A curriculum alone is not the path from good to great

May 17, 2008

The Path from Good to Great: Curriculum . . . Not!

By Allan Roy Andrews

Imagine a high school faculty as a collection of music-lovers.

Some favor classical music. These are the sophisticates with a long history of excellence and a precision of melody rarely matched in any other genre.

Imagine many who favor popular music. These are the bedrock of community. They comprise by far the largest collection of fans (and teachers). This is the music of the majority: Among their icons are Elvis, the Beatles, and ‘Ole Blue Eyes.’ Crooners and Rockers provide the music of historical landmarks: first date, first kiss, first heartbreak, first triumph.

Band music lovers are revered in educational institutions, perhaps because band music is the music of institutions with the military and the battlefield always in view. It is the music of discipline and precision, if not of tune certainly of choreography. This is the music of celebration; the music of victory.

A few faculty members favor country music. These are the patriots and the blue-collar bedrock. This is the music of trains and pick-up trucks with the themes of troubles and moaning. This is a world of values, where honesty trumps perfection, and sincerity defeats phoniness.

Pockets of this imaginary faculty are niche music-lovers. There are those who favor folk music, often with overtones of political activism. There are some with special tastes who favor Irish music or Celtic music, Italian love songs or German drinking songs. Drama-lovers lean toward show tunes, whether from the stage or the cinema.

A yet smaller cadre leans toward rap or hip-hop music, often defining an ethnic minority. In the classroom, the elders tolerate this genre as the choice of the immature.

In a religious institution, there are those who favor sacred music, often sung by choirs. Some favor praise music, celebrating the body and voice as instruments of worship. In many ways, the popular religious music sector mimics the secular music world, altering lyrics and themes with an eye toward God. (Unfortunately, the eye too frequently focuses on the performing ‘I’ who is doing the singing or praising.)

And in some dusty corner of the campus, there are the jazz fans. Typically, these are the least tolerated among the imaginary faculty. This is the music of chaos and improvisation. Of all genres, this is the music that defies curriculum. It is the music of nonconformists; it is the sound of the institution being challenged.

Enter the education mechanics who are laying the track for moving the institution from good to great. With their devotion to curriculum development, they leave little or no space for chaos, improvisation, and challenges to conventional wisdom. Curriculum does not easily tolerate jazz.

Please understand carefully my argument here: I am not opposing curriculum development. What I’m opposing is the tyranny of curriculum that brooks no questioning or challenging of the conformity that curriculum development demands. If it helps our understanding, let me propose an anti-curriculum component to the curriculum. Give the jazz-lovers the opportunity to improvise and experiment. A good deal of learning comes out of chaos.

When curriculum is king (or queen), an educational institution demonstrates that its goal is not education in the most clear and critical sense of encouraging the liberal (read as liberated—“. . . and the truth shall set you free”) mind; instead, it is driving toward conformity.

I write this with some passion since a favorite colleague of mine recently was refused a new contract because, as the conventional wisdom and the music-lovers’ gossip net puts it, “she didn’t follow the curriculum.” As I write this, I replay images of the arguments made against an excellent teacher—Mr. Keating-- in the film “The Dead Poets Society.” Don’t try to change things, he is instructed, “the curriculum is set!”

The institution at which this woman taught postures itself as one moving from good to great, and in making that move it has developed a strong attachment to its curriculum, as if curricula somehow define an excellent school. This is an idea, incidentally, that is out-of-hand rejected by those who have championed the good-to-great movement in education.

Curriculum is a guide, a sign-post suggesting the direction in which education should be traveling; it is not a lock-step straight-jacket that prevents educators from experimentation, improvisation, and—I dare say—failure.

The educational mechanics who demand strict conformity to a set curriculum unwittingly are driving toward educational fascism. As another former colleague of mine put it shortly before he departed this same school, “We’re educating the mind but not the imagination.”

I love the expression of another colleague, a younger woman who this year decided to leave her job and return to graduate school. “I’m often frustrated by the curriculum,” she told me. “What I want them to know is that in my classes I am the curriculum!”

I don’t know this for sure, but I’d guess in her heart—and in the hearts of my other dismissed or disappointed colleagues--there’s a soft spot for improvisational jazz.

Reading Philosophy Can Be Fun

April 15, 2008

Exposing the humor and leisure of thinking

By Allan Roy Andrews

At one time, I worked as a young, aspiring academic teaching psychology to students in a community college. While there, I offered a manuscript to a book salesman who took it to his editors for critique. My manuscript amounted to a prolegomenon to the study of psychology (of course, I avoided using the word prolegomenon because only philosophers, theologians and literary critics use such a term). I called my offering, Getting Psyched: An Introduction to the Introduction to Psychology. (Agents and publishers take note: I still have the manuscript tucked away somewhere in my garage.)

