The Saber Tooth Curriculum and the End Principle...right now I feel like a Saber Tooth Tiger and am ready to pounce on all of these different locations that I have to go to for completing assignments. Maybe I'm too used to fish grabbing and tiger scaring so I'm going to end this and go get a pickle from the fridge!
Ok, I'm back. Lesson learned. Do not try and write my blog late at night before class after a week's gone by. Here is the one I wrote at a more reasonable hour
Ok, I'm back. Lesson learned. Do not try and write my blog late at night before class after a week's gone by. Here is the one I wrote at a more reasonable hour
I absolutely loved reading The Saber-Tooth Curriculum, I
sure hope that the rest of the chosen books are this entertaining and easy to
read. I found the satire and tongue and check style of the author J. Abner
Peddiwell to be spot on when making an allegory of the evolution of the
Paleolithic period to the evolution of our educational system. As I was reading
I was thinking that this guy has really nailed in with such an easy to
understand comparison and I was so shocked to learn this was written in 1939.
Wow! So long ago and I felt like I was reading a contemporary comparison as it
relates to our education system. Am I to think that nothing has changed in the
last 70 plus years?
One thing that I didn’t really quite grasps was the idea
that innovation was not a good thing, or something that created more issues
than before it. I would think that having figured out how to catch more fish
and snare more antelopes would be a benefit to the community in that it would
be more efficient in doing more with less. I guess maybe the idea is that the
problems it created with needing less people left more people with nothing to
do except monkey around with rocks. For me the challenge in education is how we
change what we are teaching them or how to best meet the needs of the
community. How do meet the needs of the community and how do we know what those
needs are? Just as all the Paleolithic’s kept learning those “magical” skills
when only a few were needed to perform them.
This reading has definitely shed light on the practice of
rote memorization and “rock moving” work and embracing innovation. It will definitely
affect my professional practice by eliminating the feeling I have of giving
lots of practice work or memorizing the perfect squares and square roots of whole
numbers from 1-400. My struggle is with what the community and society needs.
Who are the purveyors of that wisdom? Me? The State Board of Education? The
Government? This seems to a real PICKLE!
With a constantly changing and evolving cultures, determining the needs of a community and society can truly be difficult. I am not sure where to go for that particular answer. That is a good question. I was also wondering whether nothing has changed since 1939. While we may have different educational issues now, the framework of these issues still remain true. For example, we have standardized testing issues now instead of (insert assessment issue from 1939 education). It is this framework that makes this book timeless.
ReplyDeleteIt is overwhelming to think we are alone in deciding what our students need for their lives, and it is frustrating to think the state standards are antiquated items we are forced to jam into our students' brains so we can have the high scores to wave triumphantly. I have found that following "the right crowd" on Twitter has been encouraging and inspirational. There actually are so many of us out there realizing what changes need to happen, and figuring out how to do that within all of our constraints. We don't have to force the fake-magic. We can figure out how to design our time with students and make real magic happen. A favorite quote of mine: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead
ReplyDeleteI think your last question is very relevant. Who should ‘decide’ what society needs? I wonder if that’s a responsibility that we as teachers put on our shoulders when we decided to take up this profession. After all, we know our students and their context better than any board of education or state organization. We are the ones who walk into our classrooms every day, witness our students’ growth, and enjoy the excitement of their success. I’m not advocating for a complete dismissal of standards or systems, but the teacher is the link between the system and the learner and I believe that we can definitely translate these standards into something more meaningful to our learners.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that there must be a balance between throwing everything we have done, up to this point, out the window, in the spirit of better design, and staying with the status quo. I know we have calculators, but I am still convinced that students need to understand some of the basic skills that make up addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, etc. If they don't really understand how numbers behave, within various operations, they don't have a sense of whether that answer they get (on their calculator) is in a reasonable ballpark. At the same time, I teach my students how powerful their graphing calculator is. They use it to check their work and, eventually, to see their graphs. A big part of math is the process; the thinking that goes into problem solving. I like the ideas that were said about modeling mathematical thinking for students. There is a lot to be said for that. As I said in my blog, my issues come with finding the authentic activities that are useful to my students (and to their growth in the future). As you suggest at the beginning of your blog: "My struggle is with what the community and society needs." What do they need to know to make themselves useful citizens in a global world?
ReplyDeleteProblem solvers is certainly one part of that.
It was a very enjoyable read! The satire was great, and you're exactly right, the irony that issues affecting the education realm decades and decades ago, still exist today!
ReplyDeleteThe challenges that you mentioned are challenges that affect us all! I'm not so sure that there's a clear answer to them either because we have no idea what tomorrow's world will be like. For the time being, we do still live in a society where standardized tests govern so much in our field. However, that seems to be changing. And being around all of you in class is so refreshing knowing that we all want change in our classrooms!