Ypres, 1915
Although he had been a doctor for years and had served in the South African War, Canadian Major John McCrae became overwhelmed by his experience in his 17 days as a surgeon near Ypres, Belgium. He later wrote of it:
"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."
While there he scribbled these lines:
"In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields."
-- Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae
I salute those who have lived, and died, for their country.
11/7/10
11/2/10
More Edu-speak
"Show me a kid who understands that he is 'synthesizing, analyzing and evaluating the validity and reliability of information from multiple sources,' and I’ll show you a wise, old owl, aka curriculum writer."
- Melinda Ehrlich, in response to this article in Education Next, Data-Driven and Off Course.
More on it later. Until then,
Vote and Read Well, Friend
- Melinda Ehrlich, in response to this article in Education Next, Data-Driven and Off Course.
More on it later. Until then,
Vote and Read Well, Friend
11/1/10
This is Teaching?
I know I've been out of education-speak for a while, but what does this mean? "...a constructivist design process should be concerned with designing environments which support the construction of knowledge, which...provides an Intellectual Toolkit to Facilitate an Internal Negotiation Necessary for Building Mental Models"? I posted this lovely bit of edu-speak on Facebook a while back. I'm studying to take a Principles of Learning and Teaching (Praxis II) test to get re-certified to teach, and found this "explanation" on a university website.
Why do college professors and researchers, (and politicians, I might add), so often think that big words and complicated phrases are a sign of big intelligence? I know that special areas of knowledge need specialized vocabulary, but shouldn't that vocabulary help clarify, not obscure, meaning? To what degree does language like this serve as some sort of group marker -- "If you can talk like this you're one of us and if you can't you're obviously not, you inferior, teeny-brained life form."
What particularly kills me about this is that it's taken from a site designed to help explain these topics to education students. I got my degree 30 years ago, so I've been out of the "research talk" loop for a long time, and I'm not surprised at finding myself needing to make an effort to wrap my head around some of the vocabulary again. But if someone who claims to be a teacher can't explain their point more clearly than this, I think there's a problem. What is teaching but, on some level, the quest to make the currently unknown knowable to our students? If those who teach our teachers can't or won't do this, then why are we so surprised that people aren't learning?
Communication should be the foundation of teaching. If I have the background needed, and the desire to learn, and you can't explain it in a way that makes sense to me, then guess what? Maybe YOU'RE NOT A VERY GOOD TEACHER! That goes for my college Calculus teacher who thought writing the answers to the practice problems on the board and then walking out of the room was teaching. And to my Tae-Kwan-Do teacher who kept telling me I wasn't holding the baton-thingy wrong, but wouldn't tell me how to correct it. If you can't explain constructivism to me in a way I can grasp and apply, then there's a problem. Maybe you don't really understand it yourself. Maybe it's a very vague concept, and thus probably not all that useful to some fourth grade teacher in a real classroom anyway. Or perhaps you're not really trying, but using lazy thinking and regurgitated phrases. But it's also possible that you're not good at explaining things so others can understand them. In that case, perhaps you shouldn't be teaching, and certainly not teaching those who will be teaching our young. If you can't lead by example, then maybe it's time for you to get out of the classroom and let in people who can.
Back to the flash cards. "Constructivism is a theory of learning based on the idea that..."
Read Well, Friend
Why do college professors and researchers, (and politicians, I might add), so often think that big words and complicated phrases are a sign of big intelligence? I know that special areas of knowledge need specialized vocabulary, but shouldn't that vocabulary help clarify, not obscure, meaning? To what degree does language like this serve as some sort of group marker -- "If you can talk like this you're one of us and if you can't you're obviously not, you inferior, teeny-brained life form."
What particularly kills me about this is that it's taken from a site designed to help explain these topics to education students. I got my degree 30 years ago, so I've been out of the "research talk" loop for a long time, and I'm not surprised at finding myself needing to make an effort to wrap my head around some of the vocabulary again. But if someone who claims to be a teacher can't explain their point more clearly than this, I think there's a problem. What is teaching but, on some level, the quest to make the currently unknown knowable to our students? If those who teach our teachers can't or won't do this, then why are we so surprised that people aren't learning?