In my proposed little book, I argued that every psychologist begins the study of human behavior from a perspective that presupposes some view of humankind, a philosophical anthropology, if you will.

After his editors had a look at it, the salesman-friend came to me with the manuscript containing one word circled in red in several places by one of his editors. My book couldn’t sell, he told me in earnest seriousness, because I had used a word that self-respecting psychologists never use; the word was philosophy! Yes, those were the days in which psychology was dominated by behaviorists and multivariate statisticians who saw themselves as scientists laboring with difficulty to break away from the casual subjectivity of philosophy.

How I wish now I could have turned to my bookcase and pulled out one or all three of the books I’m about to describe. This incident, of course, preceded the phenomenon of the “For Dummies” series, though that genre of books doesn’t introduce any subject with the talent and verve contained in the books I’m urging upon my audience here.

Reading philosophy can be fun and of great value--even for psychologists and other overly serious thinkers.

To support this assertion, I suggest a perusal of three books, one more than a decade old and two others of more recent vintage. Even if one has never read another publication related to philosophy, one should take up these three books and read. They clearly demonstrate that one can be at ease while confronting the conundrums of human thought.

The oldest of the three is a book that masks as a novel. In Sophie’s World, published in 1994, author Jostein Gaarder, a Norwegian high-school teacher, set out to interest his children in philosophy and wound up writing a surprising international best-seller. Most critics have derided Gaarder’s fiction, but they’ve judged his exposition of philosophy from the Garden of Eden to the Big Bang theory of cosmology as first-class.

The sub-title of Gaarder’s book is “A novel about the history of philosophy,” and each narrative chapter interweaves a summary of an epoch in Western philosophical thought.

A colleague at my school confessed after reading Gaarder’s book that he understood Plato’s analogy of the cave for the first time, and a woman in a study group that I am a part of told us that she never read or understood philosophy at all until her husband introduced her to Sophie’s World.

The second of my triad of books is a non-fiction text aimed at teachers (and I mean authentic teachers, those who nurture pupils in grades 4-8). It is a volume for the philosophically challenged called Little Big Minds, a textbook of sorts for those who believe they’d like to share philosophy with children.

The author, educator and consultant Marietta McCarty, has been introducing philosophy to kids in elementary schools for more than 15 years. In her words, “kids are natural philosophers.” The sub-title of her book explains her conviction: “Sharing Philosophy with Kids.”

McCarty takes a topical approach—friendship, responsibility, happiness, justice, and so on through freedom and love—for 15 chapters. Each topical chapter focuses on a philosopher or pair of philosophers; e.g., Time: Augustine and Alan Watts. The exposition is followed with lesson ideas and discussion topics for presenting the topics and thinkers to young minds; i.e., to “Little Big Minds.”

Of course, one is guaranteed that by taking the plunge into a book aimed at teaching children one is bound to learn a great deal for oneself. I believe it was Gail Sheehy, the author of several popular psychology books in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who confessed that one of her secrets of doing research was to first visit a children’s library and find the wonderful books that aim at teaching difficult subjects to kids. Her point, of course, is that one can learn a lot from kids—or from teaching kids. McCarty would certainly concur.

My third recommendation is a joke book written by two New England students of philosophy (and graduates of Harvard’s philosophy program) who seem to have found their niche in humor. It comes from the best-seller lists of 2007; it is a tiny book called Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar. The title alone hints that philosophy and humor await anyone who delves into its pages.

Authors Tom Cathcart and Dan Klein clearly have recognized the affinities between college teachers of philosophy and stand-up comedians. It’s difficult at times to tell whether they have written an introduction to philosophy punctuated with jokes or a contemporary joke book interlaced with lessons from philosophy. Either way, one is treated to sane thinking and wry humor because the authors rightly recognize that philosophy and comedy both attempt to turn things upside down and challenge us with what is uncomfortable about life.

To be sure, many of the jokes are corny or bawdy or both, and much of the philosophy is secular and simplified, but both are presented in a relaxed and easy-to-take manner. Cathcart and Klein clearly not only want their readers to think, they want them to relax and smile while doing so.

