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Created: February 2, 2003
Latest Update: February 2, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

More Talk about Teaching

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, February 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

On Sunday February 2, 2003, Marsha Walker wrote:

Subject: your conversation with susan about grading

hi jeanne, this is sunday, and the day is very nice. this is marsha walker, i wrote you last night about the space disaster and how it affected my family. hope you got it. (I did. It's up as the lead piece for the current issue.) It was sent under my other e-mail address. anyway, I would like to comment on your grading system conversation with susan.

When I was teaching 4th grade , I knew that the mornings were my best academic teaching times and so on occasions I would use the afternoon time to let the students voice their opinions on how they felt about the lessons for the day, on any personal conflicts they might be having about school work or play. At times I would ask them to explain what they recalled or understood about a history lesson, math questions or problems with language difficulty, or to just ask me a question on any matter they wanted to. It could be one on one or in a group or on a classroom basis. I found out that when given a little more freedom to express themselves verbally, I knew most of them understood the material better than when a written test was given, and were more confident when told that they would be given a better grade. Even young people can express themselves better orally, and this made me feel better that my teaching wasn't in vain because if feedback can be expressed in a more comfortable setting than a written test, which I find stressful myself, my job has been done. Teachers must ask themselves, what is your purpose? giving a test or teaching students to think and to assimilate information taught to them and letting them critically, orally, put together that information given, and express it to see that they have gotten the point or need more assistance. Well, testing has its place in some areas of academic work, but also discussions can be an assest also to determine anyone's capabilities. ok I have to sign off now, will talk again. bye

On Sunday, February 2, 2003, jeanne responded.

Good description, Marsha, of a classroom committed to student learning. Wish my kid had had you for a teacher. The children's ability to express their ideas is essential to growth in critical thinking. We don't want to raise little robots who do what they're told, and then say "but I followed the rules." Rules are made to provide enough infrastructure that we can coordinate our efforts reasonably. To that end it helps that I post when our workshops will be, so that you can plan your readings for them. It helps when I tell you what topics I plan to discuss that week, so you know where and how to focus your reading. It helps that we all know which are our best times of day and places to learn. Understanding how we learn lets us adapt the learning meaningfully to ourselves and our own needs and passions.

But rules that take precedence over substantive interactions harm us. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote from the Birmingham jail:

"the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; . . . who paternalisticaally feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freeedom . . . . I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice, and that when they fail to do this they become dangerously sructured dams that block the flow of social progress."

At p. 94 of Anthoney E. Cook's Beyond Critical Legal Studies: The Reconstructive Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr in Kimberle Crenshaw, et al, eds., Critical Race Theory, The New Press, 1995. ISBN:1-56584-226-x.

Rules, which are the normative expression of "the way we do things" become constrictive and repressive when we reify them, coming to consider the rules more important than the human interlations that are regulated within the rule context. In that sense, rules support the status quo and block both needed adjustments to the rules (for example, changing the hierarchy of administration to include evenings when half the campus is present in night classes) and imaginative reinterpretation of the rules and their consequences. There may be some feedback to administrators that students need them in the evening, but that knowledge is denied comfortably because evening students are tired, overcommitted and don't make the wheel squeak enough to break the denial that says "but 9 to 5 is a normal white collar work day, and I am a normal white collar worker." Here the feedback is being taken from the workers, who are privilegd by their 9 to 5 status, and not being collected from the students themselves. Habermas would complain that this type of system is an autopoietic non-learning system, which can continue to harm people without ever taking that harm into account.

Criminal justice runs into the same sort of social justice dilemma. We have been trying for countless decades to eliminate the drug menace. We are singularly unsuccessful. And so we have increased drug penalites again and again, to little effect.The drug system, too, is an autopoietic non learning system that has established feedback loops to self correct its functioning. But the feedback comes from criminal justice professors with little experience of the real world of the drug user, and no feedback is included to micromanage the system according to the lived experience of the drug users.

With respect to the issue of testing you raise, Marsha, school officials look at district test scores and compare them to other unlike districts where the life experiences of the children are quite different. Decisions are made on the basis of the test, with little or no inclusion of the children's lived experience and their expressions of that experience. Once again, I think Habermas would see this as an autopoietic non learning system. Glad you captured all this in your shared experience.

love and peace, jeanne