklee professor what was
paramount on his mind whenever he taught his students. Permit me to paraphrase
his answer here: “I know they have come to learn, but I also know I could learn
from them.” A professor of music, I had thought, shouldn’t have anything to
learn in that field from anybody for that matter, let alone a student of music.
Well, I was wrong. He learns a great deal from them. In contrary, I hear about
a teacher shutting up a child who finished a sentence for her. Why teachers feel
like horses drawing chariots will never be clear to twenty-first century learners.
The time has come for a test drive with students in the
driver’s seat. We shouldn’t be afraid to arrive at a place where our lesson
plan is no longer necessary especially if it can’t be adjusted in the learner’s
favour. Moreover, we should stop marking them wrong. Simply schedule a
discourse over what the lesson was about allowing them to share how they
conceived it. Then would we realize how wrongly we have been teaching and grasp
how best to communicate in such ways as they might be able to learn. The way
doctors think they are greater than their patients (until they get down with
something) is the same way teachers think they know more and can do better than
their students, until they find the words of Will Rogers to be true: “Everybody
is ignorant, only on different subjects.” Whether or not it evolved from the
school administrator’s perception of herself as higher than the janitor, we need
to correct this professional fault line of superfluous status now and always.
Fixing the Process Principle
If you don’t like meetings don’t become head of anything. In
the world we now live in there are many of them lacking objectivity. Then you
have to do a round of the stores, window-shopping. You would follow that up
with drawing papers to back-up your proforma invoice. What you have to do next
is another meeting with your supervisor to defend the papers you filed. There’s
one more meeting after that. It’s holds with the school administrator and, if
you don’t sound convincing enough – even if your students badly need the item
you requested – you’d need yet another meeting with the purchasing manager.
Beyond this point you have to hope the accounts director doesn’t think it’s too
expensive. And on it goes until you start wondering if you were hired to teach
or meet.
Creativity is lost in the maze of too many steps. Once the
path is cluttered the person is confused. The surest way to sicken a system is
to hire straight-jacket bureaucrats in the name of processes. An indication of
this may be found in meetings and procedures devoid of empirical substance. When
there is only one way to do right there is one certain result – death, from boredom and/or
disorientation. Nothing matches flexibility when it comes to running a
community of learners for passion is certain to wane should you have to sign
papers in four offices to get anything done. They were supposed to help keep a
structure in place but they do little else than ensure it crumbles on its own
head; or worse, crack open to swallow everything serving it. And so must we
overcome this administrative fault line or run the risk of demotivating our
work force.
Fixing the Promoter Principle
Discussing the fault lines in our education systems would be
an incomplete attempt if we don’t zero-in on the classroom experience. Students
sit in class for endless minutes listening to an ‘expert’ rant about the
wildest topic from the strangest subject. It was one head of school who made me
realize how strange the treble clef seems to dyslexics. I had always thought it
a very beautiful curve around five lines and the spaces in between so long as
you ensure it runs around the second line. Now, what in the world have I just
described and why should it run clock-wise around the second?
Seeing that all students can’t learn this way, I chose ever
since to trivialize and simplify that pitch symbol. To make it seem less of a
big deal, I suggest its function and make them play with it; to make it easier
to draw, I show rather than tell while engaging them with the actual pencil
work. This is what the science teacher ought to do rather than talk and give
lengthy notes to eleven-year-olds on separation techniques. Mix grains of sand
with a pinch or two of salt (sodium chloride) and share how this mixture could
be separated. Then leave them to do it. We would need fewer preps if we spread
out contact periods for real-time learning experiences than hoping they can ram
it in their heads from notes and textbooks. This productivity fault line can
be mended.
Fixing the Pointless Principle
There are more written assessment instruments in the world’s
educational institutions than there are skill-based assessment structures. What
is the appropriate measure of competence in vocational subjects – performance
and creativity or explanation in writing? Americans began to worry when jobs
went to Chinese firms no less than Africans express frustration when projects
go to German companies. How did we evolve a society in which government
contracts are won by foreign construction firms unchallenged by its people who
are not any less trained or skilled?
Government is constantly under pressure to create more jobs
at a time when schools are attempting to incorporate more vocational subjects
into the curriculum. Which should we clamour for – jobs in corporations or
entrepreneurial vocations – if we were certain that either would function at
their very best? One reads in the dailies sickening reports of ailing African
leaders who spend billions of dollars on foreign medical treatments, the kind
of funds more than sufficient to fix their country’s health systems. Why should
we raise professors of medicine who can’t/don’t treat their country’s ailing
government officials because foreign medical trips are alluring tours?
Although fixing fault lines in governance, key to a
better communal experience, is the responsibility of public office holders, it
must begin in school. No government will operate better than its nation’s
education system. No people will emerge a leader better than its finest
constituent fabric.
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