Peabloggy

Hanne Denney, a special education teacher in Maryland, has written an article about teaching her students to write Shakespearean sonnets. An exerpt:

All freshmen, as part of the introduction to William Shakespeare, have to write an original sonnet. They choose the topic, and I help them mold it to the correct form of three quatrains, one couplet, and iambic pentameter. I have a love/hate relationship (to use an oxymoron as per Shakespeare) with this assignment. The students start out saying, “I can’t do it”, and I wonder if they will. But by the end all the students do it. It is such a great experience for them.     

I remember when my seventh-grade teacher, Mrs. Donoghue, assigned our class to write sonnets. I wrote mine about stuttering, and it turned out to be the first “publication” I ever had, in a newsletter by the National Stuttering Project (now called the National Stuttering Association) called Letting Go. Is this not what teaching is all about? It’s about moving kids beyond what they think they can do, so they begin to understand that many of the greatest challenges in their lives are not imposed externally, but they are in their minds. When someone can prove to a student without hope that what seems impossible is actually possible, he or she will never again believe those perceived limits are immovable. Rather, he or she may begin to test those limits and find that the apparently impossible road is the one with the greatest rewards.  

- Peter Beddow 

“For every complex problem, there’s a simple solution that’s wrong.”

Mark Wolery, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Special Education (though I think H.L. Mencken might have said it first)

- Peter Beddow

I just read an interesting article on Education Week online, called Taming Montessori (free EdWeek registration required). In essence, the article discusses the apparent conflict between the philosophy of Montessori schools and the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements of No Child Left Behind.

This quote about the supposed Montessori “philosophy” of testing piqued my interest:

“We see more stress on the teachers. It’s really against their philosophy to test their children,” said Suzi Johnson, the assistant principal of Goddard, which has 550 students and began in the 2001-02 school year, when three existing Montessori sites were consolidated here. “But if we don’t show that this program helps children perform, then [school system officials] will do away with our program.”

Ms. Johnson makes the Montessori philosophy sound more like resistance to change than an open-minded system of beliefs about learning in which openness to change is a virtue. It seems to me that a better reason to assess the children is to determine whether or not they are learning what the teachers are teaching, not just because The Man is threatening to take your classroom away.

- Peter Beddow

Note: For more about Montessori, you may want to Google “Montessori” and/or check out The Montessori Foundation and Michael Olaf’s website. A word of caution: the word “Montessori” is not copyrighted, and therefore can be (and perhaps is) used by anyone. It’s probably best to triangulate (or quadrangulate) by looking at various descriptions and operationalizations of the Montessori philosophy to determine on which points most people agree.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I spent sixteen weeks this academic year delivering a whole-class intervention in four third-grade classrooms in metro Nashville public schools. I also delivered a minor forest to those classrooms - in the form of worksheets, answer sheets and tests galore. What’s more, I noticed that none of these four schools had a recycling program in which students participated. Kids routinely threw away mounds of paper without even a careless thought.

Watching child after child empty folders of relatively clean paper into the bin alongside plastic wrappers and banana peels, I started to wonder: how big is the carbon footprint of an American education? And how can we make it smaller? How can we make education more environmentally (and economically) efficient, reducing our king-kong-sized footprint on the rainforest and educating our children about how to tread softly on the earth?

If those of us involved in education are in the business of reducing ignorance, it follows logic that the current climate crisis merits discussion in our community. So let’s get the conversation started.

You can begin by calculating your own carbon footprint here.

- Rachel Bowers