Tero Toivanen's List: vaitoskirja

• Sir Ken Robinson’s new book “The Element”
• Sir Ken lays out the case for personalizing our kids’ educations in the context of transforming (not reforming) schools:
• The key to this transformation is not to standardize education but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of the each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions (238). The curriculum should be personalized. Learning happens in the  minds and souls of individuals–not in the databases of multiple-choice tests (248).
• Finally, he came to the conclusion that the only way to do it was to create an individualized learning experience for each teacher, to take them where they are and mentor them, individually, to a different place. He’s in the process of surveying each teacher to determine what technologies they currently use, what their comfort levels are, and what they are most passionate about. Then, using those results, he and one other tech educator at the school are going to start going one by one, talking about change, looking at tools, making connections, and shifting the pedagogy.
• Great teachers have always understood that their real role is not to teach subjects but to teach students (249).
• Teachers are learners. If they’re not, they shouldn’t be teachers.

4 more annotations...

• Psykologian englanti - suomi -sanasto

• The backdrop of this hypothesis is an ancient question in philosophy, exposed by Plato as what he calls hypomnesis, and which Michel Foucault would reactivate, also at the end of his life, as the question of hypomnémata.
• Jacques Derrida, in Plato’s Pharmacy[5], based a major part of his project for the deconstruction of metaphysics on his reading of Phaedrus[6] by showing how the dialogue sets off a sophistic hypomnesis against a philosophical anamnesis, where it is impossible, following what was described in Of grammatology[7]as a logic of the supplement which the trace is, to oppose interior and exterior: it is impossible to oppose living memory to this dead memory that is the hypomnematon, and which constitutes living memory as knowledgeable. Where metaphysics sets up static oppositions, dynamic compositions must be rearticulated : one must think in terms of processes: Derrida calls the process differance.

• Competition: Why should school be a competitive event?
• We learn what we choose to know in real life.
• Stress: When 6 year olds are stressed about going to school you know that something is wrong.
• Right answers: School teaches that there are right answers.
• But, in real life, there are very few right answers.
• Bullying and peer pressure
• In school there are always other kids telling you how to dress, how to act, how to be cool.
• Stifling of curiosity: Isn’t it obvious that learning is really about curiosity?
• Adults earn about things they want to learn about. Before the age of 6, prior to school, one kid becomes a dinosaur specialist while another knows all about dog breeds. Outside of school people drive their own learning. Schools eliminate this natural behavior.
  

  • Exactly!
• Subjects chosen for you:
• Classrooms:
• Classrooms make no sense as a venue for learning unless of course you want to save money and have 30 (or worse hundreds of) students be handled by one teacher.
• Schools cannot work as places of learning if they employ classrooms.
• Grades: Any professor can tell you that students are pretty much concerned with whether what you are telling them will be on the test and what they might do for extra credit.
• Parents do not give grades to children and employers do not give grades to employees. They judge their work and progress for sure, but not by assigning numbers to a report card.
• Certification: We all know why people attend college. They do primarily to say they are college graduates so they can get a job or go on to a professional school.
• Confined children: Children like to run around.
• Of course in school, sitting still is the norm. So we have come up with this wonderful idea of ADD, i.e. drug those who won’t sit still into submission. Is the system sick or what?
• Academics viewed as winners: Who are the smartest kids in school?
• Those who are good at these subjects go on to be professors. So those are certainly the smartest people we have in our society.
• But, I can tell you from personal experience that our society doesn’t respect professors all that much, so something is wrong here.
• Practical skills not valued: When I was young there were academic high schools and trade high schools. Trade high schools were for dumb kids. Academic high schools were for smart kids.
• The need to please teachers: People who succeed at school are invariably people who are good out at figuring what the teacher wants and giving it to them.
• In real life there is no teacher to please and these “grade grubbers” often find themselves lost.
• Self worth questioned: School is full of winners and losers.
• In school, most everyone sees themselves as a loser. Why do we allow this to happen?
• Politicians in charge: Politicians demand reform but they wouldn’t know reform if it hit them over the head.
• What they mean is that school should be like they remember rather than how it is now
• Government use of education for repression: As long as there have been governments there have been governments who wanted people to think that the governments (and the country) is very good.
• School is about teaching “truth.”
• Discovery not valued: The most important things we learn we teach ourselves.

  • Autotelic learning!
• This kind of learning is not valued in school because it might lead to, heaven forbid, failure, and failure is a really bad word in school. Except failure is how we learn, which is pretty much why school doesn’t work.

  • Exactly!
• Boredom ignored: Boredom is a bad thing. We drug bored kids with Ritalin so they will stop being bored.
• Major learning by doing mechanism ignored: And last but not least, scholars from Plato to Dewey have pointed that people learn by doing. That is how we learn. Doing. Got it? Apparently not. Very little doing in schools. Unless you count filling in circles with number 2 pencils as doing.

32 more annotations...