The authors of each of the three books I’m suggesting to readers in their own way exhibit elements of leisure at the root of their writing. Gaarder in mystery and fantasy; McCarty in childishness and innocence; and Cathcart and Klein in humor and dilemma. They seem to grasp the true meaning of being at leisure and they recommend it. So I recommend them to anyone seeking to be at ease with the puzzlements of life.

Unpacking silence: An informal exercise

April 13, 2008

Unpacking silence: An exercise for an online course, "The Uses of Silence,"

taught by Maggie Ross for the Church Divinity School of the Pacific's CALL program.

By Allan Roy Andrews

Without a doubt, some ancient Greek philosopher first framed the question, but I learned it from reading Heidegger; it goes something like this: “Why is there something, rather than nothing?”

To add to my bewilderment, today my son and I read on a car waiting at a traffic light in front of us this bumper sticker: “The best of things is not a thing.”

And many of us have been moved by the Vietnam era anthem made popular by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel—“The Sounds of Silence.” (Do I hear paradoxical intention in these words?)

I am objecting to the phrase that describes our course, “The Uses of Silence.” Silence is not an object.

My sense is that “use” is part of our commercial, materialistic, attainment society. To make myself more clear, you are going to have to indulge a bit of my professional rantings. Back in the 1990s, one of the slogans of the newspaper industry—as well as of the TV and radio business mavens—urged editors and reporters to give readers or listeners (called consumers in this mentality) “news they could use.” This became of course a slogan aimed at increasing revenue and marketing the daily news much as if it were a consumable commodity.

A little more than a decade ago I wrote a column criticizing the “news you can use” mentality. Let me offer a précis of my argument:

“Of what use to readers is news that enemy combatants are mercilessly killing each other? Of what use is it that a man with a gun in Utah went on a rampage and killed three people? Of what use to readers is the news that a father and son perished in an airplane crash in Wyoming last week?

“What these stories do is challenge our comfort zones and remind us of the frailty of human existence. Such stories should arouse compassion and move us to acts of charity and correction. We report the horrors of war in a faint hope that future wars can be averted.”

My complaint went on to defend the freedom of the press and to castigate the business school mentality that sees the sale of the news as the bottom line of journalism.

I hear echoes of that mentality in the phrase the “use of silence.” It’s as if this course is not going to have any value to those enrolled in it unless they can somehow devise a way to “use” silence in developing some programmatic spirituality.

Whatever silence is, it is not a marketable commodity; it is not something we can dress up with colors and images, not something we can package, sweeten and sell; it is not something we can promote or seek to turn into a profitable object; it is not another form of indulgences. In a word, it is not something we use!

I respond appreciatively to those who describe silence as a phenomenon in unity with language; the negative spaces of the painter; the spaces between the notes of the composer; the time of absorption at the close of a homily.

I prefer to think of silence as a revelation, or better perhaps, as a revealer. It is not something we discover or grow into or develop with varieties of practices. It is more of a gift; a gift we perhaps need to learn to accept or to open without cost or benefit.

The verse in the psalms that we all know usually translated: “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10 KJV), is better translated as “Desist, and know I am God” or “Be at leisure, and know I am God.”

To me the psalmist appears to be implying that silence (or leisure) can reveal something to us.

As I told Maggie, I’m still unpacking this for myself. I have to stop here. This is thinking by writing--perfect fodder for a blogger.

Taking an online course: "The Uses of Silence"

March 30, 2008

Uses of Silence

I enrolled in an online continuing education course called "The Uses of Silence" taught by Maggie Ross (aka Martha Reeves)for the Center for Anglican Living and Learning at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific.

I've taken several courses through CDSP, most of them in the Anglican Studies category. I latched on to this program many years ago when I signed up to read Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk.

For the most part, my classes have been stimulating and rewarding. The idea of going through six weeks of study with people whose faces I never see is a bit disconcerting, but it has advantages, too. No one gets bogged down in fashion, as it were, and most people have to think before they communicate (mostly by Blackboard messages and e-mails). At any rate, I'm using the course as an excuse to write something for this blog.

I've always been convinced that most of us--especially those who spend their lives in the media--are challenged by silence; in fact, many are frightened and made anxious by it.

Certainly, Maggie Ross is not one of those. She recently placed "Silence" in the Museum of Curiosity, a clever, comical, and conspiratorial BBC radio program. I say it's conspiratorial because under its guise of comedy and light-hearted banter, it weighs heavy in its considerations. Of course it is restricted by the superficiality it presses into 30 or so minutes.

Speaking as Martha Reeves on the March 26 program, Ross raised some interesting ideas and challenges--not only regarding silence but also regarding her own theological stance on things such as the definition of God and whether or not she believes that Jesus was the "Son of God."