Communication should be the foundation of teaching. If I have the background needed, and the desire to learn, and you can't explain it in a way that makes sense to me, then guess what? Maybe YOU'RE NOT A VERY GOOD TEACHER! That goes for my college Calculus teacher who thought writing the answers to the practice problems on the board and then walking out of the room was teaching. And to my Tae-Kwan-Do teacher who kept telling me I wasn't holding the baton-thingy wrong, but wouldn't tell me how to correct it. If you can't explain constructivism to me in a way I can grasp and apply, then there's a problem. Maybe you don't really understand it yourself. Maybe it's a very vague concept, and thus probably not all that useful to some fourth grade teacher in a real classroom anyway. Or perhaps you're not really trying, but using lazy thinking and regurgitated phrases. But it's also possible that you're not good at explaining things so others can understand them. In that case, perhaps you shouldn't be teaching, and certainly not teaching those who will be teaching our young. If you can't lead by example, then maybe it's time for you to get out of the classroom and let in people who can.
Back to the flash cards. "Constructivism is a theory of learning based on the idea that..."
Read Well, Friend
10/21/10
It's All Moot Anyway
It came up first on Says You!, that PBS radio game of "words and whimsy, bluff and bluster" that's always entertaining. When they asked their panelists to define the word moot, you just knew there had to be a catch. It means not worth talking about, right, a moot point being something that's already been decided? Not exactly. It turns out moot is a bit like inflammable -- it does and it doesn't, if you get my meaning. Yes, one definition of it is "of no legal significance," probably because it's already been decided. I always thought that's what a moot court was -- law students sitting around arguing cases that had already been decided, just for the practice. But it turns out that the word moot is also defined as "arguable or open to debate, as in 'that's a moot question.'"
It got worse when I turned to Merriam-Webster online for help. There it's considered perfectly fine to use moot as a verb meaning to bring up for discussion, i.e. "broach", but it's obsolete to use it in terms of a legal debate, though a moot court is still one in which law students argue hypothetical cases. Oh well. Glancing further down I see that Merriam-Webster thinks that the words moot and mute rhyme, which they clearly do not, so I now feel justified in throwing their opinion out all together. The baby and the bathwater approach works just fine for me, thank you. However, I still have two pretty contradictory definitions using moot as a adjective -- 1. Debatable or 2. Not worth debating because it's already settled or has no meaning.
By the way, the word moot comes from the Ole English gemot which was a meeting of freemen where various affairs and legal issues were discussed. That comes from the Germanic word motam, also meeting. So though the word-pure among us consider that moot actually means worthy of holding a meeting and discussing, it seems we in the US, at least, have taken the legal idea of a hypothetical debate, and turned moot into a word not worth talking about. Thus my frustration while watching Law and Order: SVU yesterday when I informed the actors, "Who cares who gets jurisdiction, you just proved he was insane at the time of the crime so it's a m--t point!" Help! I obviously need a new word for the second meaning of moot. Any suggestions? I suppose I could say hypothetical, but it just “ain’t got that swing,” you know?
Oh, and if you’re looking for some help rhyming, please don’t turn to Merriam-Webster. Moot and mute, indeed.
Read Well, Friend
It got worse when I turned to Merriam-Webster online for help. There it's considered perfectly fine to use moot as a verb meaning to bring up for discussion, i.e. "broach", but it's obsolete to use it in terms of a legal debate, though a moot court is still one in which law students argue hypothetical cases. Oh well. Glancing further down I see that Merriam-Webster thinks that the words moot and mute rhyme, which they clearly do not, so I now feel justified in throwing their opinion out all together. The baby and the bathwater approach works just fine for me, thank you. However, I still have two pretty contradictory definitions using moot as a adjective -- 1. Debatable or 2. Not worth debating because it's already settled or has no meaning.
By the way, the word moot comes from the Ole English gemot which was a meeting of freemen where various affairs and legal issues were discussed. That comes from the Germanic word motam, also meeting. So though the word-pure among us consider that moot actually means worthy of holding a meeting and discussing, it seems we in the US, at least, have taken the legal idea of a hypothetical debate, and turned moot into a word not worth talking about. Thus my frustration while watching Law and Order: SVU yesterday when I informed the actors, "Who cares who gets jurisdiction, you just proved he was insane at the time of the crime so it's a m--t point!" Help! I obviously need a new word for the second meaning of moot. Any suggestions? I suppose I could say hypothetical, but it just “ain’t got that swing,” you know?
Oh, and if you’re looking for some help rhyming, please don’t turn to Merriam-Webster. Moot and mute, indeed.
Read Well, Friend
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