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Paragraph Six - The Golden Thread Through a Can of Spam
Let’s pick up the string from last week’s blog post, and see where it leads, then. DaVinci’s exhortation to “realize that everything connects to everything else” is surely the answer to the problem of students who “set about forgetting” (as Sancho Panza put it) what they have learned. I made the claim that making the connections will lead us along the golden thread to the pedagogical version of Blake’s “Heaven’s gate” as opposed to the...
Long Island Schools
AUSSIE consultants are currently active in several of the Districts of Long Island and there is a great deal of enthusiasm amongst this team of AUSSIE professionals about what is happening in their schools. A recurring theme is the wonderful openness of the teachers, with whom they are working, to embracing new ideas and a keenness to learn new ways of working. The other great advantage is the...
Paragraph Six - Second Grade Empiricism and the Zeigarnik Effect
I was able to get back to Tom McMurrer’s second grade classroom this week, at last, and catch up on progress there. They did it! The little folks wrote letters to each other and took a walk to the post office. Because it was the chaotic holiday season, the workers couldn’t show them around, but the young correspondents did post their letters, and not a single hand lost to those alligator-jawed post boxes. Even better, as foretold, the letters arrived at their homes, full of...
Paragraph Six - Testing - Do Not Disturb
“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” exclaims Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In my last blog, I suggested we let the question, “What is school?” guide us through the next decade. Following my own suggestion, ready to define the nature of education at every pass, I sallied forth to encounter for the umpteenth time the...
Paragraph Six - On Questions that Shouldn't be Answered
I ran out of space in my last post (last of the decade!) as I was turning to Neil Postman for perspective on the problem of questions that can’t be answered. His book The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School actually offers perspective on both questions that can and should be answered and those that can’t and shouldn’t. In the first category, he told the story of Elizabeth Eisenstein, author of a monumental two-volume study of the printing press as an agent of cultural change. After a speech, a member of her audience asked how she...
Paragraph Six - Students' Questions and Planning for Surprises
Update on “The Question that Fed My Writing Unit.” You noticed the title change, didn’t you? From “The Question that Ate My Writing Unit” to “The Question that Fed My Writing Unit?” I may be jumping the gun, but my hope is only growing that teacher Tom McMurrer’s second grade writing unit on letter writing is becoming more meaningful in response to the students’ unexpected questions: (“Where do you get a stamp?” “What happens...
Paragraph Six - Living with Questions
Promised update on The Question that Ate My Writing Unit: Tom McMurrer, the second grade teacher at PS 124 whose unit was in peril, has decided to contact the United States Postal Service to see if he can organize a class trip to answer the students’ questions. We have trepidation. What if the recession has caused the USPS to cut back its...
Paragraph Six - The Question of Questions
Last blog post, I settled on the piñata as a metaphor for how big ideas work in the classroom. You whack it hard enough, and out bursts a hailstorm of essential and guiding questions.
Essential questions are the crown jewels of the curriculum. They dazzle us with their value and beauty at the front of the classroom, posted above blackboards (or whiteboards, or smartboards.) They are a constant point of reference during the year’s, the unit’s, the week’s, the day’s lessons. They inspire and...