Stop back here for further reflections.

Browsing and reading in the age of the Hyperlink

March 27, 2008

Reading and the Internet:

BROWSING AND READING IN THE AGE OF THE HYPERLINK
By Allan Roy Andrews

---

This column was originally posted on January 2, 2005, as part of a collection of columns.

ANNAPOLIS, MD -- (January, 2005) —

Remember the time you turned to the dictionary to look up a word and got sidetracked by another word or words along the way, eventually closing the book before finding the word you sought in the first place?

There's a subtle pattern in this activity that's important to understanding the modern mind of adolescence, and especially the mind of the adolescent reader.

That you are reading this column indicates, I suspect, that you are one of those persons who picks up a newspaper or goes online for leisure, sits, and relaxes by scanning some generally innocuous words. O.K., so you're doing so now with a computer, but, admit it, you still like to read the newspaper.

Modern adolescents are far less likely to engage in such activity.
A study of young readers and where they get their news—a study now almost a decade old— indicates that young adult readers claim to read the newspaper about three times a week, and that's the high reader group.

You've heard it from many quarters, no doubt, especially from educators, that today's teens simply do not read. It's wrong to call them illiterate, but they may be a-literate; that is, they know how to read but prefer not to.

That assertion, however, needs careful elaboration. High school students do not read the things they are assigned to read by teachers.

They are indifferent—notoriously indifferent—to reading anything that they are assigned to read or ordered to read by others.

They choose to go against most things intellectual that have an adult flavor, and that includes the adult habit of keeping up on the news through newspapers. Most teenagers, faced with the prospect of a fresh newspaper newly delivered and still encased in its plastic wrap, will pull out the comic section or the sports section--just as most adults did when they were learning to read the newspaper.
Nevertheless, the assertion that teenagers do not read is blatantly untrue!

Their reading, however, is more often than not in a form that many adults are only beginning to experience and understand. (As you are because you've come to this Web site to read what is basically an opinion column similar to many in the daily newspaper. To grasp what I'm arguing here, consider how you arrived at this Web site!)

When I say teenagers are reading in a different manner, I speak of a reading that depends heavily on hyperlinks, and hyperlinks are the basic stepping stones of reading on the Internet

Reading on the Internet is, I think, much like getting caught up in the exploration of words while looking up a specific word in the dictionary. One just never knows where the trail is leading, and while one has some control over which hyperlinks to follow, there is a path that becomes almost irretrievable once the first two or three links are opened.
In the old days of newspapering, the rigid principal of the inverted pyramid guided journalists, and while that principal is still at work in many news stories, its rigidity has been greatly relaxed. According to the inverted pyramid model, the most important elements of a story must appear in the first few paragraphs; in fact, the opening paragraph is to contain most of what is determined to be "new." Second and third paragraphs become supporting or buttressing paragraphs of what was introduced in the lead. For many people confronting the daily newspaper, reading beyond the first few paragraphs is unnecessary.

By virtue of its physical presentation to readers, the Internet also demands a "lead" and supporting information below. Many of the popular search engines charge a premium for the upper echelons of their listings; thus, one sees "sponsored results" topping off many search listings. These essentially are nothing more than paid-for leads.

Similarly, most news sites on the World Wide Web provide simply a lead to the story, often with a headline that is a hyperlink. One reads the lead and clicks the hyperlink to get to the story in its fullness.
The point of the matter is this: What we have known as "browsing" a newspaper (or even the library shelves, for that matter) has been revolutionized by the Internet and the Web. Browsing is no longer a leisurely scan or a chance glance; instead, it has become a kind of electronic hopscotch, a multiple checker game jump on an unlimited board with no squares.

The reading skills of a newspaper reader and an Internet reader are essentially identical, but the dynamics are miles—and generations—apart.

Hyperlinks, virtually unknown two decades ago, have become commonplace, not only in advertising and popular literature such as magazines, but in scholarly research. Look at a bibliography on a scholarly paper that's been written in the past five years. There's a good chance it has more hyperlinks than references to books.
Teenagers haven't stopped reading; they've simply stopped reading the way most adults were taught to read. Once we grasp this, we may recognize that the hyperlink is as revolutionary as the double helix.

The other side—perhaps the frightening side—of this sort of reading, of course, is that it tends to randomness and disorganization; some might even say to chaos.

Nevertheless, there are those who argue that genuine learning emerges more from chaos than from organization! But that's another avenue to explore, and I haven't reached that hyperlink just yet.